TOWARD A NEW RENAISSANCE?
In a previous article entitled ‘Reality versus Ideology’ (Part 4), I suggested that Marxism was a failed 20th century Renaissance of anthropocentric thinking; that Marx and his ‘Marxist’ followers, had failed to go beyond the dominant anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. I had also insufficiently situated this suggestion within the wider context of what has become known as the Western European concept of Renaissance. This was a shift in thinking and doing which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages. More specifically from around the 14th century and continued for another three centuries until the 17th century, with its effects lasting well beyond the 17th century. This particular shift in thinking came after a period in Western Europe in which hierarchical mass societies had long been dominated by clerical elites who were allied with and often official members of the Roman Catholic version of monotheism.

The conquest and expansion of the countries and regions of the Middle and Near East and Europe by the Roman Empire, had all but eliminated the previous influence of the original hierarchical mass societies of that entire region. Among the relative few of the elites who could read and write, the knowledge of Greek, Persian and Egyptian intellectual traditions (philosophy, literature, art, architecture, history and democratic politics) had been largely swept aside by the rise of the Roman Empire and the imposition of its culture. This particular renaissance comprised of the active pursuit of all this ‘lost’ or ‘neglected’ information and knowledge assumptions developed before the common era (BCE). That Renaissance is considered to have begun in the Republic of Florence in Italy, at the end of late middle ages, and took the form of an intellectual movement of rediscovery and revival of what became known as the acheivements of classical antiquity.

It was primarily an intellectual movement whose effects were felt for far longer than 15th and 16th centuries, and was characterized by the European rediscovery and revival of the literary, philosophical, and artistic achievements accruing during the esrlier period of classical antiquity. This renaissance period was also associated with great changes in art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and technology. Although this Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. The importance of this Renaissance, from a modern revolutionary-humanist perspective is that it marked the beginning of a distinct break between religiously imposed ideologies and a move to secular based understandings of life on earth. The core of this shift in understanding is perhaps best intellectually understood as an amalgamation of the Roman concept of ‘humanitas’ and the rediscovery of the classical Greek philosopher Protagorus (490 BCE to 420 BCE), who had proposed that it was not the gods, who were the measure of all things, but had asserted that; “man is the measure of all things”.

In other words the idea that contemporary ‘humanity’ was the important ‘influencers’ and the ‘central’ actors of life on earth, was competing with religious ideology, which considered it was god. We can imply from this evidence that during the time of Protagorus, Greek Intellectual development was already firmly lodged in the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. This literary evidence suggests that elite, self-gratification and self-congratulatory narcissism was circulating on a continuous, self-sustaining, feedback loop. Although much in nature had been studied during the classical Greek period, the full complexity and sophisticated species integration over billions of years of bio-chemical and biological developments had not registered in even a modest inkling way among the most profound thinkers. This abscence occurred not because Greek intellectuals were not highly intelligent, but because they and their social system lacked the accumulated evidence, along with appropriate tools and instruments to view life on earth beyond the external surface impressions.

Knowledge and understanding in any epoch is not only or simply a product of individualised talent and persistence, but a product of combined social and technological development across many disciplines. Such developments were accompanying the progress of the capitalist mode of production, which began in merchant capitalist forms, around the sea bound trade of Fuedal agricultural hierarchical mass societies. (The ancient maritime trade around the Mediterranean Sea had been significantly expanded beyond the straits of Gibraltar and countries were by then exporting surplus products across multiple tracts of water to numerous destinations.) This ‘expansion’ of trade required and produced an associated expansion of thinking and contemplation. Although, unintended this practical economic inter-change dragged along with it numerous unintended consequences and one of them was the fact that this renaissance had moved the focus of knowledge and understanding from the imaginary mystical and invisible ‘spiritual’ realm controlled by priestly access, toward the realm of the actual and daily visible, controlled by the rising merchant elites.

This alternative elite perspective represented a considerable advance in critical thinking. I should of course make clear that I am using the term Renaissance in the sense of representing a significant paradigm shift in the dominant orientation (or assumed intellectual axis) around which the intellectual understanding of ‘life on earth’ pivots or orbits. For significant sectors of the populations, that pivot had ceased to be solely God and God’s will, but trade (with Gods blessing) and trade whether blessed or not was gradually winning. Real conversations about communities trade relationships were regularly occuring at least six days a week, whilst imaginary conversations about communities relationships with someone invisible continued to relegated to a Saturday or Sunday Sabbath.

