I hope this part 2 will be useful for those readers who are not familiar with the dark side of the history of hierarchical mass societies, because only those who have not understood that long history, can conclude that this recurring symptom of one faction of an oligarchal elite, replacing (peacefully or otherwise) another oligarchal faction of the elite and taking over the governance of such societies, is something relatively new. In actual fact this symptom is as old as the hierarchical form itself and was rampant in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome as well as in ancient China, India and Russia. The symptom continued throughout the feudal middle ages, and elite factions (Christian and Muslim) within such hierarchical mass society formations who were greedy for power and wealth, also formed alliances and assassinated rivals, to get their hands on the reins of power and the keys to the treasures stored within their vaults.

This internicine violence included killing their own family members and even children along with the entire residents of villages and cities, when they felt this was necessary to ensure their success. Also the defeated section of any ruling elite past or present (and their supporters) could frequently only understand their defeat as a transition to a ‘new world order’, when in fact it was simply a ‘take over’ of an existing socio-economic system by a new political management. The underlying exploitation and oppression of the labouring populations within such hierarchical so-called ‘civilisations‘ continued unabated. Thus when I recently read that under the Trump administration the;

“The United States is openly breaking with the values that once defined the shared heritage of ‘the West’: democracy, the rule of law, inalienable human rights, the right to physical and social security, international law, and a rules-based multilateral order.” (Social Europe. 28/2/25)

I can only assume that a historical dimension to the authors knowledge was substantially missing as well as any critical exploration of his own class – based assumptions about bourgeois forms of “democracy, the rule of elite determined bourgeois law, pretence of ‘inalienable human rights’ and the right to physical and social security and a rules based multilateral order”. Does it not become obvious that knowledge of the recipients of bombs, drones, missiles, (in Palestine Ukraine and elsewhere) of modern slavery (in Europe, UK and Asia), deaths in custody (in many countries) and Musk/Trump dismissals of US public workers, lodged somewhere in the authors brain, are not bumping up against the neurons and synaptic gaps of the selective memory cells that he is using to write this liberal bourgeois slant on recent events? There are no such rights and rules in most parts of the world, and even in the least worse countries, some of them are privileges, which can be, and are, removed whenever the elite feel threatened. The elite – in any form of hierarchical mass society – never implement referendums to decide on war.

This gap between ideology and reality is most profoundly displayed by the education and socialisation of the ruling elites and those who have been trained in bicameral ways of thinking and are anxious to please the powers that be. But having a convenient blind spot for reality is not the only distortion which occurs in the humanity of ruling elites. The experience (i.e. the socialisation) of elites in control of hierarchical mass societies is such that throughout history, practically any level of inhumanity or brutality has been considered and perpetrated by them. This extends to unleashing the brutality of total war on non-military targets and actual genocidal elimination of whole communities controlled by rival elites.  Furthermore, the elite – in any form of hierarchical mass society – never implement citizen referendums to decide on war.

It is important to understand that elite instituted violence, hideous torture and Genocide did not suddenly appear in the 20th century under the influence of the Nazis, nor did it disappear when the Nazis were eventually defeated and disbanded in the mid twentieth century. It goes back to the earliest hierarchical mass societies. For example, one celebrated ancient ruler, Ashurnacirpal, (approximately 860 BCE) even openly advertised on a Stele, his brutality in the subjugation of those who rebelled after having been previously conquered and subjected to his rule by his loyal troops. Thus he boasted;

“I drew near to the city of Tela. The city was very strong; three walls surrounded it. The inhabitants trusted to their strong walls and numerous soldiers; they did not come down or embrace my feet. With battle and slaughter I assaulted and took the city. Three thousand warriors I slew in battle. Their booty and possessions, cattle, sheep, I carried away; many captives I burned with fire. Many of their soldiers I took alive; of some I cut off their hands and limbs; of others the noses, ears and arms; of many soldiers I put out the eyes. I reared a column of the living and a column of heads. I hung up on high their heads on trees in the vicinity of their city. Their boys and girls I burned up in the flame. I devastated the city, dug it up, in fire burned it; I annihilated it. (Standard Inc., col. I. 113 – 118./ quoted in ‘A History of Babylonian and Assyrians’. By George Stephen Goodspeed. Section 168.)

