Reality

Of course the effects of the previously noted excess extractions from natural resources (Parts 1 & 2) also extends to imbalances in the planets biosphere such as pollution, climate changes, insect pollination levels, rain patterns, sea level rises, reduced glacial reflections creating temperature rises, all of which have predictable and unpredictable effects detrimental to life on earth in some of its forms. Even if some of the evidence has been exaggerated or deliberately minimised, there are enough reliable sources to suggest some serious changes are already taking place and that more are yet to come. The reality of life on earth in the 21st century, is that the hierarchical mass society system can no longer be biologically or sociologically sustained on its previous basis of unlimited extraction, unlimited production, unlimited consumption, unlimited pollution and elite governance. The biological system’s processes of life on earth (N-M-G-R + A – D) are breaking down in a number of essential and non-essential organic and inorganic categories.

The huge forests and plains grasses on land and the sea based plant and algae species are all severely degraded either by pollution, acidification, physical clearances, monocultural planting, culling, or over-consumption. The loss of plant life and land-based soil micro-organisms, pollinating insects and their sea based equivalents, are undermining not only the nitrogen/carbonic acid exchanges which are essential to replenish the level of oxygenated air, stable weather patterns and for the pollination of plant nutrition. All of which of course forms the basis of the land-based food chains which nourish all forms of land based life on earth. A similar but more hidden process of degradation is taking place within the sea-based sections of the biological species spectrum, which also forms a substantial part of the nutritional consumption which is essential for the metabolic processes of human and animal species.

Ideology.
Yet the anthropocentric ideological fixation of the human species elites in general and the relative ignorance of their own biological essence in particular has resulted in a form of self-inflicted intellectual brain fog. After many generations, most human brains can no longer adequately process their biological reality because they have been too busy processing their sociologically derived reality of self-importance and their ersatz commodity based form of wealth. The hierarchical mass society social system has become so collectively entrenched in it’s own self-consciousness and self-importance that for upteen centuries the biology of life has been abstractly designated as ‘nature’ and nature itself has been reduced in human consciousness to the equivalent of pleasant (or untidy) side-show gardens or wild-life reservations to occasionally visit. For most economic, financial and political elites, nature is something to plunder from or on a small scale, to relaxingly tinker with or get the gardener to do that, after the main business of making money.

Even the most dedicated mainstream ‘nature’ enthusiast and commentator often views the biology of life as seperate, ‘special’, inter-spersed areas of outstanding beauty for visiting or ‘protected islands’ of diversity for medical study and extracting new drugs. In general consciousness, Nature is not something humans have to absolutely depend upon and have become a destructive part of it. The reality of the biology of Nature – as the source of everything living and non-living – has been imaginatively reduced by human intellectual ideology to area’s of curiosity located between the percieved more important sociologically created city buildings, metropolitan infrastructures and concrete highways. The biosphere, that was established by the long evolution of life on earth and which has supported a unique range of complimentary and integrated life forms, including the eventual evolution of the human species, has become a variously neglected secondary (or lower) feature in the political and socio-economic life of the species once candidly and biologically classified as the naked ape.

Life on earth via the lens of anthropocentric thinking, has like camera lenses, inverted the image of reality, until the social system of humanity looms larger and ranks much higher than the biological system which gave rise to all species. Anthropocentric ideologies are so biased in their own favour, that very little of serious intent to radically change humanities relationship to its biological origins has been thought about and even less been actioned. Ignorance or denial of any serious problems for life on earth caused by hierarchical mass societies and their historical elites has become the default position of most of the modern capitalist and pro-capitalist elites. The majority of the more liberal political parties and movements of all left, right and centre positions at their very best have adopted only slight and marginal nature friendly reforms to the socio-economic system. Reformists, as the term implies, only want to remove the worst symptoms – once they have been identified – not the causes in the hope that these will prevent even worst symptoms from emerging.

Basically, ‘green’ reformists just want humanity to keep the local ‘nature’ garden tidy and the global kitchen garden plentifully stocked, but that’s the extent of it. In anthropocentric ideologies of all types, religious or secular, the essence and purpose of humanity has become merely to accumulate public or private wealth and consume as many resources as is ecologically possible. No other more worthy ambition disturbs the consciousness of those thoroughly socialised and emotionally adapted to the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. Coming from a life-long working class, revolutionary-humanist tradition I have come to the conclusion that one of the best litmus type tests to illustrate the general reluctance to radically alter how we live is to consider the views of the most radical critics of the current system. Faced with the accumulated evidence of several decades, that our own socio-economic activities have introduced a progressive deterioration in the levels of organic life on earth and inorganic changes in climate, weather patterns, it is worth considering the current attitude of the most radical left fringes of the few remaining anti-capitalists.

Anti-capitalist ideologies. (a)
Just recently in a number of articles on this blog I have highlighted, without embarrassingly naming the authors, some of the feeble and limited understandings and responses from such anti-capitalist intellectual sources that I have come across recently. I suggest that even if the future reality of life on earth only turns out half as bad as some of the more evidence based predictions have asserted then there is trouble now and even more trouble ahead. After reading the following most radical 21st century expressions of anti-capitalists thinking I suggest the reader asks his or her self, the following question: ‘Apart from yourself and a few others who else is going to begin to seriously change how we treat each other and the rest of the planets life forms’ before it really is too late to save many of them. Here are some more recently published ones.