Even with fear and subservience imposed by the governing elite side, at a ratio of six to one, the odds were not in god’s or his self-appointed bishopric intermediaries, favour. Moreover, after the European Renaissance, knowledge and understanding could in future be increasingly based upon the reality of life on earth. By means of careful analysis, detailed evidence gathering and experimental confirmation, rather than relying on naive beliefs borrowed wholesale from ancient, supposedly-non-human ‘sacred’ scrolls or books, reality could be pursued with reasonably accurate understandings, if not the fraudulent absolute truths presented at Saturday or Sunday sermons,by men in fancy robes and gilded replicas of shepherds staffs.

The Renaissance’s intellectual basis was founded intellectually on a version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who had written that “man is the measure of all things”. It is important to note that Protagorus was a pre-Socratic intellectual thinker within Greece, which as far as we know, also predates the full development of the Abrahamic monotheisms which matured within the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. At that stage in the historical development of the hierarchical mass society aggregation of humanity, man in the abstract was already being elevated into the pre-eminent aspect of life on earth and the imaginary top-god (Zeus) was in the process of, or had already been, divorced from his goddess partner (Athena) and family of gods and goddesses; had been removed from his residence on mount Olympus and allegedly had been given a refuge somewhere way up high beyond the clouds. So it turns out that the early pre-socratic belief in the unique central placement of human beings which was culturally set within the pre-monotheistic religious universal spiritual order headed by Zeus and the anthromophrphic family of gods and goddesses, had only been a temporary unsatisfactory myth and needed it’s own socio-evolutionary updating.

It was only later, after the establishment of the Abrahamic trio of monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), that this was also found unsatisfactory and that the consequent human grandeur and dignity of the ancient period needed to be resurrected by the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in his ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’. These successive adaptations and departures from the framework of mystical belief had previously laid down the foundational myths of the later monotheistic patriarchal abrahamic trio of Judsism, Christianity and Islam. All three of which continued to adhere to the central part of the anthropocentric patriarchal man-centred tradition, which had imagined a fundamental, intellectual bifurcation between humanity and nature. The result of this estrangement of humanity from nature being imagined as life on earth comprising of two distinct and opposed realms of material reality; social reality and biological reality. This intellectual bifurcation still dominates and still awaits it’s own renaissance. The common reality of the bio-chemical basis of all life on earth – in all their manifest biological species forms – had not yet entered the 19th century peripheral vision of humanities intellectual contemplation, let alone become a central focus of it.
Biology at the sophisticated and complex cellular level along with the evolution of species functions and forms was then in its early, socio-biological, stuttering steps, and still remains so in many places. However, in the 19th century, alongside the development of the capitalist mode of production, a broader but still limited form of renaissance in thinking, was taking place. The philosopher Hegel, for example, had pioneered and developed an ideological dialectical approach to critical thinking to replace the ideological dualism of religious forms of belief. Contradictions between things were not just fixed and final opposed categories (dualisms), but changing and evolving categories that could transform themselves or be transformed into their opposites and even into entirely different forms or categories (dialectics). A seed could sprout and become a flower or edible plant, etc. Karl Marx, as a young Hegelian student and in conjunction with Ludwig Feuerbach, inverted Hegel’s dialectical idealism into a materialist dialectic of thinking about religion and life on earth.

However, despite a perceptive observation by Feuerbach, Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism and materialist dialectic never escaped from within the dominant anthropocentric paradigm of all hitherto thinking. It is worth considering this insight by Feuerbach for although Marx was full of admiration and praise for Feuerbach and wrote a letter to him saying so, Marx never took the following observation any further. Feuerbach wrote the following in a book entitled ‘The Essence of Christianity’;

“The doctrine of the Creation sprang out of Judsism; indeed, it is the characteristic, the fundamental doctrine of the Jewish religion. The principle which lies at its foundation is, however, not so much the principle of subjectivity as of egoism. The doctrine of the Creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that stand-point where man in practice makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and hence in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will.” (‘The Essence of Christianity’. F. Feuerbach. Chapter 11. Emphasis added. RR.)

In that one short paragraph by Feuerbach is summarised not only the essence of Christianity and the essence of Judaism and all other monotheisms, but also the essence of the transition from previous hunter-gatherer biologicaly based aggregations of human communities, to socially based aggregations of aggriculturally organised human communities. The social organisation of Agriculture is the means and practice where humans consistently attempt and partially succeed, to make ‘Nature the servant of their needs and will’. Within settled agricultural communities, the relationship between humanity and Nature was no longer viewed as humans being part of the sum total of all biological life on earth, but humanity ebotistically and narcisistically imagined as a superior natural species which had been given dominion over nature (by an imaginary spiritual man-like creater-being) as an exclusive resource to be used and fashioned according to the will and wishes of the human species.