The above quotation is merely one of the many ancient genocidal level massacres I came across during the research for a section on the history of hierarchical mass societies in a book I have written on the ‘past, present and future of life on earth’. So this body of research suggests that the violence which is now occuring within the modern world in North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia between rival sections of elites orientated around either liberal political ideologies or authoritarian political ideologies is part of a long established recurring pattern. It is a direct product of the hierarchical mass society system of human aggregation itself. The same research confirms that the non-military socio-economic violence of elites against their subjects is not simply or purely a product of a particular mode of production, such as capitalism.

Of course, the capitalist mode of production has introduced some different technologies and new methods into the hierarchical mass society form, but useful technologies have been integrated into the fundamental essence of all the previously established hierarchical social forms. Indeed, this incorporation of technologies of death promoted by elites has always been the case and all previous technological advances in weaponry have been integrated into these changing socio-economic forms. Weapons of mass destruction have been transformed from swords and Greek fire, through trebuchet’s and massed archers, to machine guns, cannons and bombs, to gas and biological and viral life forms of disease, and now to computer and AI controlled drones. However, all such weapons have been produced, accumulated and directed toward their targets (their own or other communities) by the command of the particular elites controlling each successive hierarchical form and for essentially the same purposes.

Those purposes are to obtain organic and inorganic sources of surplus value and utility and which are the results of someone else’s surplus labour. Therefore, the recent exclusion of Ukraine’s elite from the talks between the US elite and the Russian elite over ending the war over who controls the land and resources in in and around Ukraine, is not something  new either. That too is as ancient as the Persian elite invading Greece across a temporary bridge. More recently in historical terms, many other countries elites (than were involved) were excluded from the Treaty of Versailles conference after the 1st World War and even more were excluded by the big three carve-up of USSR, USA and UK at Yalta toward the end of the Second. This is not to mention the fact that those who had born the brunt of the military and civilian death and destruction during wars, the male and female working classes, have always been excluded from talks about the future when hostilities were ended, not just recently,  but from as far back as the Persian invasion of Greece at Marathon in 490 BCE.

Therefore, when we read the following extract by a twentieth century intellectual, produced in a recent left wing blog we can conclude that despite some relative mundane accuracies, the above noted general history and understanding, is completely missing from the subsequent description and analysis. Thus;

“There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms which break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the democratic structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to-reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler’s victory.” (Leon Trotsky, March 1933) (Appearing in Counterpunch 25/2/25)

This assertion by Leon Trotsky in 1933, who was himself part of an exclusive Bolshevik ruling elite, that ‘capitalist society has outlived its strength’ was both ridiculously arrogant and hopelessly premature. Arrogant because no one, including the talented intellectual Trotsky, could predict the future of capitalism based upon his or anyone elses limited knowledge of all the variables at play in the real life of hierarchical mass society social forms. Premature, because the capitalist mode of production harnessed to the hierarchical mass society form had so much strength and social support, that it not only outlived its serious, but temporary 19th and 20th century crises, but went on for a further 90 years before in its neo-liberal manifestation came again to the present multiple-crisis period.

Moreover, the hierarchical mass society form, harnessed to the industrial model of production introduced by the capitalist elites, also found an interim state-capitalist form under the control of two political elite authoritarian tendencies known as Bolshevism and Fascism. The accumulated past labour of working people (stored as social capital, as well as private capital) was used by the political elite to both exploit and control the rest of the population. Indeed, Trotsky along with Lenin and eventually Stalin, gave new life to the existence of hierarchical authoritarian industrial practices of labour exploitation established by the bourgeois capitalist elites. They did so by simply copying directly the division of labour established by capitalist class methods. In recommending that the soviet government should structure their production methods in the manner of the German capitalists, Lenin wrote in 1918, that they should operate upon;

