Every time the problems of life on earth are addressed from within an Anthropocentric biased form of ideology, the solutions proposed are almost certain to be way off the mark, full of needless abstractions and therefore categorically wrong. A recent article I came across in a left blog is a further example of such confusion. The author of the article commenced his analysis of life under the capitalist mode of production, with a long list of authors from Buber, through to Marx, via numerous others who had used the mythical concept of ‘vampires‘ to try to explain the working of the capitalist system. The article was entitled ‘Fighting Oligarchy: The Idle Rich and the Vampire Economy.’

Note that even the title contains two useless abstractions – fighting and oligarchy! There is nothing real or specific denoted or described by the authors use of these two words. Without actual tangible content ‘oligarchy‘ and ‘fighting‘ are just empty abstractions addressing or describing nothing specific and no-one in particular. Yet their use is intended to refer to something specific, whilst sounding tough and are also being used to promote a serious proposition. Consequently, these abstractions and the others that follow them reveal more about the author’s own confusion than the situation facing the mass of humanity in particular and life on earth in general.

It is a confusion which the author is determined to spread to readers of that article. It explains little or nothing about any actual struggle against the system of capitalism or against the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. This confusion serves only to obscure the socio-economic nature of any serious struggle against the capitalists control of the current mode of production, and their utter dependence upon the hierarchical mass society structures conceptualised as ‘civilisation’s’. Hence words used in this way are just empty, meaningless phrases. Furthermore the author of the form and content of this article has made no attempt to criticise and debunk the historic and blatantly false anthropocentric concept of Vampirism, within the human species.

Hematophagy, drinking blood, exists among species of life on earth, but is only found within some insects, worms, leeches, birds and bats. Vampires in human communities are a complete narrative fiction written to sell imaginative stories in the form of literary commodities to a public looking to be entertained and willing to pay for consuming such trivial nonsense. And like all the rest of the trivial nonsense produced by the capitalist entrepreneurs as commodities these narratives are vehicles for enabling profits or income to be made on the production and sale of these actual and fictional commodities. In addition to pure fiction, selling ill thought out ideas and half-baked opinions is part of the bourgeois and petite bourgeois income stream creative process.

So how sad it is to see it so frequently perpetuated within the ranks of the allegedly anti-capitalist left. The use of this spurious ‘vampire’ analogy, which seeks to equate the cause of the socio-economic exploitation of the bulk of humanity by the capitalist class using a biologicaly based, species specific, framework is likewise a piece of trivial non-existent nonsense. There are no blood sucking nutrition extraction organisms within any species remotely connected with the evolution of the apes, hominids and homo sapiens. Indeed, there are very few such examples of vampirism (pure Hematophagy) even  within the extensive mammalian and insect species.

The fact that Karl Marx used this vivid and emotive concept does not justify its continued use in terms of considering human modes of production, which are social  forms of obtaining biological essentials such as nutrition, clothing, dwellings, safety and reproduction. Obtaining these biological essentials is the social purpose of all planting, rearing, reaping, culling, hunting and gathering as modes of human production and consumption. For Marx just a sentence or two (out of hundreds of thousands) on vampirism  was not offered to his readers as a description, but as an abstract emotive metaphor within a three volume, extremely detailed analysis of the socio-economic mode of production known as capitalism.

By choice, most of Marx’s many volumes on economic issues have focussed upon the most modern economic system – capitalism, as an entire socio-economic system. It was a socio-economic system which in pursuit of nutrition, shelter, housing and safety, he knew had socially integrated and socially entrapped all its members, leaving them no easy way of escaping from it. During the lifetime of Marx, it had become clear that for the bulk of humanity, the only possibility of escape from these hierarchical mass society systems, was by a collective overthrowing of the ruling capitalist and pro-capitalist elites and the reconstitution of human aggregates on a completely different non-capitalist socio-economic basis.

For Marx, and those who thought like him in the 19th and 20th century, therefore, overthrowing capitalism and revolutionising the entire socio-economic system to eliminate this historic human alienation and oppression, was their primary and often only concern. There was insufficient evidence available to think otherwise. A mode of production from within an anthropocentric viewpoint was then (and is now) considered to be only a social relationship and no matter how sophisticated and complex they become –  superficially that is all they still are! However, in more fundamental terms a mode of production for any organic species is a biological (or bio-chemical) relationship with ‘nature’; at it’s most basic, and is their fundamental form of existence.  Life is a complex biological relationship of each organic species with all the other organic species.