It is a commonly held assumption that ‘things’, including ‘species’ must have an origin, but this assumption, lodged within the neo-cortical regions of the religious and anthropocentric mind-set is frequently firmly attached to the concept of a ‘creative force’, which itself is based upon the centrality of anthropocentric thinking. Humanity itself exerts a creative force by making things out of the materials available in nature and so the idea of ‘creative force’ has widespread relevance and accuracy, but ‘creation’ is clearly not a universal phenomenon and this applies to the realm of biological and chemical forces. The atomic or molecular particles of two (or more) inert inorganic materials combining naturally can create a new material or release the energy which binds these molecular structures together. Gunpowder is a mixture of substances which under certain external circumstances can explode; baking bread is a mixture of inorganic ingredients which under the right external circumstances can become a form of delicious nutrition, and those are only two of the many thousands of things that have an origin without having a creator, that the discipline of chemistry deals with.

The human bakers, wine-makers, explosives manufacturers don’t actually create the results they desire, they just arrange the materials and conditions which the facilitate the results of natural interactions on a regular and controlled basis. If someone does not comprehend that ‘nature’ has it’s own source of creative force in the movement of the solar system’s planetary bodies and the energy contained within its solid, gaseous and liquid elements, then it cannot be surprising that to them nature, in all its manifest, complex and aesthetically pleasing appearances, must have had an origin and also an intelligent creator of that origin. However, if someone understands that natural substances themselves contain material forms and forms of energy that making cakes or wine out of some of them only requires the mixing of them under the right circumstances to turn the semi-liguid ingredient slush into my favourite date and walnut cake, or turns the not very appetising liquid mixture into a delicious red wine, then the understanding of reality abandons its child like innocence and imagination and becomes deepened by an adult level of understanding. Since life on earth pre-dates the origin of the human species by millions or even billions of years, the only other further intellectual hurdle the adult needs to make to eliminate the need for a human or super-human mixer of such ingredients, to be the force to change the ingredient form into another a more useful or pleasant form.

That intellectual hurdle was provided by the concept of evolutionary adaptation and change measured by the duration of changes by the invention of a standard known as time. If existing potentionaly active materials and energy forms can be combined under the right circumstances of heat, pressure, time and mixture to form useful new properties can these circumstances occur naturally without the existence of conscious intelligent external creative force? This is where evolutionary theory, provides a more realistic, plausible and natural explanation for life on earth than the imaginary invention of an invisible, male-like God, that wishes life into being and is still keeping an eye on things here on earth. Instead, during the billions of years that the hot gaseous planets circulating the sun cooled and became solid on the outer surface of the planetary system orbiting this sun, on one planet that we call earth, the natural mixture of mineral dust, gasses and liquids and the atmospheric conditions were such that over billions of years of such random interactive natural molecular activity some molecular ingredients were able to chemically break up and recombine in such a way that they became repeating slow molecular reactions and interactions that eventually formed stable molecular and atom based chemical combinations.

Eventually over millions of these naturally occurring interactions these stable chemical bonds became the bio-chemical units we now know in the cellular forms of Prokaryotic and Eukariotic cells. And it is these self-forming, self-organising and self-reproducing, cellular units which are the bio-chemical functioning cells which form the basic structures of all plant, animal, insect life forms along with the bacteria, viruses and fungi which make up the biosphere and all that live within it. Just how this initial transition from inorganic active molecular and atom based material existence, into the realm of bio-chemical and biological existence occured is still not known. However, it is based on provable material evidence and of course, this ‘spark’ of life coming into being, obviously did occur and continues to occur, with every new birth. It then energises the reproductive and growth phases of the Nutritional, Metabolic, Growth, Reproductive, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A – D) phases of all forms of biologjcal species from the most microscopic to the largest Macroscopic organisms. Biology and thus nature is indifferent to human wishes and has to be violated in any attempt to deflect it from its bio-chemical essence and to serve non-biological or sociologically determined needs or wishes.

