In a previous article entitled (Gaps between Ideas and Reality’) I made the case for recognising that the anthropocentric view of workers revolution that most of the 20th century and current 21st century anticapitalist left are following is a purely  theoretical one. Moreover that this theoretical view was formulated almost two centuries ago during the 18th and 19th centuries.  I further reasoned that this theory, when it was most comprehensively formulated by Karl Marx, had been based primarily upon the industrialisation of the capitalist mode of production and the consequent changed economic role and social status of the industrialised labouring classes. Marx in his studies had concluded that the industrialisation of the mode of production, harnessed to the investment needs of the capitalist classes, would lead to three symptomatic and constantly recurring contradictions, which would trigger a future revolution.

The first contradiction was that, the profit motive pursued by the owners of capital would, create a relative overproduction of commodities and capital, which in turn would lead to the continuous  expansion of productive capital and recurrent economic crises in the form of booms and slumps in actual production output. The second contradiction would arise during the boom periods by an increase in the number of workplaces  and workers employed in them. The third contradiction would mature during the economic slumps by an increasing level of unpaid wage labour leading to a crisis in the socio-biological life of the working class masses. During the slump/crisis periods the working classes would be unable to feed, clothe and house themselves and their families adequately when laid off during numerous lengthy slumps. The theoretical reasoning concluded that the working classes would then be forced to recognise (as Marx had done ) that the capitalist mode of production could not offer a stable present and future for working people and their families.

This revolutionary theory held that the workers experience of their everyday exploitation and the repeated crisis in their lives would in turn lead a to leap in consciousness in the form of a recognition that they would, as a class, need to take over the mode of production. They could then utilise the factories and machinery to produce the essential goods that ordinary people needed, rather than producing for profit needed or desired by the capitalists and other elites.  At a 19th and 20th century intellectual level of understanding of life on earth, the logic of these three theoretical conclusions and predictions seemed perfectly sound. Indeed, reality did vividly confirm the first two hypotheses of the purely theoretical perspective of revolution. The predicted booms and slumps continued to occur and during periods of over production of capital the concepts of colonialism and imperialism were vigorously asserted, acted upon and promoted the expansion of over-produced commodities and overproduced productive capital out of Europe and via the colonies, across the entire globe.  Furthermore, the repeated slumps in turn did create crises in the socio- biological life of the working classes of Europe, massed as they were in their huge factories, farms, offices, mines and shops.

This pattern to a lesser extent, also occurred in the newly formed workplaces of the colonial mining, live-stock ranches and the  agricultural plantations of cotton, rubber, tobacco, sugar etc.
Large-scale slumps and rural and urban poverty and hardship for the working classes, became continuous symptoms of hierarchical mass societies – everywhere! So two out of the three 19th century anti-capitalist theoretical conclusions and predictions actually materialised. But unlike a phrase from a 20th century ‘Meat Loaf’  pop song “two out of three – ain’t bad”, this two out of three actuality was ultimately very bad for working people. So in fact the third theoretical conclusion, ‘there would be a workers revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production’ never occured. Working class anger was not levelled at the capitalist system as whole. Instead, working class anger at their deteriorating circumstances, was channelled against other workers and other elites in other countries. And during extreme cases of crisis  this anger was channelled into ‘nationalist‘ wars of destruction and self -destruction pitted against the countries of rival elites.

This channeling of anger against other countries and other human beings brutally matetialised in the First and Second World Wars and also in some cases into civil wars to replace their pre-existing exploiting bourgeois elites by revolutionary sounding petite bourgeois exploiting elites which had emerged in Russia, China and Cuba. In less crisis ridden periods,  working class consciousness and antipathy to the extreme alienations and exploitation of the capitalist socio-economic ‘system’ was also deflected into movements around individual self-improvement and into becoming a pro-capitalist salaried  worker or into a political activist campaigning for collective improvements by reform of the social and economic system. This lack of revolutionary zeal was classed by some dualistic minded ‘Marxists’ as form of  ‘false-consciousness‘ as if there were only two (true or false) versions of conscious responses to the complex contradictions of hierarchical mass society living. Even though the term was frequently used on the left, I suggest that a consistent dialectical understandings of life was never a fundamental method of addressing and processing reality by most of the Marxists and their imitators.

