In part 1 of this survey of Marx and the ‘Marxists, I identified the fact that there had been a tendency amongst some ‘Marxists’ in order to try to resurrect Marx’s stature and their own, by looking back to the ideas that had influenced him, notably Hegel and Epicurus. Indeed, I suggest that the main reason for Marx’s decline in general popularity during the mid to late 20th century in Europe and the west, was that the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutionaries of that 20th century period, whilst they were killing each other and killing anyone who questioned their ideas and policies, claimed they were strongly influenced by Marx’s dialectical ideas.

This was an undoubted set back for the ideas that Marx had championed. To have your ideas undermined, by changing reality, or distorted and demonised by your mortal enemies is one thing, and to be expected under the capitalist mode of production, but to be dragged down into the dirt by the actions and words of your own so-called ‘Marxist’ disciples, such as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and their followers is not a little tragic. Apart from a fair-minded few the result, therefore, was that Marx’s own detailed levels of research have been ignored or discarded by at least two generations of workers and intellectuals, not due to his own words and actions, but those of his so-called followers.

Just like their intellectual counterparts in religious ideologies, many of these followers claimed that they were knowledgable disciples of his ideas, when in fact these self-styled ‘Marxists’ more often than not preached dogmatic secular distortions of his works. From my own direct experience, Marx is easier to read and understand than Hegel, but reading Marx is still not always like a stroll through the park on a sunny day, more like a mountain climb – as Marx once noted in a preface to Das Capital. In this regard, it is worth noting that Marx, once emphatically declared that he was not a ‘Marxist’. However, the following quote by Marx’s close friend Engels, sums up the the tendency to partially or completely mis-understand Marx;

“Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado as soon as they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent ‘Marxists’ from this approach, for the most amazing stuff has been produced in that quarter too.” (Engels in; Marx/Engels. Selected Correspondence. Pub. Progress. Page 396 Emphasis added. RR.)

Anyone who has made a serious study of Marx and the works of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao’setung would know exactly what Engels was getting at and who else such criticism could be reasonably levelled at. But to be fair in the modern context, we also need to remember that those researching and writing so confidently (and sometimes extremely dogmatically and arrogantly) in the 19th and 20th centuries were, like Marx, lacking much of the material evidence now available to those of us living in the 21st.

In particular, there was much ignorance of the internal micro-organelle biology of the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cellular structures of life on earth or of the interconnected and interdependent biology of species diversity within the planets ecological systems biosphere. With too little reliable evidence to contradict the then prevalent anthropocentric assumptions about humanity and the rest of life on earth, mistakes were inevitable. Consequently, humanity during that period was viewed as an exclusive, superior, sophisticated, self-sufficient, more intelligent, all-conquering sociological domain than nature.

Nature, on the other hand was unrealistically imagined as a separate, original, crude biological precurser to the higher forms of life represented by the human species. Nature was more often than not simply viewed as being the available raw material to be exploited, controlled and utilised as humans saw fit. This general anthropocentric exceptionalism has meant that from most pro-capitalist and anticapitalist perspectives, there has been an implicit, but wrong assumption, that the essence of what Marx wrote in the 19th century still remains accurate and valid in the 21st.

Therefore, if in the light of modern evidence-based understandings, Marx can be shown to have not fully understood important parts of the subject of his humanist studies after two centuries have elapsed (and there are numerous examples of how Marx mistakenly viewed life on earth, to come), how realistic is it to dig up the works of a long dead Epicurus? When Epicurus was articulating his considered understandings, he did not have the benefit, as we do, of a further 2,000 years of human socio-economic affairs or of scientific endeavour.

Nevertheless, it is important to understand that when Epicurus was alive, hierarchical mass societies in the pre-BCE period, had already consolidated their socio-economic hold among human slave-holding communities, in the near and middle east. Furthermore, from their philosophical and historical discourse, the intellectuals of that pre-Christian period undoubtedly thought that slave labour equipped with metal tools and assisted by the motive power of an ass, a donkey, a Bullock or a Camel were the cutting edge in productive technology, which of course, in a sense, it was.

Therefore when we read that Epicurus and Marx have become resurrected characters in a book bearing the dubious abstract title ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’, I suggest our crap detectors, if they have stayed sharp and not dulled by routine and ‘party’ loyalty, are bound to start flapping or vibrating. For a start Fate is the term for a religiously inspired type of concept and unlike Marx and Epicurus, it is nothing more than a word representing a concept and consequently has neither had a material existence or agency.

Therefore, ‘fate’ could not create or apply ‘bonds’ with or to anything.
Apart from trying to impress others by sounding profound, the terms fate and bonds in the title are just intellectual abstractions and therefore tell us very little about anything. Hierarchical mass societies based economically on mass slavery whose human bodies actually were in real bonds as they worked in or on fields, farms, pastures, forests, woods, quarries, mines, building sites, ships and ‘served’ in domestic homes and palaces, were by that period established enough to build exceptionally large hierarchical mass society conglomerations known as ’empires’.

The only contemporary parallel with the 21st century, is that Epicurus also lived in the aftermath of the ruthless conquest of an extended hierarchical mass society Empire – the Macedonian in that case! So, for those not familiar with the writings, of Epicurus and Marx, it might be useful to start with a brief consideration of Epicurus first, before looking again at Marx’s 19th century assumptions. Epicurus was one of a long list of ancient Greek intellectuals from pre BCE (Before the Common Era) periods who lived during the time of a particular hierarchical mass society Empire building project.

