Perhaps the clearest expression of anthropocentric type thinking appears within the discipline of economics. Like mathematics, everything purely outside of a human-centred viewpoint is either represented abstractly or totally ignored within such fields of study. Whilst mathematics in its anthropocentric centred calculations can totally ignore organic and inorganic material, the discipline of economics cannot completely ignore these two sources of raw materials for all types of production. The discipline of economics therefore considers the planet and its resident life forms as ‘externalities’, or in the case of Adam Smith, as organic or inorganic ‘instruments‘ of “eating, wearing or lodging”.

Adam Smith is probably one of the earliest and most analytic of those intellectuals who considered the capitalist mode of production until the more detailed and comprehensive consideration of this mode of production by Karl Marx in his six volumes of economic notes – only 3 volumes of which became finally published as Das Capital. I have written at length on the revolutionary-humanist motivation of Marx and his outstanding critical contributions to knowledge in the fields of economics, politics and philosophy (see free downloads section under this blogs banner). However, in this article, I wish to draw attention to Adam Smith’s critical contributions to our understanding of the capitalist mode of production and to our understanding of – the wider and more historic – problems facing working people – at all previous historic stages of the hierarchical mass society formations constructed by some ancient sections of humanity.

In Adam Smith’s seminal publication, the two volume work of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, there is in chapter 11, a chapter entitled ‘Of the Rent of Land’, which is one of the longest and most detailed anthropocentric chapters in this first volume. However, this chapter is also one of the most revealing and candid with regards to his opinions of the ruling capitalist elites, the situation facing working people under hierarchies and their divisions of labour. Moreover, it touches on the situation facing human society in general. Of particular interest is his open recognition of the productive power of nature when “never augmented by human industry” (page 162).

Although Smith’s perspective was never revolutionary in a political or economic sense, as was the case with Karl Marx, nonetheless his perceptive analysis (although limited) was no less revealing in the recognition that life on earth (nature) does the producing of nutrition (N) and other useful materials, without needing the application of human industry. It is a fact that humans and before them ‘hominids’, along with all other life forms,  lived for hundreds of millions of years off what nature provided without their need to plant or manufacture anything.

Unsurprisingly, Smith’s primary anthropocentric concern for much of this particular chapter is with the various levels of rents that certain crops or minerals can attract due to various variables, such as the scarcity of the crop, the soil quality or the geographical situation in which the material is grown, excavated or mined, nevertheless he does not ignore certain general fundamentals which depend upon nature, Nor does he ignore the fact that some of these fundamental problems were being discussed not only within the era of capitalism, but way back in the pre-capitalist days of ancient Greece. Consequently, he references the opinions of Democritus, Columella and Varro of ancient times in that regard (among others) and also to him the more modern crop growing situations in the European colonies in various places around the globe; and in doing so he notes that;

“Human food seems to be the only produce of land which always and necessarily affords some rent to the landlord. …After food, clothing and lodging are the two great wants of mankind….Among savage and barbarous nations, a hundredth or less than hundredth part of the labour of the whole year will be sufficient to provide them with such clothing and lodging as satisfy the great part of the people. (Smith ‘Wealth of Nations. Chapter 11, Volume 1, Page 180)

He recognises that the basic biological needs (or wants as he puts it) of humanity are for food, clothing and lodging, which anthropocentrically he considers are basically economic not biological needs. The scathing references to hunter-gatherer peoples as ‘savages’, is clearly part of Smith’s bourgeois educated mindset, but leaving that blight aside, the recognition from an economic perspective that the working, day, week or year of pre-hierarchical mass society communities, was a hundredth part of of the labour now required of ordinary people to fulfil their six biological life preserving processes of Nutrition, Metabolising nutrition, Growing, Reproducing, Ageing, and Dying (identified and abbreviated by me as (N-M-G-R + A – D). This new hierarchical mode, exponentially increased labour time for the working members of the human species to obtain societies needs for food, clothing and shelter under hierarchical mass society systems. This is a pertinent observation.