This dualism and a lack of rigour, among other things, was part of the reasons why Marx, having reviewed what many of his self-styled ‘Marxist’ groupies were writing, declared “I am not a Marxist!” Nevertheless, the fact remains that there has been a substantial gap between the 19th century theory formulated by Marx of the emergence of a  general revolutionary form of conscìousness which would lead to a working class-led overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and in the actual social and political practices of working people. Some ‘Marxists’ concluded, that it was the workers who by having this supposedly ‘false consciousness‘, had failed to implement the ‘true’ consciousness of Marx and the Marxists. In fact it was the later Marxist theoreticians that had failed to fully understand three real aspects of these theories; a) the full extent of Marx’s theories ; b) the reality of the working class predicament, due to the increasing divisions between blue and white-collar; waged and salaried workers; and c) the strength of the socialisation process on workers of living in hierarchical mass society forms of aggregation.

The 19th and 20th century Marxist theoreticians had also not anticipated the political flexibility of the ruling bourgeois elites, who granted temporary reforms to workers and even recruited talented working people into elite sections of the ruling ‘establishment’. Knighthoods, for trade unionists, Peerages for labour politicians and local authority advancements, all such ‘promotions’ were the modern equivalents of similar practices pioneered by the elites in the ancient, Greek, Persian, and Roman mass society periods. The elite strategy of divide and rule in hierarchical mass societies was almost as old as their earliest formation. Like individual weak strings twisted into rope, the combined intertwining of these relatively weak, practical, intellectual and emotional strands of individual working class support for the system they were born into, created significant splits among the working classes.

At the same time, elite promotion of the ideology of nationalism allowed the forging of much stronger bonds between workers and ‘their’ own hierarchical mass society system, which exploited them. Attraction and repulsion in social systems are not always dualistic opposites as simplistic forms of thinking often assume. Hence, despite a few minor examples, working class consciousness in general during the 150 or so years since Marx wrote “workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains”, never went further than demanding and voting for better, more supportive or stronger political elites to run the capitalist society in a more fairer way. The ‘chains‘ of collective belonging – to even a despicable national regime – are proving far stronger than anyone previously imagined. However, that third failed theoretical conclusion and prediction in the Marxist theory of revolution was not the only flaw in that particular concept of a revolutionary transformation in consciousness, because it only saw the problem for human life on earth, from it’s own anthropocentric perspective.

Anthropocentrically based ideologies only understood humanity (and the nature/humanity relationship) very dimly and located all problems facing modern humanity as rooted entirely in the capitalist mode of production. It needs to be stressed that Marxist revolutionary theoreticians were anthropocentric theoreticians first and foremost and therefore, did not see the problem of life on earth in general from the complex multi-species biological perspective of the earths biosphere. Even most of the later generations of anti-capitalist revolutionary-minded intellectuals saw the socio-biological problems facing humanity as due to one particular mode of production only – Capitalism! In fact any social mode of production (that has been or can be imagined) has only two sources of raw materials from which to extract what is needed for the survival of all organic beings.

The first source is organic nature and the second is inorganic nature. Every species of life on earth needs to extract from nature the quantities of materials they need to survive. However, if even one species extracts more organic raw materials at a rate which exceeds, the rate they can be reproduced, by the species which produce and reproduce those raw materials, then shortages will occur. It is now clear from a study of hierarchical mass societies throughout history, that all ancient hierarchical mass societies over extracted, over consumed and often totally exhausted their local ecological resources and to maintain themselves their elites needed to extend their control and extract from ecological resources, further and further away from their original ‘settlement’ territory. They weren’t generously spreading the benefits of civilisation, as naive anthropocentric historians have later claimed, they were actually greedily extracting, grabbing and consuming natural resources, wherever they were in abundance, and doing so simply in order to keep their system functioning.

That territorial ‘expansion’ and resource ‘extraction’ is how ancient empires came into being and how and where these aggresively successful hierarchical mass societies were eventually destroyed by rival empires operating on the same socio-economic basis. Furthermore, any modern hierarchical mass society wielding the latest automated industrial technologies no longer needs a class of capitalists in order to ramp up the over consumption of raw materials or the over-production of finished commodities during periods of war or peace. A class of trained and loyal bureaucrats can do so, as they did in the two world wars in general and as they did in the form of the Supreme Economic Council and the various ‘org-bureau’s of the the early Soviet Union and even later, from 1920 to 1970. Nevertheless, Karl Marx cannot also be held responsible for all the deliberate or mistaken distortions of his theoretical conclusions and recommendations made by past, present or future self-styled Marxists. Nor can he be discredited or dismissed because the 19th century research and understanding of life on earth available to him had not revealed what it has in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Only those revolutionary minded  intellectuals now living in the 20th and 21st centuries can be validly taken to task for ignoring what has been revealed in our own lifetime’s. For example, Marx had no way of knowing that the capitalist mode of production would reach such a high automated level of productive technology that it would be capable of enabling the feeding, clothing and housing up to nine billion human beings by over-consuming the extracted products of organic and inorganic nature. He had no exposure to the more modern methods of research into earth systems at the global level or at the electron scanning microscopic levels. Thus the modern ability of hierarchical elites in control of capitalist developed science and technology, can now by their decisions, endanger the very species which contribute to maintaining and renewing the biosphere upon which all the species of life on earth depend to survive, was not even suspected let alone partially confirmed by reliable field work evidence.

