It is fairly common knowledge that there have been a number of significant Empires in the past history of the human species. The term ’empire’ is used retrospectively to refer to an amalgamation of hierarchical mass societies, whose ruling elites have begun to act as one for certain advantageous purposes. This decision to act in concert, is the determining factor in becoming classed as an empire, not whether the parties intended to become one or not. Of course a decision to act in concert can be by voluntary agreement or by one or more of the hierarchical elites forcing, by military means, the rest of the mass societies to agree to act as directed by the dominant mass society elite. The latter is the more usual way that elites in control of hierarchical mass societies, ‘persuade’ other similar societies to affiliate with them and become a functioning part of their developing empire. An overwhelming majority of the ancient hierarchical mass society forms of aggregation, (also known as city states) and their subsequent amalgamation into ‘Empires’, were developed within the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East region.

Thus there were ancient empires administered and controlled by elites who dominated in Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Assyria, Persia, China, Greece and Rome etc. Then came the later examples of the Byzantine, Hasburg, Spanish, Russian, French, Portugese and British Empires of the more recent centuries. Each of these examples were administered by the elites ruling over a dominant hierarchical mass society. It is also common knowledge, that all 13 of the above noted historical empires collapsed and many of them did so spectacularly. From within the anthropocentric ideologies and identity politics promoted by successive hierarchical elites and their supporters, it was reasoned that humanity found it’s true home and future identity within powerful hierarchical mass society aggregates. The anthropocentric ‘progress’ of humanity, via conflict over, and conquest of, the resources of nature, became (and remains) the defining characteristic of hierarchical mass societies, including when they are incorporated into empires.

However, in reality rather than in anthropocentric ideology, humanity long ago effectively turned it’s back on its (actual) biological species identity and via the socio-economic competition and continuous conflict, between hierarchical mass societies, chose alternative non-natural identities.  The choice of identity made by elites to rally around was on religious and/or regional (national) identities. Therefore, ever since, that period, settled humanity has effectively been a species regularly and repeatedly at war with itself. It is these ersatz identities, harnessed to the hierarchical mass society form, and their frequent empire amalgamations, which has led to repeated historical genocides and is now leading not only toward humanities own eventual self-destruction, but to multiple extinctions of other species.

The rise and fall of Empires, are merely the recurring anthropocentric symptoms moving along this relatively short path of humanities relatively late historical and social evolution. Yet at their most vigorous and energetic stages, all of these past empires seemed to be both all-powerful and permanent to those living within them and even to those not liviing in them. The conclusion to be drawn from the actual historical evidence, rather than from any rose-tinted, intellectually selected, ‘glorious’ episodes, or what are considered an empires outstanding accomplishments, therefore, is clear. It is the fact that Empires no matter how large, powerful or impressive they may appear to have been, nonetheless, on the scale of the evolution of life on earth, these socio-economic amalgamations of humans were relatively recent and short-lived. More significantly, on the evolutionary scale of human (Homo sapien) species existence, they have been extremely short lived. Yet, a full understanding of these collapses and the profound implications of such evolutionary brevity for humanity, seems never to have been seriously considered particularly with regard to the current hierarchical mass society amalgamations.

In the 21st century, the idealistic anthem dominating most anthropocentric obsessions always seems to be echoing a theme roughly approximating to; ‘From Here to Eternity’.  Whilst in reality nuclear weapons of mass destruction and their materials are now constantly readied for production, deployment and only a button press away from detonation.  The ability of our elites to utilise science, technology and human labour to ‘Mutually Assure Destruction’, (MAD) of other human communities by Nuclear explosion, or by continued ecological extinctions of key species, epitomises the self-destructive nihilistic intelligence levels of our 21st century leaders. It is this combination of practices and ideas which flow from essentially the same socio-economic processes as have existed throughout recorded history. Although few amalgamations in the 20th and 21st centuries resemble the ancient examples of empires, noted above, (or Elam type socio-economic amalgamations) nevertheless the current alliances of modern states bear all the hallmarks of societies already in various stages of terminal decline.