“It is Capitalisms … economic “blindness” that drives this ecological depletion. The crisis stems from a structural mismatch between wealth and value”

The first extract again demonstrates the conceptual confusion among much of the left including the anti-capitalist left. The abstract economic term ‘capitalism’ which represents nothing with an actual material identity, has been given a biological characteristic of ‘blindness’ which can only be applied to a living biological entity equipped with eyes. Does the author know what he is actually writing or just feeling off abstractions? Capitalism cannot possibly be blind either economically or literally. Wealth and value are not structures, they are also linguistic abstractions and therefore cannot have a structural relationship (another abstraction) with each other whether mis-matched or perfectly matched. I suggest we must assume that the author is genuinely concerned with ecological ‘crisis’ and wishes to inform readers of how to understand and counter it, but it appears that he or she does not yet even understand the content of the crisis or the difference between abstract ideologically produced jargon and the unfolding ecological reality. Here is another example;

“The first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary adminstration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system.”

This recent extract is itself an extract from a late 19th or early 20th century general tradition, in which an unmentioned form of ‘social ‘revolution’ would take place and a ‘revolutionary administration’ would take over the functions of the state. The state personnel’s aims would be “to prepare and further – in all available ways – human life” for a new mass socio-economic system. Basically this 19th century anthropocentric revolutionary tradition was followed by the communist leaders of the revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba. These particular revolutionary administrations included, Socialist and Communist Party members as well as non-party experts, who also had access to the previous stores of wealth and power. It was a top-down hierarchical mass society system in which the hierarchy was no longer drawn from aristocrats as in Feudalism, or from the bourgeois capitalists and petite-bourgeois pro-capitalists, as in capitalism. The workers would continue to work for the state which would function as the board of directors of a state-capitalist nation! And at rates and conditions set by the revolutionary administrative elites.

Albeit with subtle variations, the Bolshevik, Maoist and Castroist revolutionaries of the 20th century also followed that particular revolutionary administrative model with ruthless determination and with results that were far from satisfactory for the majority of their working classes and peasants. Incidently, variations of this administrative model were also adopted by the post-Second World War reformist governments in Europe and North America. One of the most refined and comprehensive versions of this socialist administrative, socio-political model took place in the UK whose post-war Labour government brushed aside bourgeois objections and Nationalised all major industries and social institutions, such as coal, railways, telephones, water, electrical and gas power distribution, health services, education (Primary, Secondary and Higher) and even road transport. But of course it turned out that what was accepted by a governments of reform can be reversed by governments of reaction and that reversal was done during the counter-reform era of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. Here’s yet another!

“Day two of the “revolution” will not see ecological equilibrium restored. But it will open up a space where workers, scientists and activists can find a way forward – at the same time as having access to the wealth and power they need to deal with immediate issues.”

Here we have another left version of a revolutionary administrative strategy in which on day two the administrators will be comprised of workers, scientists and activists, who will find a way forward using their access to wealth and power to deal with immediate issues. There will be a state apparatus, because although unspecified it is implicitly referenced with regard to the power and wealth needed by the selected workers, scientists and activists, to find a way forward and deal with ‘immediate issues’. Moreover, on the way forward to that idealised projection we are informed that;

“….this, requires taking control of the values and “expropriating” the factories.”

Since ‘values’ are not physical objects, just how it is possible to take control of ‘values’ (another abstraction) is not made clear by the author, perhaps because it is impossible from any practical point of view and values and control of them, are just words and ideas floating around in the authors ideological framework of thinking. However, expropriating the factories does introduce the reality of physical buildings and the take over of them by the workers, scientists and activists, in order to find a way forward. However, the author seems unconcerned to explain the direction toward which the factory-based workers, scientists and activists are supposedly finding a way forward for the rest of us to follow.

Yet it would seem from the above author’s remarks that after the revolution, in this view there will still remain social structures of wealth, power, elite workers, scientists and activists and an industrial economy of some kind. In other words all the socially constructed class structures that have contributed to the estrangements, alienations and dehumanisations within the human species, wiĺl remain along with the ecological destructions and climate disturbances. It would seem here again that those who aspire to be revolutionary cannot imagine humanity being free of the hierarchical mass society social form or escape from its ideological expression in anthropocentric thinking.

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2026)

For those who are interested in the evolution of ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, I have written a book bearing that title which contains a more detailed consideration of the historic tension between the biological essence of life on earth and the social essence of the human species. The book can be obtained in Ebook or Paperback form from Amazon, Browns Books, Waterstones, Strand Books and Google.

Two recent reviews.
“Discover the history of life on our beautiful planet with Life On Earth (Past, Present & Future!) by Roy Ratcliffe. A book that will keep you hooked till the very end.”

“Humanity now dominates a planet that once teemed with life’s myriad forms — yet this domination has come at an unbearable cost. ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, strips away comforting myths and exposes the brutal truth: our species has polluted skies and seas, decimated countless others, entrenched inequality, and disrupted the very processes that sustain life itself. More than a history, this is a radical critique of anthropocentric arrogance and ecological devastation. It demands we rethink our place in nature, confront the deep roots of the crisis, and envision a future grounded in ecological humility and justice.” (Countercurrents.org)