That belligerent project of territorial expansion was led by the son of Philip of Macedon, now often retrospectively known as Alexander the Great. Incidentally, anyone seriously reading about this so-called ‘great’ individual without being previously influenced by two factors, might hold a completely different and even opposed opinion of his greatness. The first factor is the colossal spin put on his exploits by future hero-blinded historians; and the second factor, would be not having their own independent critical faculties dulled to an almost non-existence. Take these two factors away and any unbiased researcher would hardly concur with handing out a posthumous ‘greatness’ label to that Alexander.

That particular Alexander, in my opinion was a narcissistic product of an ancient Greek period of ruling elites, who despite having the now world famous scholar and philosopher Plato, as a tutor, did not prevent his many tactical blunders or his superstitious regard for the gods of the time. Apparently he was so irrational that he frequently sought confirmation that he was decended from the gods! The subsequent death of Alexander, led to a ferocious level of ‘succession’ battles by those amongst his followers who wished to take over and rule parts of this vast empire. These were ferocious battles which destabilised the whole near east region from Persia to Egypt. So much so that a modern historian of that period has noted that;

“The Hellenistic age – commonly dated from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the consolidation of Rome after the battle of Actium in 31 BC – fathered the three great philosophical schools of Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism. These therapeutic philosophies, which took their place alongside the Platonic Academy and the Lyceum of Aristotle, arose in response to a world that had been remade by powerful and largely destructive forces. Alexander ‘the great’ of Macedon had forged a vast Greek-speaking empire that quickly, upon his death, broke into a trio of rival kingdoms centred on Pella in Macedonia, Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria.” (‘Reclaiming Epicurus’. Luke Slattery. Penguins Books)

Leaving aside the above authors poetic nonsense that a linguistic abstraction ‘The Hellenistic age’ lacking a pointed shape cannot penetrate anything and therefore cannot father anything, let alone the “three great philosophical schools” of Epicurism, Stoicism and Scepticism. However, the quote does indicate something important. It indicates that these three philosophical schools of thinking were heavily influenced by the violence, uncertainty and fragility around the class structures ruling and controlling the then existing hierarchical mass society forms. An interesting thing is that the writings of Epicurus contain ideas that clearly indicate that these periods of violence and uncertainty, came very close to his home. For example he is considered to have written the following wise words;

“Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbour’s, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other’s society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.” (Epicurus. Principle Doctrine 40. Emphasis added.RR.)

Obtaining the means of security against your own neighbour’s sounds ominously like very few at the time, could be trusted. Indeed, the historical record of these ancient times indicates that elites were even killing their own mothers, fathers and children in order to climb to the pinnacle of hierarchical mass society power or to retain it.. This whole period introduced among the intellectual classes debates about freedom and necessity. Personal liberties had become so restricted within such hierarchical mass societies because each individual, within each class, became tied both mentally and physically to particular competitive roles, within those socio-economic systems in order to continue to eat, sleep and survive.

Consequently among the intellectual middle-class sectors, the means of obtaining personal security even “from their immediate neighbors”, required a carefully constructed survival strategy’. Material well-being had become dependent upon the exploitation of slave labour and the patronage of precariously placed ruling elites. The problems of social instability were clearly in the front, middle and back of the majority of the intelligentsia’s minds in that extensive period of violent and unpredictable political, military and social turmoil. A turmoil later airbrushed as ‘civilisation’ by subsequent historians – and obviously with good reason.

Elsewhere (in the book ‘Life on Earth, (Past, Present and Future’) I have illustrated at length the violence and inhumanity of those turbulent times, but the predictable and unpredictable turmoil was also obvious by the mode of living Epicurus and his followers espoused during their own lifetimes. This was to create within this philosophical tendency, a deliberate delcision to retreat to live in a Gated Garden, horticultural, communities with only trusted friends having access to them. Such an out of sight, out of mind solution to living in turbulent and violent hierarchical mass society formative and consolidation periods, I suggest, hardly needs a recommendation from an ancient Greek intellectual.

Many modern humans have reached similar conclusions from their own intelligence and parts of accumulated social wisdom. Some are digging out or renovating underground bunkers stashing them with long term provisions. In addition, apart from local ‘diggers and dreamers’ communes or local intentional housing communities, there are also the efforts of the Zapatista’s, the Kurdish Rojova communities and the numerous indigenous peoples groups, and local cooperatives across the world. These too are creating alternative ways of ecological and non-hierarchical forms of communal living amid the 21st century turmoil and violence on planet earth.

I should add here that I am not against studying and researching ancient history or modern history. I do so myself, out of interest and curiosity, but I merely question the purpose of doing so in the current 21st century context of multiple crises, completely unknown to previous generations and whose lives and ideas are interesting and informative but offer no real insights into the problems facing humanity in the 21st century. The current tranche of unprecedented multiple crises by pollution, warfare, genocide, severe climate disruption, increasing ecological destruction, frequent viral epidemics, large-scale poverty, homelessness and the obscene spectacle of billion and trillionaire individuals using wealth, power and blackmail to influence and even dominate social and biological systems, has no parallel in ancient or 19th century history.

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2026)

Marx and the Marxists on Life on Earth’ Part 3 will consider in more detail the thoughts and assertions of Marx and Engels in their own words.