Clearly, Adam Smith, like Karl Marx later, was operating within the anthropocentric paradigm of bourgeois economic theory and so Smith keeps returning to the question of profits from production, rents from land as well as wages from productive and unproductive labour. Yet he still manages to stress that it is not capital which produces value as most bourgeois intellectuals maintain, but that; “Labour, it must always be remembered….is the real measure of value..” (page 207). However in between these primary economic concerns and at the very beginning of the next chapter, he goes even further and writes the following;

“In the rude state of society in which there is no division of labour, in which exchanges are seldom made, and in which…. Every man endeavours to supply by his own industry his own occasional wants as they occur. When he is hungry, he goes to the forest to hunt; when his coat is worn out, he clothes himself with the first large animal he kills: and when his hut begins to go to ruin, he repairs it…….But when the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a mans own labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants. The far greater part of them are supplied by the produce of other men’s labour, which he purchases with produce, or what is the same thing, with the price of the produce of his own.” (ibid page 291.)

Now I urge the reader not to let the outrageous patriarchal distortions and blatant historical mis-information that Adam Smith presents in this paragraph, obscure the valuable insight it also contains. Of course, it is widely known that in pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer communities the proportion of plant based nutritional (N) food to animal carcass (N) was rarely less than 70 or 80 percent to 20 percent and that the 70 to 80 percent plant based nutrition – in even skilled hunter communities – was frequently gathered by females and children whilst the hunters where out hunting. Plus it is generally recognised that in regard to clothing construction, it was usual that female labour did much of the skin preparation and stitching of animal or plant based clothing. Furthermore,  even hut construction and repair often fell into the female sphere of domestic chores.

The sexist and historical distortions contained in the above extract merely illustrates that men of the 18th century, and particularly elite men, were extremely patriarchal and often historically ignorant – as they often are in the 20th and 21st centuries. The real insightful value of the above quotation, however, lies in the recognition that it is the division of labour and the elite control of land and its naturally produced resources, which caused the historic double alienation of the human individual from other individuals when exchanging labour products. The first by means of inserting money into the exchange, rather than productive effort, and second, by the alienation of the majority of citizens from the actual products of, and from the human effects upon, nature and its products.

Having thus identified the problem of alienation and conflict among human communities, as predating the capitalist mode of production and locating it in the hierarchical mass society situation of enforced divisions of labour, Smith was clearly onto something important. Of course, he avoids considering any solution to these problems of hierarchical mass society living, but once the problem has been properly identified, the solutions are not too difficult to suggest.

The way to end these alienating contradictions is to; 1, end the private ownership and control of the inorganic and organic materials of the planet (i.e. end the privatisation of nature); and 2, end the insertion of money into the gaining of social access to the essential, food, clothing and shelter etc., of social forms of living; and, 3, to start to view nature (i.e. all the millions of species) as the integrated life support system for all species of life on earth that they are – and not just as the supply chain of nutrition, shelter and clothing – for the exclusive use of humanity. Recognising that the species network of life on earth, is also absolutely necessary for providing oxygenated air, the pollination of crops, the scavenging and recycling of dead organisms, the cleaning of rivers, seas and lakes of natural pollutants and much else, would be the beginning of a challenge to anthropocentric focussed obsessions.

Neither, Smith or Marx, or any other outstanding intellect of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries for that matter, anticipated that the technical and scientific advances made by the bourgeois mode of capitalist production, in extracting, producing, and consuming the planets natural resources, could do so at the cost of depleting the planets plant, insect and animal biosphere essential support systems. That realisation would only come later when evidence for it became indisputable.