Failed nation states and rapidly failing nation states are again the norm and not the exception. The fact that modern hierarchical mass societies are based upon the capitalist mode of production, has not insulated them from the processes of disintegration that are built into the historical foundations of all the hiearchical mass society forms of human aggregation. Indeed, the capitalist mode of production having harnessed science and technology to this particular social form and mode of productive living, has accelerated the pace of the empire building phases of their socio-economic cycles and likewise accelerated the pace of their declines. Incessant redundancy epitomises the capitalist mode of production in the commodies produced and in methods of production.  Historically, the values expended in maintaining an empire, or an amalgamation of nations, has always, sooner or later, exceeded the values created by them after these use-values have been  extracted from nature. So it is inevitable that such alliances eventually collapse. In the 21st century, they are now collapsing much sooner, rather than much later than they have ever done before.

In ancient and later times, the full cycle of the expansion, consolidation, decline and fall of empires was a process that had taken many centuries (or generations) or on occasion 1,000 year millennia periods. Thus in the case of Egypt, (approx 20 centuries) Persia, (approx 5 centuries ?) Greek attempts at Empire building came via Alexander, son of his Macedonian father, King Philip (approx 3 centuries), and in the case of Rome (approx 10 centuries). However, the contrast between the life-spans of ancient human empires and the more recent ones couldn’t be starker. The British Empire, arguably the largest ever in terms of the territory and the populations controlled, spans only the two hundred or so years from the 17th to the 19th centuries. However, the longevity of those hierarchical mass society amalgamations based upon the industrialised capitalist mode of production, has been even less. They took less than a century to expand across the globe from Europe, before the First World War (1914-18) witnessed the violent termination of the remaining medieval empires (Russian, Chinese, Ottoman) and the Second World War (1939-45) brought an abrupt end to the Nazi dream of a future, 1,000 year German Reich.

The same two world war conflicts also marked two stages of the terminal decline and fall of the British Empire itself. The maturing hierarchical mass societies of North America (USA), Soviet Union and Communist China, were not able to directly replicate any previous examples of empire building. The USA despite having the most advanced technologies of destruction have been unable to subdue or directly incorporate much weaker hierarchical mass societies than it’s own, into fulfilling it’s own elite determined purposes. Advanced technology military failures in Vietnam, Iraq, Lybia and Afghanistan indicate that the times have changed for all such potential  empire building. Lacking this ability to directly control other populations, for any lengthy period, their amalgamations and agreements with other hierarchical mass societies, (considered as ‘spheres of influence’) were spread across a series of international institutions (UN, NATO, IMF etc.) which were set up for precisely that purpose.

These international politically motivated bureaucratic mechanisms themselves were (and are) a symptom of the relative decline of the global potential for the elite creation of further hierarchical mass society ’empires’. whether designated as ‘capitalist’, ‘fascist’, ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. Revealingly, given the inadequate understanding of the capitalist mode of production in the 20th century, the state-capitalist mode of organising social production was regarded by some on the self-styled revolutionary left as something radically different from, and opposed to, the privatised form of organising capital-intensive social production. Once comprehensively understood, however, the difference in exploitation and extraction between capitalist and state-capitalist social aggregations, was only in marginal characteristics, not in actual content or substance.

Thus, in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, the structure of wage-labour, the subsequent exploitation of labour power, the structural alienation of citizens from their own collectively  created means of production, and the armed enforcement of state-designated socio-economic policies and practices were continued. In fact these ‘essential’ capitalist style structures were intensified in all hierarchical mass societies in the 20th century. Consequently, these post-Second World War hierarchical mass societies were still strong, but not strong enough to impose their absolute will, either upon their enemies or upon the hierarchical mass societies of their allies. Therefore, the most dominant hierarchical mass society immediately after the Second World War was the USA, yet its elites were unable to create an official empire, and were only able to influence the outcome of the votes of the above noted institutions. However, even that form of ‘rules based’ hierarchical domination has been short lived and has only lasted a few decades.

The rival mass society amalgamations initiated by Russia and China (BRICS) and the European countris (EEC) have eroded the military, financial, economic and technological advantages the USA had after the Second World War. The results of all this frenetic production and destruction are that all hierarchical mass societies and their amalgamations are in serious decline, economically, socially, financially and morally. Moreover, their ruling elites do not have the abilty to understand that decline nor have any means to reverse it. The one serious attempt to intellectually understand the implications of the gradually expiring glory and degeneration of previous, supposedly ‘glorious’ empires (or even any more recent ‘inglorious’ ones), was the detailed, six volume study of the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, by Edward Gibbons. Gibbons had noted amongst many other things that within the Roman Empire; an “unhappy condition of men were at the centre of every province and every family, who endured the weight, without sharing the benefits, of society”

He also noted the many complaints and revolts of the labouring classes, particularly those revolts circulating among the slaves. He added that even those who where better off and clearly not enduring the weight of Roman occupation and socio-economic exploitation were nonetheless “fettered by the habits of a just servitude, and were unable to expand themselves”. We could be more specific in our own life times and note that the 21st century middle classes, are disinclined to find serious reasons to end a degenerate system that they still continue to prosper within. Gibbon’s, noted in the first of his six volumes that;

“Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society, are produced by the restraints which the necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are covered by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity.” (Gibbon. ‘Decline and Fall’ etc. Volume 1. Chapter 4 part 1.)

