During the last few weeks there have been two notable events in the UK which have relevance to the contemporary global political and climate/ecological situation. The first was an invitation only conference in London on the 27th November 2025 addressed by ten UK climate and nature specialists entitled ‘A National Emergency Briefing’; the second was a conference held in Liverpool on December 5th to form a new political Party in the UK, designated as ‘Your Party’. Unsurprisingly, both events were typically anthropocentrically focussed, in that the main concern of both sets of organisers, and presumably both sets of attendees, was the continued survival of the current hierarchically mass society social systems.

The two events differed only in their preferred political routes to achieve their general mass society aims. Faced with multiple aspects of social, ecological, economic and climate driven tipping points and consequent existential crises, astute political actors almost everywhere are positioning themselves according to the level of their understanding concerning the climate or ecological aspects of the crisis. In the case of these two particular examples they are adjusting their tactics and perspectives as best they see them, but both are doing so within the same anthropocentric paradigm of hierarchical mass society structures and the same political tendencies which created the crises in the first place.

The UK National Briefing: meeting was an attempt, in the wake of yet another failed (COP 30) United Nations Conference, to address the seriousness of the impending climate crises, and at the same time to stimulate the existing UK political class to take the latest scientific evidence presented by the ‘experts’ as a real National Emergency, needing urgent action. The UN annual COP 30, conference again heavily influenced by the 1600 fossil-fuel funded activist attendees, had typically managed to produce lots of hot air but crucially had redacted any mention of the role of fossil fuels in climate destabilisation, within COP 30 documents. In contrast, the National Emergency Briefing presented ten inputs each delivering robust scientific evidence and considered opinion, which implicitly condemned the current mode of production, and political processes. However, they did so without anyone mentioning that the current mode of production was based upon the domination of it by the owners and controllers of capital. It seems, eliminatng from discussion ‘sensitive‘ or ‘touchy‘ topics isn’t restricted to the fossil fuel investors.

The ‘business as usual’ tradition of fossil fuel energy powered extraction, production and consumption was of course identified as the problem by a number of speakers, but again without acknowledging its domination by the owners of industrial and finance capital. Yet to their credit the ten ‘experts’ bluntly pointed out the hard facts of life facing most of humanity, in the UK and elsewhere, particularly those among the low-paid and precariously funded citizens, if drastic action was not urgently taken.
Speaker after speaker supported by tangible and reliable evidence stressed that any further procrastination and avoidance of decisive Emergency action, to seriously cut emissions would be tantamount to condemning present and future generations to hardships and deaths on a scale currently unimaginable. The experience of previous generations over the last several thousand years of Near Eastern and European history had nothing comparable to what is to befall planet earth if emergency measures where not implemented immediately. I found the evidence and projected outcomes presented by the ten inputs valid and convincing, but their social and political strategy for promoting solutions and citizen participation in implementing such radical solutions was not at all convincing.

This is because it was based entirely upon the same hierarchical economic, financial, social and political structures that have created the existing capitalist mode of production and have simultaneously been consistently used by its elites to prevent any previous solutions from being implemented. There is a video of this particular event on Youtube (www.youtube.com/live/2-PFKT15Ne4) which I suggest is important for supporters or sceptics to listen to and is therefore well worth viewing. Having said that I still consider this hard hitting briefing will not be enough to energise the existing political, social, cultural, military, bureaucratic and educational elites to depart from their decades of acceptance of business, class, salary and investment differentials as per usual.

In contrast, the ‘alternative’ Liverpool event did not entirely focus on climate and ecology as the motivation there was to create an alternative political party to the existing mainstream bourgeois and petite-bourgeois focussed political parties. The lack of commitment to the low-paid, precarious masses along with the lack of accountability within all bourgeous forms of political parties, was the main reason for the participants wishing to create an alternative. Therefore although both events had distinctive motives and different political agendas they both concurred that politics was the only form of human activity which could deliver the solutions to solve and prevent humanities current multiple concurrent crises, from bearing down upon us all.