“…the principle of discipline, organisation, harmonious co-operation on the basis of modern machine industry and strict accounting and control…unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry.” (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 27. Pages 163 and 269. Emphasis added RR)

Unquestioning obedience of the masses to the dictates of their elites has been the holy grail of ruling elites throughout the history of the hierarchical mass society formations and the elites in control of them have used every method available to ensure it. Is this not what Trump, Musk, Putin, and many other authoritarians desire? The only slight deviation in liberal forms of elite rule are that some elements of criticism are allowed until these are punished or banned as they were over Biden’s US miliary resource funding of genocide in Gaza. In extreme cases, these methods of social control have included slavery, torture, maiming and death and all have been implemented by the elite upholders of the ideologies of religion, economics and nation-state politics.

Under the capitalist mode of production, apart from wars and penal servitude, the compulsion to labour long and hard has been exerted by the external force of hunger, thirst and the need for shelter. This is because these essentials, under the capitalist mode of production, can only be obtained in exchange for money and therefore money in the form of a wage or salary, must be worked for in exchange for a period of value producing labour. The historic denying of access to land and its natural resources for the mass of people by various forms of private control has resulted in a more subtle form of compulsion, than outright slavery, but nonetheless wage or salary slavery is a compulsion that is equally effective and arguably (by Adam Smith) more economically productive. For Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik elite, however, this form of indirect compulsion was not direct enough so he dictated the following class-war tactic to be perpetrated against the Russian peasants and workers.

“…not a single rogue (including those who shirk work) to be at liberty, but kept in prison, or serve a sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind… In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work…will be put in prison. In another they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with yellow tickets after they have served their time…In a fourth place one out of every ten will be shot on the spot.” (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 26. Page 414.)

The essence of this class based elite concern about workers shirking their work is not a million miles away from that which has been expressed just recently by Trump and Musk’s demand to confirm in writing  five things public sector workers have done in a week.   It cannot be surprising therefore, that after Lenin had died and Stalin orchestrated his own political succession to become head of the Russian state by various nefarious means, that he continued the same policies incuding deaths in custody. He did so because this logic flowed not simply out of him socialised as a degenerate human being, but from the logic of an economic system based upon the compulsory exploitation of human labour. Compulsion becomes necessary, in hierarchical systems because if workers were free to labour how they collectively see fit they would be unlikely to fulfill the intensity levels and duration of productive labour demanded of them by the needs and desires of privileged elites.

For those who have not had the time and inclination to fully study the history of the Soviet Union it may seem from some popular historical regurgitations that it was Stalin who initiated the nasty inhuman stuff into the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Politburo, but as we have already read from Lenin’s own words above, Stalin’s brutality was merely following in Lenin’s intellectual and practical footsteps. But so too was that other member of the Bolshevik elite before Stalin had him assassinated in Mexico. Trotsky in addition to the above quote had also written the following well before Lenin’s death and whilst he was part of the Bolshevik ruling elite.

“The very principle of compulsory labour service is for the communist quite unquestionable….Compulsory labour service is sketched into our constitution and in our labour code…The introduction of compulsory labour service is unthinkable without the application, to a greater or lesser degree of the methods of militarisation of labour…The labour state considers itself empowered to send every worker to the place were his work is necessary….and the right to lay its hands upon the worker who refuses to execute his labour duty.” (Trotsky. ‘Terrorism and Communism’. Pathfinder pages 146-148 and 153)

Laying ones hand on the worker by the state is a euphemism used by Trotsky to hint at punishment in the manner demanded by Lenin (i.e. eventually leading to “one in ten to be shot”) in the previous quote.

Once considered from an understanding of the contradictions within all hierarchical mass societies, as reflected in the lives of their elites, something essential to all of them becomes clear. It is that despite many less important differences, three forms of violence are intrinsic to them all. First the violence of the elite-led class war which is connected directly with their compulsion of workers (free or enslaved) to labour as directed by the ruling or employing elite. Second, the violent competition between rival elites themselves, either within their own elite community (i.e. via class and civil wars) or against rival elites controlling other hierarchical mass societies (i.e. wars of conquest, resource annexation or genocide). Third, the elite directed war against nature in the form of excessively extracting from the present (or past) reproductive capacity of all the useful species which have not only defined the biosphere but reproduced the foundational nutrition and atmospheric conditions of the planet which ditectly and indirectly supported them.