I suggest that within the modern global empire of divided international capitalism, a similar pattern of unequal possessions, civil discord, established laws routinely ignored by ruling elites, including those against genocide and crimes against humanity. Similar symptoms of economic, social and moral decay, that eventually brought down the Roman Empire exist globally in the 21st century. Moreover,  they now also exist in an extended social and increasingly ecological form.  So to paraphrase Gibbon; In the centre of every modern hierarchical mass society region, nation and family there exists an unhappy condition of women, men and youth who endure the weight of the capitalist mode of production, without sharing the benefits of it. Moreover, the morality of the ruling elites has again dipped to new depths under the triple effects of their insatiable greed, the lack of accountability and their authoritarian control of law enforcement, and its turning a blind eye, or their non-enforcement. The most glaring example of the lack guilt or embarrassment over the abandonment (non- enforcement) of their own agreed principles, by the international elites, lies in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

After the vivid 20th century examples of Genocide throughout the world, for elites to not only allow it to happen again in the 21st, but to aid and abet it by providing supportive armament materials, finance, intelligence advice and political rationalizations, reveals how distantly the current social forms of elite humanity have positioned themselves away from a) being at one with members of their own species; and b) from being a protector of the millions of other species which provide the essential air and nutritional food chains for all the species on earth. It is clear that among the modern elite, there is not even the smallest  sense of injustice, not a twinge of guilt or a smattering of embarrassment at the vast disparities of wealth, the failure to live up to their own principles and their inability to speak the truth about the socio-economic system they uphold. In contrast, in the 20th century, a left intellectual named Leon Trotsky, based upon the facts of civil and military wars, prematurely predicted that the capitalist mode of production was experiencing its Death Agony, but as bold as this prediction was, it was a wrong analogy and a mistaken prediction.

Social systems do not have death agonies and modes of production are just socio-economic systems, which secure the biological needs of organic beings, who may or may not exhibit and suffer from death agonies. Social systems, don’t agonise, they decline and are pushed apart, by their own contradictions. Indeed, Trotsky was part of an anthropocentric hierarchical middle-class ideology that temporarily reversed the decline and fall of the capitalist mode of production by taking the means of production (which are the social results of previous working class labour), out of the control of private individuals, by ‘nationalising’ them. This amounted to no more than  placing them into the control of a left party political state elite (Bolsheviki) in Russia, later in the control of the (Communists) in China and Cuba, and the social democrats in Europe.

A more accurate formulation of the socio-economic situation during Trotsky ‘s 20th century lifetime was that the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, had entered a final (finance capitalist) stage in its increasingly rapid decline and fall. Therefore as a means of delivering the socio-biological essential needs of humanity to enable it’s own continued evolution along with the evolution of all other life forms contributing to the biosphere which sustains that evolution, Capitalism and State Capitalism, were by that time both well past their sell-by or use-by dates. If this was the case then, how much more so now, after even more decades of global extraction and global pollution? However, the process of such declines and falls, are also generally protracted affairs in which declines are not always in the form of steep slopes, continually going down.

Residual powers can still be exercised by a system in serious decline but still functioning in some parts whilst obviously dysfunctional in many others. These temporary successes can then mask the real depth and extent of any systems socio-economic fragility. The Roman army was still having victories over what were considered weaker and ‘barbarian’ opponents, even whilst the ’empire’ was well entrenched in its terminal processes of decline. Mohamed Ali, the famous US Boxer, when well past his prime and when considerable brain damage had already been inflicted upon him, nevertheless was able to defeat younger and stronger opponents. He did so famously on one occasion by a tactic of rope-a-doping one of them, until the opponent was sufficiently exhausted (thus defeated) by his own frenetic efforts. But then Ali had independently studied his chosen skill set and career path and was not simply repeating the tactics and strategies of long dead, generations of previous ‘authority‘ figures in his particular field of pugilistic human endeavour.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2025.)