In the 21st century, however, sufficient evidence has now accumulated to indicate that capitalism is merely a technological intensification the pre-existing hierarchical mass society formations, that have since their inception, consumed more of their local natural resources than local nature could reproduce them. In previous centuries, because the planet was so large, there was always room to continually expand to new territories and therefore to continually over extract. However, in the late 20th and 21st centuries, hierarchical mass society systems containing up to 9 billion human beings are now consuming organic (and inorganic) raw materials as nutrition, clothing, housing, leisure and tools of construction and destruction (demolition and warfare) much faster than the reproductive rates of most organic species can replenish them.

Of course, the inorganic resources of earth also used as raw materials, cannot renew themselves and so are for all practical purposes finite. However, their globally polluting manufacturing residues of mineral sediments, metals, gases and liquids are also hindering the reproduction of organic sources of raw materials. Therefore, the quantity and quality of non-human organic life forms, making up the nutritional resources of humanity (and much else) is continually shrinking. Yet at the same time, the mass of humanity and their consumption of these resources is continually rising. The several thousand year old anthropocentric paradigm of thinking that ‘nature‘ would always be sufficiently productive to enable the survival of humanity – no matter how large it becomes – is now no longer tenable. The hierarchical social relationships of humans have long been effectively at war with their organic support networks. Now they are increasingly endangering them.

The long term future of life on earth, including the future of the human species, now depends upon reducing the consumption of nature by humanity, below the average natural rate of reproductive capability and upon replanting and restoring as many as possible of the lost resource species destroyed by current and previous generations. Yet very few have reached this logical conclusion. This is  because – even on the left – there is a general social failure to understand the contradiction between how the earth’s biological system has naturally evolved to sustain all life as an integrated system and how the social evolution of human hierarchical mass societies now frenetically undermines that system by many of it’s own mass society productive sub-systems. Hierarchical mass society resource extraction processes are now capable of sufficiently destroying or depleting crucial parts of the global biosphere to cause a collapse of many of the biological renewal systems upon which all forms of life on earth depend.

Even, the most radical of the anti-capitalist left have likewise not only failed to reach this conclusion, but as a consequence of anthropocentric thinking have also failed to understand the inadequate nature of their current concept of revolution. The current concept of an anticapitalist ‘revolution’ amounts to nothing more than an ambition to achieve a socio-political transformation. It envisions the overthrow of an existing right-wing hierarchical elite, its ‘temporary’ (or permanent)  replacement by another (left-wing) hierarchical political elite and a more equal social redistribution of the future proceeds of mass production and consumption. Yet even the introduction of a radical form of community self-governance would not be completely revolutionary, it would merely be a reform of the social structure and the political form of mass governance. It would not be a ‘revolution’ in the human mode of obtaining the essentials our species needs from the rest of organic and inorganic nature.

Consequently, sustainability, from the various anthropocentric anticapitalist, (Marxist or Anarchist) perspectives amounts to no more than an ambition to create less obvious pollution during the mass production and consumption processes, protection and preservation of more endangered species and ensuring a fairer social distribution of the future proceeds of mass production and consumption. That perspective amounts to dealing with some secondary symptoms rather than with the overall cause. This biological myopia occurs  because for some anthropocentric anticapitalist perspectives, there are more important narcistic, body-autonomy concerns to consider. Thus from the above noted ‘Fighting Oligarchy: The Idle Rich and the Vampire Economy’, abstract perspective, under the capitalist mode of production, we are informed that;

“The dominated worker is no longer a full human being, but an appendage of capital, an instrument in capital’s self-recreation. Capital is alive and primary, the human host a mere means. Freedom from the reign of capital thus involves the reclamation of bodily autonomy; it is a matter principally of individual freedom, the ability to direct the control of one’s physical body.” (ibid)

Really! A worker is no longer a full human being – but an appendage of capital? And capital is alive! Really? These are reactionary middle-class abstractions which humanise capital and de-humanise workers and then assume that capitalism renders working people incapable of intelligent thought, self-governance and self-determination. In actual fact the worker is a full biological and social being and he or she is not simply an appendage of capital!

First a worker remains a full human being at work both in a biological, gender, social, intellectual and species sense, no matter how badly he or she is treated and no matter how difficult or degrading the work handed out to them remains. Members of the capitalist class may infer what they like about working people, but they have no power to change the workers’ biological, gender or social status no matter how badly or inhumanely he or she treats them.

