There has been a trend in recent years in which some of the inheritors of what has been widely called the Marxist tradition, have become less enamoured by the great men of this particular line of anti-capitalist revolutionary thinking. This trend of left wing thinking was originally epitomised and personified in a proposed sequence of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao Zedong. Not all of these named individuals have been equally venerated by all those who have adopted a radical rejection of the capitalist mode of production, but many have done so. The lineage of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky has also taken a rapid reduction in the number of people who consider them as role models to follow or emulate. This dwindling following is with regard to both the practical application of the latter trio’s actions in the real world or in the study of their theoretical insights made during the many class and national wars occuring during the 20th century. This demise is not surprising.

The mass killing of their respective populations by most of the latter three named anti-capitalist elites who took power during the initial revolutions in Russia (later established as the Soviet Union and Communist China), did little to endear them to already suffering humanity. Those histories, together with the eventual re-transformation of their State Capitalist forms of social control back into fully capitalist forms in Russia, China and elsewhere, has also disillusioned many previous enthusiasts. That particular hierarchical version of ‘another world is possible’ no longer seemed to offer an attractive alternative, except to a sectarian and dogmatic few.

It has also not helped their image by the fact that these so-called socio-economic transformations – in all such instances – were guided by male left wing political hierarchies who were clearly willing to simply replace the previous hierarchies of male aristocratic or male bourgeois elite classes, and ruthlessly rule in their stead. This woeful track record, has all but dissolved the remaining numbers of sectarian ‘believers’ in the potential of these hoped for ‘saviours’ of humanity.

The less than enthusiastic support for those late 20th century middle-class ‘vanguard’ elites has led some few remaining sympathisers of this 19th century radical tradition to suggest a return to a study of the original founding fathers of it. One such recent suggestion I came across recently has been to study the founding duo – Karl Marx and in particular Fredrick Engels and his book ‘The Dialectics of Nature’. However, the problem with that particular ‘back to the future‘ perspective, as I see it, is the following. The undoubted degree of scientific rigour personified by both Marx and Engels and brought to bear by them on the latest socio-economic problems they considered during their respective lifetimes, are now hugely outdated in almost every important consideration. This is particularly so with respect to the contemporary understanding of the origin and inter-connected complexity of the vast inter-dependent network of species life occupying the numerous niche’s scattered about the biosphere of the planet earth.

Indeed, the biosphere (the parts of the planet where everything organic lives) viewed as a holistic system was not something seriously or scientifically considered in the 19th and early 20th centuries when all the above named individuals were deeply concerned by the treatment ordinary working people were getting from their elite governed socio-economic systems. Similarly, the duo’s understanding of the economic system of the capitalist mode of production, whilst it was both comprehensive and deeply profound at the time (i.e. the 1850’s), it had not by then reached it’s full extension. The bourgeois revolutions in Europe, which championed and promoted the capitalist mode of production, had not by that time created a fully integrated world socio-economic system. The means of doing so (an extensive and sustained colonialist resource expansion) had begun but was not then in its final stages, Nor had its mid to late 20th century neo-liberal phase of economic and financial deregulation then arrived to lay out a fully global socio-economic, ‘just-in-time’ supply chain delivery system and an elite motive to drive it forward.

Fast forward to the 21st century and of course it now has. Moreover, this global ‘just in time’ supply chain system turns out to be just as polluting and destructive to life on earth as the prior and present production system, the results of which are carried along it. Consequently, the negative effects of this global industrial system of production, distribution and consumption have now reached most, if not all, of the last remaining nooks and crannies of the earth’s biosphere. The upper atmosphere, the deep sea canyons, all available land masses and even planetary biosphere boundaries have now been routinely exceeded and disturbed by frenetic satellite based activities.

The equivalent of junk yards and land-fill sites are orbiting above our heads, homes, cities and seas. All this industrial-level activity has created pollution, toxic waste and ecological damage at levels and intensities unknown to all previous generations of human beings. In addition to this extraction and alteration of planetary inorganic materials, the same human based productive system has carried out essentially the same global assault upon the millions of organic species existing upon the planet. The successive human focussed socio-economic, hierarchical mass society systems, have on an accelerated scale, radically altered and depleted the vast pre-nineteenth and twentieth century distribution of essential organic life forms on planet earth.