These three forms of violence have occurred in every form of hierarchical mass society, whether ancient, medieval or modern. Such threefold violence occurs whatever the mode of production, whether it be feudal, liberal capitalist, republican capitalist or state capitalist, because it is as intrinsic to the hierarchical mass society form as eating and reproducing. So returning to the earlier mentioned article that began with the quote from Trotsky, we also read below that the historic and contemporary rivalry and authoritarianism that I have abbreviated above, is said “pops up now and then” in the form of fascism and Nazism. It is impossible not to notice that the authoritarianism of the authors chosen intellectual to quote, (i.e. Trotsky), along with the authoritarianism of Bidens US liberal hierarchical support (i.e. the population of America were not consulted) for Zionist Genocide have also not been included in the following extract. Thus;

“National socialism, the political ideology of Nazism, pops up now and then, as in  the U.S. now, but both fascism and Nazism include a strong central government as well as a strong central leader. What we have going on with Trump/Musk is a hollowing out of the Federal government so that, in Trump’s case, he can do whatever he wants without facing power to stop him. He wants to replace a strong central government with himself. How what’s left of government can serve its constituency and keep him from facing Stalin’s end is not a consequence total self-absorption can consider.” (ibid Counterpunch 25/2/25. Emphasis added. RR.)

It is frequently the case that what is not written or spoken by elites and their sycophantic supporters and narrators is more revealing than what is. The rival elites are not struggling on behalf the majority of their communities, but are struggling on behalf of the elite faction they represent. So what will be left of the US government (after its hollowing out by the two loose cannons of Musk and Trump) will amost certainly be what the pre-Trump liberal authoritarian or conservative authoritarian form of elite rule would love to inherit. Less resources for the masses mean more resources for the elite, no matter what political complexion they choose to adopt.

Short of a profound and extensive socio-economic revolution very little of consequence will change. If and when Trump’s ambitions are not achieved, whatever elite form of politics replaces it, will still be an oligarchal regime ruling over a class divided society and exploiting and oppressing those whose surplus labour supports the entire hierarchical system.
Moreover, that regime will still be competing against various other right wing authoritarian forms of elite rule over which tendency will control the remaining organic and inorganic resources and govern US hierarchical mass society. However, even at it’s best the liberal authoritarian versions will still not be a boon for the working masses and will simply be a remnant of its previous iteration.

The iron fist of elite political rule, whether covered by a temporary velvet glove or not,  will be used to serve the interests of the wealthy sections who reward them. The remnant regimes in the US, UK and elsewhere after the populist outbreaks will remain a oligarchal elite which in the US has been and still is currently punishing anyone who stands against what is happening to the Palestinians, has also conducted sustained class war by allowing the introduction of precarious forms of employment and created mass forms of homelessness and poverty, whilst enabling excessively wealthy individuals to avoid taxation and public censure.

Whether or not the arbitrary dismissals of many USA public service workers by Musk and Trump and similar political puppets of the system elsewhere, will sufficiently startle and galvanise any of the displaced citizens to question the whole basis of the hierarchical structure of human societies, its dual janus faced political authoritarian forms and its reliance on the capitalist mode of production, is yet to be seen. However, going by the level of understanding demonstrated by the current so-called radical left, any who become newly galvanised rather than staying traumatised, are going to have to venture along that journey of knowledge and realisation entirely independently.

This is because, the only assistance they are getting from these particular 21st century radical left sources is advice to look back and study the century-old inadequate level of anthropocentric understanding, demonstrated by their favoured radical 20th century intellectual elites. Elites, who also like themselves, failed to understand the full extent of social alienations caused by hierarchical and class divisions and also utterly failed understand the negative effects upon the biosphere of increased human productivity from the perspective of life on earth as a whole.

Roy Ratcliffe (March 2025.)