But now it is; and this knowledge has implications for the development of a revolutionary theory relevant for the 21st century. Proposals for a revolutionary transformation of the mode of production from one which is undermining the basis of the entire biosphere, to one that doesn’t, must not limit itself to being satisfied with a political revolution to change the form of governance of human societies, or limit itself to removing the profit motive from the process of production. It needs to have at its core, the perspective and practical intention to limit human levels of extraction from nature, to ones at or below the levels of all species reproduction, and to ensure in doing so that all human beings are adequately catered for. Saving, the photosynthetic species of vegetation and the microorganisms supporting those that are a) the absorbers of carbon dioxide, b) producers of oxygen, and c) the basic units of all subsequent food chains is the only way to save the multi-cellular species that came later in the evolution of life on earth. It is misguided nonsense to campaign for saving elephants, tigers and whales and ignoring the species that by their own organic life processes, enable all the other species to breathe and eat.

Furthermore, the idea of a revolution in the mode of production commencing by the political ovethrow of an existing elite and its replacement by another group or class of individuals is an anthropocentric distortion of biological and social reality. Modes of production are merely the intellectual descriptions of how the human species extract from nature what they need to survive. In the biologically cycling and re-cycling reality of planet earth, it is the practical level of extraction from the biosphere, which determines, whether a mode of production is sustainable or not. It is not the theoretical opinion of any expert, non- expert or computer simulation.

Reality, not theory determines the species types and species levels of extinctions. The current form of human extraction is not only unjust but also unsustainable. These two symptoms can only be changed by groups of people changing how much and in what form they extract from nature. The idealistic theory that the current mode of production needs to be changed by a technological revolution first, a political revolution second, and a social revolution third, is just a regurgitation of the 19th and 20th century level of anthropocentric incremental thinking. All the other species of life on earth have continued to do what all species did until a few thousand years ago. They have just taken what they need daily and have left the rest of nature to continue its inter-connected and inter-dependent biological processes.

If advocating an eventual return to such a balanced ecological situation sounds idealistic and impossible, it should be recognised that until a few millenia ago nearly every human community on planet earth, successfully lived in that way; and until a few centuries ago so did non-European humanity.  Indeed, it is still the case that many remaining small isolated communities, have never ceased to live within the limits determined by the reproduction of organic sources of nutrition; and that other small new Gaia-centric communities have already been started on that basis. It is far more idealistic and impossible to realistically suggest  that the existing hierarchical mass society models can continue without continually turning humanity into lethaly warring factions, over rapidly depleting resources and nature into  vast plains of depleted wasteland, or in thinking that a significant change in human consciousness will take place and successful worker led revolutions will spring up here, there and everywhere.

The historical record indicates that no change in modes of production or changes in social forms of living have ever been transformed according to some previous intellectually constructed scenario of mass realisation and widespread prior agreement to violently overthrow existing socio-economic forms.
Revolutions in modes of production never occur as a result of intellectual theories, by those with the time and inclination to produce them. Small numbers of practically focussed people organising together and successfully doing something different have always  begun such holistic changes. It is then that these ‘start-up’ examples have been copied and replicated by other small groups who could see and evaluate that success for themselves, before joining in with that practically based revolutionary transition in embryo.

Small groups consistently and successfully living more sustainably is the real starting point for a practical revolution in the human mode of production and in forging a complimentary mode of social aggregation. Real socio-ecoligical revolutions, will not occur through a theoretically envisioned process in which millions of working people and others will 1, arrive at a consciousness of the need to engage in politically motivated civil wars in which the human species line up to kill each other just in order for one side to 2, conquer political power, impose dictatorships of the proletariat upon those who survive and 3, continue to administer in some way, a socio-economic system which by its structure and composition will still need to extract more from natures species, than nature’s species can replenish themselves by their biological reproductive systems.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2025.)