We need to constantly bear in mind that it is this total inorganic and organic biologically integrated ‘system’ which throughout billions of years of evolution has made the whole biosphere of earth habitable for its multiple species of life forms. Therefore, the almost two centuries of accelerated technological developments, since Marx and Engels were alive, together with accelerated human populational growth and increases in ecological/biological degradations, caused by this accumulated activity has begun to critically change all the essential geothermal patterns of life on earth. Therefore, the 19th century focus of Marx and Engels (as well as every other 19th, 20th and 21st century perceptive intellectual) primarily upon the welfare of just one species – humanity itself – is no longer a tenable position. For it is also the case that as close as they both came to considering the crucial foundational role that the rest of the naturally occuring species of life on earth played with regard to the human species, the information they required to make any other observations and logical deductions, than they actually did was simply not available to them. Nor to anyone else.

Consequently, all human beings, rigorous intellectuals or not, have long remained trapped within the general anthropocentric obsession which had gripped humanity since humans had first invented and consolidated hierarchical mass society structures. Whilst it is true that many (but not all) have abandoned the most extreme example of an obsessive anthropocentric belief system – that of a supernatural being (God) creating this planet and its life form inhabitants exclusively for humans to rule and to consume, there is actually more to Anthropocentrism than that. It is only the God bit of Anthropocentrism, that was abandoned by most of those who eventually found their way out of the religious cradle they had been placed in by their adult generations. Even the most radical atheists remained anthropocentrically focussed and instead of an imaginary abstraction – god – they began to look upon the abstraction – ‘nature‘ – as bestowing the gift of unlimited resources to be consumed for the benefit of humanity. Of course, most humans still thought other species were essential – but as manifestations of ‘nature’ – and as important resources to be used by humanity, but nothing more. Consider Marx, for example.

KARL MARX.
Marx in explaining the effect of the development of the capitalist mode of production upon human relationships with ‘nature’, noted that;

“For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely an object of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself;… whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as nature worship…It is destructive towards all of this….tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production. (Marx. Grundrisse Notebook 1V.)

However, these barriers considered by Marx to ‘hem in production’, are what amounts to bourgeois economic limitations, factors such as the domination of capital, overproduction and the inevitable circulation interruptions all of which were stimulated and triggered by the desire and expectation of profit and/or interest on invested capital. These interuptions of capitalist forms of expected wealth production and transfer, as described in the ‘Grundrisse’ and ‘Capital’, were conceptualised there as ‘barriers’ to circulation and consumption, placed there by contradictions within the mode of capitalist production. Thus Marx proceeded in Das Capital to write;

“…capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier, which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development.(Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 237. Emphasis added RR.)

According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production was contradictory in many ways; in both stimulating ever more production and creating ever more efficient forces of production, but at the next phase of its processes it also controlled and limited the development of those forces of social production. According to Marx, in that 19th century way of anthropocentric focussed thinking, capitalism needed to be overthrown not only because it was oppressive, exploititive, degrading to the bulk of humanity etc., but because capitalism also held back the means of a constant expansion of the living process of the society of working class producers. An additional class based fault with capitalist industry he noted was that it only produced prolifically for the benefit of capitalists, not for the benefit of everyone. Marx went  on to note the following;

“The contradiction, to put it in a very general way, consists in that the capitalist mode of production involves a tendency towards absolute development of the productive forces, regardless of the value and surplus-value it contains, and regardless of the social conditions under which capitalist production takes place;….The ‘real barrier’ of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expression appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for ‘capital’s and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. (Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 244/245. Emphasis added. RR.)

Note this repeated assessment by Marx well!! Marx in the mid 1800’s, was suggesting that working people, after the overthrow of capitalism, could begin using the means of production developed under the industrial system of capitalist profit motive, as a ‘means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers’. It is now clear that over the last century and a half ‘production has actually continued to be a constant for producing and reproducing capitals’ and this purpose has geometrically expanded the living processes of the millionaires and billionaires classes, etc., of the capitalist mode of production. Whilst at the same time this unlimited production for capital has been banging against the evolutionary constructed life support systems which are effectively biological protective  barriers of the biosphere and is seriously damaging it. Marx, as brilliantly forensic as he was in many areas of study he focussed upon, is now way out of date with current information. Therefore Marx, as if he wishes to remind the reader of his important 19th century conclusion, continues with this particular point, and again stresses that under the capitalist mode of production the means and purposes of production are in permanent conflict;

“The means – unconditional development of the productive forces of society – comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world market…” (Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 244/245. Emphasis added. RR.)