The capitalist mode of production, under the direction and motivation of the capitalist class for profit and interest on capital and the vigorous support of their profit sharing supporters, has become so technically efficient that it is undermining the biospheres ability to sustain life on earth and to continue to maintain our multiplicity of species varieties. But in addition Smith’s book indicates that Marx was not alone in analysing and projecting the future trajectory of the bourgeois based capitalist system. Adam Smith for example noted that under the capitalist mode of production;

“..the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of buildings, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary…..Hence arises a demand for every sort of material which human invention can supply, either usefully or ornimentally, in building, dress, equipage, or household furniture for the fossils and minerals in the bowels of the earth, the precious metals and the precious stones. (ibid page 183.)

After noting, as early as the 18th century, the propensity of capitalists to stimulate commodity fetishism and to artificially increase the desire of the general public to consume profitable products by every means possible, Smith anticipated in the 1760’s the ‘no limits’ or ‘boundaries’ which Marx also claimed characterised the capitalist mode of production in Capital Volume 1. Moreover, that was not the only propensity of the capitalist class that Smith drew attention to. He also wrote;

” As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interests of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgement, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion), is much more to be depended upon with the former of these two objects, than with regard to the latter…….The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interests is never exactly the same with that of the public; who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (ibid page 278.)

Although, Adam Smith never gained the esteem that Marx did (or the notoriety) he nonetheless was one of the few of that generation who did intensely scrutinise the capitalist system and pointed out many of its despicable tendencies. However, to my mind, despite his anthropocentric and patriarchal, tendencies he deserves recognition for drawing attention to the fact that the problems often exclusively associated with the capitalist mode of production, by anti-capitalists, were not actually due to the capitalist system exclusively. The fact is that all social systems based upon hierarchical elite class systems with their control of the divisions of labour and their additional control of land and it’s natural products (which are necessary for all forms of biological survival)  continue to alienate, their working citizens and continue to treat the products of nature purely as instruments for fulfilling their own anthropocentric desires and fantasies.

Clearly, the leaders of the 20th century political revolutions such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, did not understand this important issue and merely continued to make themselves into hierachical political elites, and thus gained hierarchical control of the division of labour, and hierarchical control of land and it’s natural resources. As a consequence those ‘revolutions‘ were never more than political elite replacement strategies and did not revolutionise social relationships or negate the negative, exploitative  relationships between humanity and the rest of nature. Those societies resembled the State Capitalist form theoretically anticipated by Marx before his death, and candidly admitted by Lenin (i.e. in 1918 he considered State Capitalism would be “the next rung on the ladder of history”) before his own illness and eventual death in 1922. The political ladder constructed by the Russian State Capitalist experiment, under Lenin’s and Stalin’s leadership  seems to have first descended rung by rung into a hell for the peasants and Left Opposition critics, and later to the hell of Putins serial war mongering.

Those among the modern anticapitalist left who have failed to understand these previous insights and factual based histories and have also failed to understand the danger of approaching climate change, ecological deterioration and human alienation from an approach dominated by their own anthropocentric concerns and fantasies, rather than those of a ‘whole of life’ concern, are destined to repeat the past failures of the so-called Anticapitalist left of previous generations. Indeed, they are also likely to become (or may have already become), obstacles to future practical revolutionary possibilities, by campaigning to influence workers and activists to follow the outdated ideas of their 20th century sectarian icons, that they still cling onto like intellectual versions of immature security blankets.

Such dogmatic adherence to cherished theoretical individuals and their traditions and any associated corollary of therefore resisting small scale practical steps undertaken by ordinary unaffiliated citizens, at creating truly revolutionary changes in human behaviour within human communities and between human communities and the rest of nature – will of course be reactionary.  ‘Follow us, because we know what we are talking about and what needs doing’ is a classic elite form of enticement practiced by authoritarian system builders of left, right and centre!  And ‘up the garden path’ is where they all keep taking suffering humanity.

Furthermore, any attempt to sideline or minimise a comprehensive understanding of the inter-dependent and integrated species spectrum of life on earth, which functions to maintain the biosphere in a condition suitable for all its constituent, inter-dependent organic parts, will also be a negative position to adopt.

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2025).