Despite the recurrent complaint by many of its participants that; “people are sick of normal politics” that is exactly what has happened according to a recent media report on the progress of the UK initiative to form a new political party describing itself as YOUR PARTY. The report describes that participants at, and even before, the founding conference of the ‘new party’ have been engaged in political manoeuvring and membership manipulations (and expulsions) that have been typical of all political movements that have occurred throughout the long history of politics and which still clearly exist in the 21st century.

The historical record illustrates that from the earliest versions of hierarchical mass societies in and around the pre-BCE ancient Greek ‘polis’, political intrigue and sectarian manoeuvring has been part of its socio-political DNA. Whilst it is true that politically based domination over hierarchical mass societies replaced the earlier ancient Kingly and Despotic family intrigues and cut-throat manoeuvres of the ruling dynasties dominating those ancient and medieval societies, not everything was abandoned. Formal politics did not entirely abandon the non-lethal wheeling, dealing and skulduggery at the time and of all ruling elites before and ever since.

The modern 21st century enthusiasts of political solutions to social, economic, financial, environmental and ecological problems currently facing life on earth (in all its forms including humanity) still seem to think some form of politics within hierarchical mass society systems is the only (or perhaps the best) way to solve the problems facing humanity. This is so even though these problems have actually been created by existing hierarchical mass society systems and their political representatives. Yet, once examined, politics, ancient and modern, is still fundamentally a system of organisational hierarchy within hierarchical mass societies which while it pretends to be representing the interests of everybody within society, it never has and never will.

The reason is that political systems are designed to only represents the interests of those with most power, wealth and influence within hierarchical social systems and politics has reliably done this since its inception in the ancient Greek ‘polis’. The almost universal dissatisfaction with politics by most citizens of the various Nation States, spread across the globe is a collective expression (often vaguely formulated) of that fundamental inate characteristic. The fundamental nature of the problem with politics becomes glaringly apparent by the fact that such dissatisfaction is not limited to the politics and political parties headed by any particular political tendency. Dissatisfaction with politics, is directed against all forms of politics, whether from left, right, centre or religious leaning or military or semi- military governing tendencies and their leaders.

A serious study of history indicates that politics and the hierarchical mass society system has long been a problem for humanity, not a solution or means to solving its problems. The problem became so obvious that radicals within previous 18th and 19th century generations concluded that aristocratic and bourgeois political elite leaders and movements, were the fundamental problem for hierarchical mass society nation-state formations, as a whole. Therefore, their proposed solution was to form political parties and movements made up of ‘genuine’ (?) representatives of the oppressed groups and those classes drawn from among the masses. Consequently the active results of such ‘radical’ thinking in the early 20th century was the formation of revolutionary parties and movements allegedly based upon the needs of the industrial and rural working classes (the proletariat and peasantry) a typical rallying rhetoric being ‘workers of the world unite’.

In Russia, the revolutionary wing of the Social Democratic Party known as the Bolshevik Tendency, during a revolutionary upsurge of worker and peasant led uprisings, motivated during the 1st World War and commencing in 1917, took over the Russian State institutions, declared itself the Communist Party, staffed the highest State institutions with its own dedicated senior members and implemented a set of plans and measures aimed at overcoming the previous dissatisfaction of the Russian industrial and agricultural workers, by replacing feudal aristocrats by revolutionary minded politicians, such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin at the top and placing their ‘loyal’ party followers lower down the state apparatus.

The predictable result (mostly predicted by the anarchist trend) was just another hierarchical mass society with a different set of ruling elites, a different set of administrative elites and the same masses of industrial and agricultural workers being brutally exploited and oppressed. I have analysed this process in detail and at length in the document ‘Revolutionary-Humanism and The Anticapitalist Struggle’ (available as a free downloads in the above banner section of this blog.) The next similar ‘revolutionary’ event occurred In China, at a somewhat later date. There too a revolutionary movement led by a Chinese intellectual known as Mao’setung, led an insurgency against those previously in power and the successful insurgents in Mao’s group eventually declared themselves The Communist Party of China, and took over and staffed the old and new state institutions and began to carefully and often ruthlessly organise the functioning of their own version of a politically dominated hierarchical mass society designated as ‘communism’..