Marx’s logic was sound in this latter regard and we do now have an effective world market. It is particularly efficient at speeding items around the globe in hours and days, including viral pandemics. However, given 21st century climate change, weather pattern irregularities, essential species loss and widespread metal and plastic pollutants infusing its molecules into the cellular bases of existing food chains. There are now profound reasons for considering whether any form of world market would be appropriate to rectify or eventually remedy the existing and eventual biosphere deterioration now taking place.

However, there is another aspect (a revolutionary crisis perspectives) in which the data base utilised by Marx to develop his perspectives upon is now considerably out of date. This is because Marx also notes the specific socio-economic circumstances of crises (also viewed as socio-economic barriers) due to overproduction and breakdowns in commodity circulation. Marx in the 19th century envisioned a social and political breakdown during such crises. Crises of circulation and relative overproduction, he reasoned, would bring the capitalist system into frequent economic deadlock and prolonged semi-collapses until the corresponding growth of forms of additional levels of mass “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation’ would trigger a social revolt. Along with these prolonged negative symptoms, he suggested, would come;

“….the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself….Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integumentary. …The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx. Capital Vol 1 page 763)

Marx’s hopeful scenario of unity (noted above), engendered by the process of capitalist production itself by centralisation of the means of production among the working classes no longer seems a sufficient mechanism. The massive workplace concentrations of workers have been automated and replaced by robotic and computerised mechanical workstations. However, now even more important to consider are the serious biological degradations which need to be considered as biological barriers to the increased rate of the human productive consumption of nature. In the 19th and 20th centuries, when the abstraction ‘nature’ was (and often still is) viewed as containing limitless supplies of raw materials both inorganic and organic, shortages (barriers) then were only considered to be temporary. As such they could be overcome, by obtaining supplies from alternative raw material sources or the same resources from alternative locations. Consequently, Marx nowhere in any of his extensive and detailed writings on production (Grundrisse, 1844 Manuscripts, Capital’s three volumes, and his 3 volumes of notes on Surplus-Value) mentions a barrier to production caused by the reproductive collapse of key organic species, changes in crucial weather patterns, the supply chain spread of rampant pandemics and/or the eventual lack of vital inorganic resources.

But how could Marx possibly know about these biosphere limitations to unlimited production in the 19th century or point out their future possibility? And how could he know that the eventual 20th century revolts of working and peasant classes would result in nothing more radical than temporary State-Capitalist formations and industrial scale world wars before they were guided back (within one generation) by their elites to full-on bourgeois elite patterns? Moreover, although in Das Capital Marx does not focus directly or comprehensively upon pre-capitalist hierarchical mass societies, he does reveal the logic of them. He does so by abstracting away from some of the specifics of the capitalist mode of mass production, (such as eliminating exchange and surplus-value), and thus reveals a glimpse of all pre-capitalist relationships between humanity and nature. He writes;

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants………The labour process, resolved as above into it’s simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. ” (Marx Capital. Vol. 1 Part 3. Page 177 and 183. Emphasis added. RR.)

Marx certainly understood, that the nature-imposed necessary condition of human exchange with ‘nature’ is actually common to every phase of human existence, so we can only assume that if Marx had been still alive he would recognise that the term ‘nature’ was more than a once useful, but problematic abstraction. He would know that the term ‘nature’ included within it all the key species functioning within the biosphere, such as vast expanses of microorganism-filled top soil land and water-based (algae) photosynthetic plants. For it is those minute and large species associations, which provide the oxygenated air which is needed every minute of everyday by most species of life and without which no human production can take place no matter how powerful the technical means have become.

Similarly, the same minute inter-dependent photosynthetic species also provide the base-line nutritional intake of the vast number of food chains the majority of species need several times daily. Incidentally I have been an adult-long admirer of Karl Marx’s anti-capitalist understanding and perceptive intellect, but this high regard cannot be allowed to stand in the way of, or deflect our attention from, the new realities which have emerged and have rendered a number of his perspectives and opinions no longer valid or reliable. To reappraise and reassess the conclusions and observations that Marx and Engels made in light of significant social, biological and economic changes, is only what they did themselves in the past and in all likelihood would do again if they were still alive. Being afraid to admit that Marx was limited by his knowledge at the time and therefore wrong, by his followers is a weakness of theirs not his. So how does it stand with Fred?

FREDRICK ENGELS.
We need to remember, that Engels was a life long friend and collaborator of Marx and once he became so he was always in touch and in general agreement with Marx’s views on politics, economics and science. This he did both during when Marx was alive and after his death. But in comparing the productive capacity of the human species with the productive capacity of other species, in his book ‘Dialectics of Nature’, Engels wrote;

“…animals also produce, but their productive effect on surrounding nature in relation to the latter (i.e. Men) amounts to nothing at all.” (Engels. ‘Dialectics of Nature’ Introduction. Emphasis added. RR.)