And the worker is never an appendage of capital. These analogies serve to confuse biological categories with anthropocentric mechanical categories. The physical independence of the worker from the machine is absolute. That is why workers can (and do ) sabotage machinery, refuse to operate dangerous machinery and remove their labour entirely from operating machinery in certain circumstances. It matters not a jot that some people had made such appendage analogies for polemical or emotive accusatory reasons, those reasons do not remove the actual reality of the human situation – within any mode of production – including the capitalist mode of production. Finally the anthropocentric derived confusion about humanity and ‘individual freedom’ continues as we read;

“Freedom from the reign of capital thus involves the reclamation of bodily autonomy; it is a matter principally of individual freedom, the ability to direct the control of one’s physical body. Political theorist Bruno Leipold argues that “Marx’s central political value is freedom.” His book Citizen Marx encourages us to see Marx as first and foremost “a thinker of freedom”—freedom from arbitrary power and domination.” (Ibid)

We are informed by this left author that “freedom from the reign of capital thus involves the reclamation of bodily autonomy…..and individual freedom..etc.” This half-baked assertion also mixes up economic categories with biological categories, which only goes to reinforce or spread the confusion disseminated by bourgeois anthropocentric categories and dualist modes of thinking. Freedom from the ‘reign’ of capital, (abstractions can’t reign) could only reclaim bodily autonomy from the capitalist controlled mode of production, it’s tools and workplaces. Such freedom could not possibly reclaim bodily autonomy from the biologically derived need to expend physical energy, (work) in order to obtain, produce or gather from nature; the necessary food, water, shelter and in the case of modern humans, clothing.

Nor, in an intelligent species, could freedom from the capitalist mode of production reclaim any imaginary autonomy from ensuring that an ecological balance of species is maintained so that all organic bodies which, (short of death), can never gain bodily autonomy from the need for gravity, breathable air, unpolluted water, a form of external organic and inorganic  nutrition, acceptable temperature gradients etc., in order to survive. The above extract once again illustrates the left tendency of assuming that abstract categories used to discuss the relevance of ideas and their connections, (which gives rise to the phenomena of idealism) are real. It continues the ancient anthropocentric mistake of thinking that ideas have some independence from the human brains ability to process and consider them. Thus we read;

“Within the system, capital enjoys this right or power of increase, its owners’ ability to increase their wealth using their wealth, growing ever richer without work”. (Fighting Oligarchy: The Idle Rich and the Vampire Economy.’ Counterpunch. May 3 2025)

The first sentence removes the individual human agent of capital (the capitalist) from capitalism and gives the right and power to increase capital to an abstraction – capital – itself! In the authors brain, reality has been permanently inverted; The right and power of the capitalist to increase his or her wealth has been given to to a collective abstraction – capital! So when the author writes that ..capital enjoys this right to increase its owners ability to increase their wealth, he has completely inverted reality. If in one short sentence, the very basic distinction between categories of thought that we know have the power to act (organic life forms – humans and animals) and those categories that we know are just descriptions of inanimate objects or relationships, then what else can such intellects as this be confusing or inverting in their unself-critical imagination?

Well we don’t have to wait for long to find out. We are informed in the final phrase that capitalists are; “…using their wealth, growing ever richer without work”. Here we have a confusion between; work for a wage or salary which contains less exchange value than what the capitalist gains from employing the worker (which is the origin of surplus- product and surplus-value) and thus the profit on capital investment; and work as a unit of expended energy upon any task requiring such physical effort, by any biological organism. And any rational anti-capitalist perspective which objects to the attempted dehumanisation of working people by the elite classes, cannot then promote the dehumanisation of capitalists, on the basis of frustrated emotion.

So of course the capitalist works (often intensively,  persistently and oppressively) but not as a wage labourer. He or she expends energy (works) in any number of ways but as with all hierarchical mass society systems the system is constructed so that when the elites work they get far more return of tangible product (‘wealth’) for the energy they expend, than those who work merely to secure their basic survival provisions. The capitalist mode of production is no different in this regard, than any other hierarchical mass society system, it just returns those efforts in the indirect form of money instead of directly in the form of the surplus products extracted from nature and processed to completion by skilled labour.

So in reality, rather than dogmatic ideology, the capitalist mode of production is not an entirely unique socio-economic system, and getting lost intellectually in its specific details, as many anti-capitalist intellectuals do, can be the metaphorical equivalent of not seeing the wood for the vast number of trees. The capitalist mode of production is just the latest technological iteration of a series of hierarchical mass society formations, existing throughout history. Each successive iteration has organised the individuals living within them into pre-determined socio-economic classes initially within village settlements and then city states and which were later grouped into city-state alliances and then nations and empires.

In each successive historic iteration the elite classes, with the help and support of a middle class, have organised the social and economic system to benefit themselves by compelling the vast majority of their working class populations to extract from ‘nature’ the socio-biological provisions necessary for the existence of all their citizens. But crucially, and hyper destructively, in addition to these biological necessities of providing food, clothing, shelter for general population use, these successive elites have also compelled the increasing production of numerous luxury items for their own exclusive use.