Whatever, the relatively short term  merits and long term demerits of these two Political Party led revolutions, (and there are many) need not divert us from the current assessment of politically led solutions to humanities problems, because the vast majority of the citizens living within both these anti-establishment led political ‘revolutions’ were (and still are) the oppressed and exploited masses who then continued to implement the policies of a newly privileged political elite and to serve their new elite needs and aspirations instead of the previous feudal aristocratic elites.

Furthermore, in both cases, (and other similar less massive ones) the over extraction, over production, over consumption and over pollution of these politically led hierarchical systems continued – why? Precisely because the mass of newly appointed unproductive rulers, administrative bureaucrats, and armed forces personnel required to control the extreme social contradictions of those hierarchical mass societies, had to be provided with food, housing, clothing, education, training and equipment. All of which had to be extracted from the dwindling natural organic and inorganic resources available within their particular national territory – at least until they could conquer more – which they did.

This is why the multiple crises caused by the entire history of fundamentally unsustainable hierarchical mass society social systems, can never be rectified by continuing with fundamentally unsustainable hierarchical social systems. Once human social systems and natures biological systems are adequately understood something becomes obvious. Humanity needs to remove the entire hierarchical class based social systems along with the political systems which enables the control of them by a minority. At the same time humanity needs to collectively agree to reduce the level of natural extraction for it’s own species, to below the level of the reproduction rate of humanities essential organic and inorganic requirements. However, no elites (not even liberal minded ones) are going to voluntarily agree to such a revolutionary Gaia-centric transformation. And in any case revolutionary changes to basic socio-economic systems are never top down elite led mass initiatives. They never have been.

Such changes are always local, small scale initiatives which by success, and example are copied and replicated by other small local initiatives. The first herders, were small scale local collective shepherds, before that caught on. The first horticulturalist were small scale local allotment type collective planters, before that caught on. The first farmers, using sticks to make furrows by hand, were small scale local collective horticultural initiatives before that caught on. The first merchant capitalists were local merchant sailors on small-boat trading journeys, trading surplus production, before that caught on. The first Finance capitalist bankers were small local goldsmiths, holding local deposits, before that caught on and became wholesale fraud and international based capital exploitation. The romantic fantasy of some revolutionaries who imagine themselves leading the masses in a heroic revolutionary upsurge to introduce a ‘green’ top-down ‘ten days that shakes the world’, has no basis in historical or evolutionary reality; nor in logic – once logic is deprived of its creative virtual world of imagination.

So the future of humanity as a species – sooner or later – lies in starting again with small and moderate sized groups of individuals living in classless egalitarian small-scale communities living frugally and sharing biosphere resources equitably and sustainably, whilst nurturing the rest of natures species, rather than destroying or damaging them. This form of living has already been successfuly trialled in many parts of the world and whilst these ‘intentional’  communities are viewed by our hierarchical mass society elites as being made up of idealists or deviants, that is only because the elites are blinded by their own socialised self-important image. Nevertheless, from a biological understanding of life on earth as a whole, it turns out the actual idealists are the ones who think humanity can go one indefinitely polluting and extracting from nature, at a massive level and volume, that nature is already demonstrating clearly that it can no longer sustain, without terminal extinction problems.

The real fantasists and idealists among the climate and ecology  deniers, then think that when nature can no longer sustain humanity – in its present hierarchical mass society form – the privileged ones remaining alive can just rocket off to another planet and re-create in a short time a viable supportive biosphere which took billions of years to form on planet earth. Which is, of course, just extreme fantasy nonsense. Whether such above noted small and moderate sized community initiatives are to  continue to be developed sooner (preferably) or later (predictably) after one or more serious existential collapses of the hierarchical mass society mode of production and those dependent upon them, is uncertain. However, one thing is certain. It is that small scale, classless, egalitarian forms are the only preferable ones that life on earth – as a whole – can maintain, whilst the human species continues to exist and evolve within planet earth’s limited biosphere.

Roy Ratcliffe (December 2025)