This assertion by Engels that ‘animals by their effects upon nature amount to nothing at all’ , serves to exemplify the 19th century ‘left’ version of the general anthropocentric arrogance and ignorance of elite humanity. This general Anthropocentrism manifests itself within the field of economics as well as other disciplines and only considers the effect of human and some animal species forms of labour and production. As noted earlier, this general attitude does not understand (or ignores) the production of oxygen from plant sun-activated photosynthesis and various gases, primarily carbon dioxide, which daily reproduces the oxygenated air without which all animals cannot continue to exist for more than a minute or two. As referenced earlier, plants by the same type of photosynthetic cell activities that they contain and maintain, also ensure by their growth the fundamental base-line nourishment sources of all food chains for insects, animals and humans.

And again we should stress that without the effects and results of sufficient plant based food chains, humans and animals cannot function effectively for more than a few days. This base line ecological and evolutionary development of the gas and energy exchange support of biological processes for the physical function of breathing, eating and the cellular metabolising of energy sources into proteins and minerals in the 19th century opinion of Engels “amounts to nothing at all”. Despite his undoubted intellect, Engels continued with this same obsessive anthropocentric bias when he later wrote imaginatively that in the new epoch of history – when he imagines that a planned economy will have been achieved;

“From it will date a new epoch of history , in which mankind itself, and all branches of its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade.” (Engels ibid)

According to Engels, the achievement of a planned economy would put everything preceding it in the deepest shade. I have good reason to doubt that rash assertion. Germany and the UK had planned economies during the Second World War and this kind of planned economy cast a different kind of darkness upon life on earth. In contrast to total war by planned economies, the  formation of cellular organic life and the subsequent billion year evolution of millions of amazing multi-cellular species, I suggest it is that which is going to be difficult to be pushed into the deepest shade, by anything that emerges from humanity. The latest space science and technology is crude and useless to life on earth in comparison to a biological cell or cooperating networks of cells in multi-cellular beings.

After this section of his book Engels uses further scientific assumptions to speculate far into the cosmic future and describe the eventual extermination of humanity and the disintegration of the earth and the solar system it spins within. He includes by a logical deduction  the inevitable collapse and disintegration of the Milky Way Galaxy, presumably in the hope that the reader would find this possibility or probability informative and relevant. Later in section eight of the same book Engels writes;

“Labour is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.” (ibid. Emphasis added. RR.)

Although containing a good degree of relative accuracy, this sentiment clearly emanates from an anthropocentric conception of nature which identifies the product of inorganic and organic nature, when modified by human hand, – as wealth. Wealth is not created by human hands, but by anthropocentric value systems. Wealth is purely an anthropocentric concept and a narcissistic one at that. But we also have an element of creationism slipped in at this point, when Engels suggests that ‘labour’ (an abstraction) ‘creates’ man himself. Muscular activity may help modify or otherwise adapt the muscles, bones, nerves and sinues of any body parts of any animal that uses them consistently during movement, but labour being an abstraction, does not ‘create’ those modifications. Unlike religion, the term ‘creation’ has a very narrow and extremely limited level of specificity in questions relating to nature (the subject of Engels’ book) and to natural/bio-chemical functions and developments. He then anthropocentrically asserts that;

“The further that men became removed from animals; however, the more the effect on nature assumes the character of a premeditated, planned action directed towards definite ends known in advance.” (ibid)

The number of animals and insects now known to engage in premeditated action directed to definite ends, such as eating suitable nutrition, locating a suitable and willing mate, building a suitable nest, hole or den for warmth and shelter are too commonly known and to numerous to render this sentence as anything other than an ill-thought out, evidence absent opinion. Engels at his then 19th century level of understanding imagines (and with a sense of approval) that planned actions take place at the chemical, cell and plant levels of life on earth (doubters should check the book). He then repeats his earlier assumption of the superiority of the human species over other species and writes the following;

“In short the animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, ‘masters‘ it. This is the final distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.” (ibid)

The ancient anthropocentric dominating tendency, (mastery) evident from early Suma, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and Arabia which was perpetuated in ancient hierarchical mass society aggregations and has been sustained in the structure of these hierarchical ‘civilised’ societies ever since, is vividly illustrated in this extract. Engels, then correctly points out the negative and contradictory (often) unforseen results of this purposeful anthropocentic alteration of nature by removing forests and overgrazing and over planting of land. But despite this valid observation Engels remains committed to what he sees as the ‘progress’ of mass human societies. For he arrogantly suggests on a later page that human ‘mastery’ over nature has the advantage of “knowing and correctly applying” nature’s ‘laws’. Really? Humanity, seems to be having considerable difficulty in accurately knowing and even correctly applying what humanity thinks it already knows.

