Dementia.

The recent meeting of world ‘leaders’ at Davos was a spectacle indeed, with most eyes on President Trumps meandering gait up a lonely, unacompanied carpet walk outside the venue on arrival and of course his rambling speeches once inside. The international press had another field day with comments pointing out the deteriorating mental and physical condition of the president of the USA. However, they were sparing on the pathetic fact that one of the most wealthy and powerful national elites in the world, in the USA, can only put forward as their current representative another sad version of the previous geriatric president who could also not walk straight or remember how to finish his sentences coherently. The two recent partial-dementia political examples of Biden and Trump are certainly not the personifications of a stable capitalist Empire or one in ascendency. But the real crisis at Davos is not about Trump or any other political figurhead that is manipulated into supreme positions of governing power. These despicable, incompetent and pathetic figureheads are in fact just one more visible symptom of the decline of the hierarchical mass society system and it’s current capitalist mode of production’s continuing multiple crises.

Decline.

A ruling elite which cannot, or will not, devote enough effort within their ranks to produce an adequate, or better than adequate, group of political puppets to represent them at the most senior levels, cannot be expected to make enough effort to do many other vitally essential things. For example a serious symptom of – any hierarchical mass society system in decline – is when the elite cannot, or will not, ensure that the bulk of their citizens – who actually keep the entire system functioning on a day to day basis – are adequately fed, housed and their health and fitness fully protected. Hence, the decline and eventual fall of the ancient hierarchical mass societies of Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome.

In addition the elite in a hierarchical mass society system in the 21st century that cannot, or will not, make efforts to maintain a healthy global biosphere which supports their own and their systems entire existence, is definitely a system in terminal decline. The current empire of the global capitalist mode of production is dominated by three large hierarchical power blocs (USA, RUSSIA and CHINA) and all three have elites and leaderships in control which are ignoring the condition of their workforces, ignoring the overall condition of their respective home territories and ignoring their economic production’s impact upon the essential health of the global biosphere.

Deterioration.

None of these three elites, or their analogues in the so-called ‘middle-powers’ are making serious attempts to prevent further deterioration of the global environment in terms of preventing further deforestations, preventing further massive sea, air and soil pollutions – all of which provide the bio-chemical basis for the earth’s biological cycles of re-oxygenated air and the biological foundations of all animal and human food chains. Indeed, they are all actively making things worse by increasing extraction, production and consumption in every conceivable military and commercial way.

This lack of positive environmental stewardship is no accident. These elites cannot adequately address the fundamental existential symptoms now threatening life on earth, because they and their supporters are focussed on maintaining the existing privileges of their elite designed system. The rich can only stay rich and can only get richer my maintaining the present mode of production based upon extracting from nature more than nature can continue to provide and pocketing the surplus financial value from that extraction, production and consumption process, for themselves.

The elites within the three big-power aggregations know the rough basics of the multiple crises which are now maturing yearly, even if they are not aware of the more detailed elements of them. Therefore, they are planning and manoeuvring to make sure that as the multiple crises deepen – and they certainly will – their particular share of the rapidly reducing global resources comes to them before a share of it goes to all the middle power countries. Hence the big three are signaling to each other openly and covertly that they are ok with the previous so-called rules based order established after the Second World War, being ignored or torn up, in favour of carving the globe up into three main spheres of economic and military control or ‘influence’ as they prefer to call it.

Every one who has bothered to follow their global machinations, understands that United Nations was always a pretend attempt at limiting big power domination. At least now the pretence, which fooled many, is being openly abandoned. The entire record of the UN indicates that it was never seriously meant to do anything to inhibit big power policies and their acquisitions and it never has. Resolutions unhelpful to the big capitalist players have been vetoed or ignored by the inner-power group. Therefore Trumps board of peace initiative is a tentative attempt to establish a similar big power national realignment, but without needing to fund it, and without the annoyance of other lesser nations presenting resolutions, for lengthy discussion and deliberation. Trumps, cynically named ‘board of peace’ will start with a like minded, invited cronies group, tasked initially to profitably carve Gaza up, between themselves and their close supporters.

If that is successful, the next phase of the ‘board of peace’ will be moving on to become a more naked, privatised, big power carve up replacement for the United Nations. Then any negotiating to obtain bases for big power armed forces in and out of anywhere they choose to send or withdraw them, will be up to the cronies staffing the board of peace. The entire history of the imperialist stage of hierarchical mass societies, from ancient Greece and Rome, to modern European states, (Spain, France, Portugal, Germany and Britain) suggests that once welcomed or unwelcomed armed resource-hungry guests are allowed to move in, getting them to leave becomes practically impossible. In addition an eventual Trump initiated ‘board of peace’ with armed back up sounds very much like a global mafioso protection racket for people who didn’t need protection in the first place until the trumpist mafioso decided they needed ‘protection’ primarily from themselves.

Denial.

The false contrast Mark Carney made at Davos between Authoritarian big power nations and middle power Democratic nations when he implied that the latter are supportive of the poor and precarious, was a form of hard-faced denial. All Carney’ s middle power nations are authoritarian exploiters of the people and the resources of our planet. Just look at how most of them, including Canada’s elites either stood by and watched, or lent a hand to Israel in carrying out the most barefaced and heartless genocide of the Palestinian people in recent years. And note how his elites, the USA elites and those in middle-power Europe, also victimised and penalised any of their citizens who campaigned against Israeli crimes against humanity.

All the hierarchical mass society elites are following the same basic elite economic and political tactical game plan, whatever their relative military, financial or economic strengths may be. They are all in denial of class system reality; they are all in relative or absolute states of denial of their own economic and social decline and all are engaged in open and hidden upper class wars against their own relatively powerless citizens. Not forgetting that also, with exception of their own domestic arrangements, they are all also in denial that they are at war against their own territories natural environments and engaged in an economic war of extraction against the global biosphere which is the essential foundation of all biological and social systems.

In the 21st century, the ordinary working citizens of the world are the ones who will be forced by their elites to bear the brunt of the ongoing climate, social, economic, financial and ecological crises which will peak in the coming decades. Their resistance is inevitable, the only problem will be what kind of resistance. The traditional reformist resistance which seeks by mass actions to improve the present hierarchical mass society form by reforming away its worst features, will not solve any of the five symptoms noted in this paragraph. Nor will the form of 20th century resistance which sought to simply replace the bourgeous conservative elites with petite bourgeois socialist elites as in the Soviet Union and Communist China.

These latter were not ‘revolutions’ but ‘reforms’ of the hierarchical mass society structure. They were simply State-run Capitalist societies, in which non-elite citizens remained wage-slaves, were exploited by a ‘new class’ of elites governing essentially the same hierarchical mass extraction, production, consumption and pollution creating society structures as previously. The only realistic way forward for working people now is to not to help save the hierarchical mass society system – in any form – but to organise to help save the biosphere of planet earth, by creating small scale, local, low-consuming communities, living modestly and putting ecological sustainability above technical ability. For it is the latter, urged on by elites, which for a century or so, has been driving excessive-extraction, excessive-production, excessive-consumption and excessive-pollution, ever closer to the point of ecological and climate collapse.

Roy Ratcliffe (January 2026)

(See also my book;’ Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future) for further information on the social and economic history of hierarchical mass societies and their impact upon the planet.)