Therefore in order to fully understand life on earth it is essential to recognise that it was these ancient hierarchical mass society forms that began the process of extracting from local areas of organic and inorganic nature, more than was necessary for any given number of the human species to comfortably survive. In other words, two extra socio-economic demands were set in motion by this new form of hierarchical mass society aggregation. First, the demands of the elite for extra sources of nutrition, extra sources of clothing, extra sources of housing, extra items of luxury, which then frequently outstripped the locally available resources, necessitating an extension of the area of control and extraction for each developing settlement. Second, as each local hierarchical mass society aggregate grew in population numbers, the existing general level of material extraction from nature had to be increased and therefore extended far beyond the original village or city parameters (or settlement boundaries).

Wherever these two extra elements of human settlement (or city-state) demands grew, so did the need (and thus the obvious desire) for territorial expansion over land or water-based organic and inorganic resources. Thus trade, conquest and internal and external resource control became the socio-biological requirements of hierarchical mass societies which were eventually formalised in the State and Military institutions of the ancient Near and Middle East. These facts on the ‘local’ ground and ‘foreign-ground’ were eventually fictionalised (Jason and the argonauts etc.) and further rationalised and justified in the ideological expressions of the ancient religious, philosophical and political formulations of that region.

Every subsequent settled hierarchical mode of production – from ancient to modern – maintained this class divided mass system and consequently logically retained a resource-hungry appetite. However, it was the ancient religious and philosophical aspects of anthropocentric ideology which attributed (and blamed) the systematic social oppression and exploitation of citizen against citizen – not to the system – but to the motive of individual evil or selfish greed. In this way, certain individuals were held personally responsible (as ‘vampires’) for what amounted to an outcome of a particular boundary-encapsulated socio-economic form.

It is revealing that the original social form of human aggregation (hunter-gatherer communities) had no class divisions and no systematic organised territorial conquests or systematic practice of mass enslavement of other communities labouring populations. There were no socio-biological foundations for them to arise upon. When those social foundations did appear with the rise of hierarchical mass societies and their contradictions matured, then explanations for the resulting inhumanity were sought. With only limited experiences and knowledge, ancient Anthropocentric reflective thinking, based upon magic and narcissism in both religion and secular guises, came up with an imaginary bodily symptom, to explain them. An individual inner ‘evil’ (vampires or devils) was imagined to explain such ‘unnatural’ inhumane behaviours within hierarchical mass society structures. Yet it was not a biologically determined intellectual tendency which motivated such behavioural traits among these so-called ‘civilised’ individuals, but a matrix of sociological pressures, rationales and restraints that these individuals were contained within.

These pressures to behave differently than all previous human groups, were created by a particular socio-economic system, which by an elite determined, socially developed process, had practically and socially bound certain sections of humanity to its socio-economic practices. But it needs to be remembered that this hierarchical entrapment and process of intellectual dehumanisation only occured in certain regions and at a certain stages of humanities biological and social existence. Outside of those regions and before the social authority enforcing adherence to those new forms could be implemented, that tendency had not the socio-biological foundation to sustain itself and so did not exist as a social trait. Other, non-hierarchical social forms of human communities continued to exist on every continent and practically every habitable Island on the entire planet, until the modern colonialist global expansion took place and destroyed them. They existed as they had for millions of years previously, and as a remaining few still do in the 21st century.

The really revolutionary perspective in the 21st century, therefore, is not to keep on regurgitating and dogmatically arguing about what past anthropocentric based research and ‘wisdom’ has revealed, or which patrifocal personal interpretation was best, or how soon a significant collapse will occur.  The logic of the system, if not changed will grind toward such an outcome sooner or later.  The revolutionary-humanist perspective is to base ourselves on what new circumstances and research has revealed and has therefore rendered many of these past insights only valid within outdated anthropocentric parameters and thus are no longer valid outside of them, and thus are in need of revolutionary transformation. In the 21st century, the whole range of anthropocentric based ideological systems, religious, philosophical, secular, political and atheist need to be consistently and rigourously criticised from a whole-of-earth, Gaia-centric perspective.

That Gaia-centric perspective, I suggest needs to be the meaningful basis of any future ‘revolutionary’ trend  which is really worthy of applying that term to itself.  Coming as these concepts do, from the only articulate and intellectually competent species of life on earth – the human species – these concepts actually bring with them a collective responsibility! However, as in most cases, revolutions in practice as well as thought within the evolution of humanity invariably begin with the actions and  thoughts of a minority and this fact should be accepted as inevitable and usual not simply dismissed as indiosyncratic and problematic.

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2025)