The final problem that I see with Engels as a useful source for modern students of anti-capitalist views and future revolutionary-humanist views and research to consider, is that he shares a similar Darwinist and Malthusian lack of understanding of the integrated, inter-connected beneficial web of species life within the biosphere of planet earth. In this regard, he makes a revealing comment in his above noted book. He wtote;

“Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the ‘animal’ kingdom.” (ibid. Emphasis added. RR.)

This extract contains another common and long standing anthropocentric assumption, that all animal life is a 24/7 struggle for existence, when it clearly is not. No animal species has prevented other animal species from eating their preferred nutrition – which is invariably available in the location they are born into. Apart from the few predator species no animal is constantly trying to kill any other animal for nutrition and space to dwell. Furthermore, even highly evolved predators do not try to kill all other available prey animals just because they have evolved the ability to do so. They kill only enough to eat, then their prey species are left in peace. Any serious study of nature without the prior infusion of Darwinian/Malthusian ideology will reveal that the vast majority of each species gets sufficient food, water, shelter, safety and reproductive activity proportional to it’s needs and to its normal life-span. Their continued collective survival as entire species for millions of years, indicates that life and species existence is not one long continual battle with other species. Indeed, beneficial associations of species and cellular symbiosis are the ‘natural’ reasons why species have survived sometimes for billions and sometimes for millions of years.

The ideology of ‘natural selection‘ and the ‘preservation of favoured species in the struggle for life’ Darwin’s sub-title, is yet another aspect of the anthropocentric ideological paradigm which still conceptualises a complete negative bio-social difference between the other species of life on earth and the human species. In reality, I suggest that both Malthus and Darwin viewed the collectives of non-human species, through the assumptions they drew directly from the human hierarchical form of social organisation. It was within these human systems, where a struggle against elite control over nutrition, shelter, partners and safety, had become the historical social norm. Darwin highly influenced by religion and the man of cloth, Malthus, assumed that what was socially typical within such religious based, god-guided, clerically blessed, human societies was naturally also typical within nature. But of course it is not.

Other species of life don’t have to pray daily for or provide labour in exchange for water, nutrition and shelter, these essentials for all animal, insect and plant living are easily available from any unguarded or unfenced part of nature. There are no species food vendors, or food monopolisers in nature. Nor do most other species have to labour in exchange for obtaining reproductive partners, these too are relatively easy to obtain in nature. There are no bride prices, dowries or parental permissions to negotiate among any other species. And of course, there are no wars and genocides among the non-human species life forms. Furthermore, among other species, there are no rich and poor members and no other species is forced to labour for the benefit of an elite member of it’s own kind or for another elite member of another species of life on earth.

Finally! Although the history of the human species is interesting and informative, we don’t always need to go back to the 19th century intellects for inspiration or knowledge. We just need to open our eyes to what is happening all around us to know what needs to change and then begin to form alliances with those who also want to transform our essential patterns for the better. Starting in a small group way to think and when possible to consistently act to protect the whole of life on earth not just our human right to pleasure, is actually the first revolutionary step. Assisting and encouraging the new consolidated practice to spread further becomes the second revolutionary step. These changes do not require rocket science levels of theoretical understanding or reams of social theory in order to make them.

A course in Hegelian dialectics can be challenging occupation if it is ever suggested, but having done so myself I can say performing such theoretical gymnastics are not essential to obtain a revolutionary change of our destructive mode of production. Small steps are how all actual meaningful changes in modes of production and modes of living have always taken place. It’s a myth that they take place via political vanguards directing armed contingents of fighting men killing each other. That is the change-agent model of how control ofhierarchical mass societies have successively changed hands. Historically when ruling elites have failed to change places peacefully they invariably resort to summoning armed bodies of men to assist in the overthrow of one particular elite regime and replace it with another – their own! Human social evolution needs to channel its development in the way biological evolution has done by relatively slow, incremental changes to structure, behaviour and motivation and not at the expense of every other essential part of the biosphere. That way these new non-hierarchical social quantities of local community living will become transformed into new social qualities.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2025)