But of course Marx in the 19th century was not sufficiently aware of the quality and quantity of the type of evidence we now have and although he welcomed Feuerbach’s bringing humanity back into prominent consideration rather than thrusting pure imagination into the the gaps in human knowledge and understanding (via a God of the gap’s). Nevertheless, he did not pursue Feuerbach’s crucial insight, into humanities intellectual assessment of nature as an object of utility and thus the effective degradation of nature into a mere machine of production – a series of products to be bent or shaped to human wills. It is not possible to say if anyone from a secular position had asked themselves the obvious following question. That if humanity treated the rest of life on earth as a system of production to be fashioned according to the will of elite humanity, what would be the implications and what could be the eventual outcome? Certainly from my research it appears that no one from the Marxist tradition, from the 19th century Marx and on to his 20th and 21st century Marxist academic or activist followers, seem to have asked this question or pursued the implications of this hierarchical mass society agricultural ‘practice’ and its intellectual rationalisation. But nevertheless, it is possible to say when Marx wrote the following he certainly demonstrated that he remained firmly within the traditional hierarchical mass society anthropocentric paradigm, even within the capitalist mode of production social form.

“Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature”….”If, therefore, industry is conceived as the esoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature, or the natural essence of man”……”The nature which develops in human society – is man’s ‘real’ nature: hence nature as it develop’s through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.” (Marx. Marx/Engels Collected Works. Vol 3. pages 298; 303.Emphssis added. RR.)

Conflating the social organisation of hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregation with the biological structure of life on earth, and vice versa, is a secular version of those monotheistic religious ideas which assert that prayer to an invisible god is a force that might bend nature (biology) to human desires. For Marx in the 19th century it was not prayer but industrial manpower which is deemed capable of achieving this result. This particular written piece of evidence, along with the written evidence drawn from many successive anti-capitalist and ‘Marxist’ writings, is the basis of my previous assertion (in Part 4) that Marxism, despite its reputation for being a revolutionary form of understanding was not fully so. Despite Marx’s self-declared ambition to pursue ‘a ruthless criticism of everything’, a form of criticism which was meant to be neither afraid of it’s own conclusions nor of the powers that be’, much of it was reform of the politics of governance. From all this evidence the conclusion emerges that ‘Marxism’ has been a failed Renaissance in human thinking practice in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The supposedly top-tier of revolutionary anti-capitalist thinkers in the 20th century, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, also made no attempt to either correct (in theory or practice) their anti-capitalist social theories and activist actions, they merely demonstrated in practice their own allegiance to the mainstream anthropocentric distortion and juxtaposition of biological and socially understood ecological reality. In this their differences with bourgeois radicals in their allegiance to the hierarchical mass society over the degree of authoritarian acceptable within them was extremely marginal. The intellectual apologists of Stalins euphomism of the Nazi regime breaking eggs to make an omelette, or of Hitlers apologists, reminding us that the Volkswaggon beetle was a car for the working man and Germany needed to expand to make Germany Great Again for all Germans. Intellectuals, as Trotsky pointed out; are frequently flexible enough to be “federalist, centralist, embrace autonomy, autocracy, democracy or dictatorship, without in any way changing its essence nor the nature of its political interests”, whilst doing so himself during his career from 1916 to 1930.

To some extent the previous centuries intellectuals of all shades and convictions, can be excused for not reaching really revolutionary conclusions about the hierarchical mass society system of exploitation of nature and humanity along with the estrangement and dehumanisation of humans socialised within such societies. The promotion of reformist alterations to political forms of hierarchical rule by self-declared revolutionaries, rather than actual evolutionary ones, was due to the anthropocentric concensus among intellectuals from ancient Greece to modern capitalism, that hiearchical mass societies were an expression of civilisation not an actual war of the succesive ruling elites to appropriate the resources of nature, to exploit the labour power of their slaves and wage slaves and to dehumanise the essence of the human species, so that this would accepted or at least tolerated. The possibility of this excuse for previous intellectuals arises because many of the facts and the processes for linking them into coherent connected evidence were lacking throughout the 20th century, but this is no longer the case.

The electron scanning microscopes invented in the late 20th century have revealed the sophistication and self-repairing and self-reproducing complexity of the previously impenetrable Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cell infrastructure components of all living things, and mass computer analysed data gathering and models, from modern instruments, whether totally accurate or not has indicated sufficiently that human industry is not the true resurection of nature as Marx thought and expressed it. Indeed, modern automated and computer aided industry and commerce turbo-charged by the ‘profit’ and ‘interest’ motive has become the direct or indirect executioner of many essential and necessary species of life on earth and the grave digger and robber of many essential ecological niches and resources needed for the survival of other essential species of life on earth. So the question arises; where is the motive for a 21st century renaissance of intellectual thinking about life on earth to come from, given that Marxism and every other form of ism so far, has hardly been up to the job? Plus the fact that the tradition of thoroughly studying and meticulously recording ‘results and prospects’ has been dwindling for decades.

Fast adulterated food, off the top of the head judgements, facile facebook opinions, Snap Chat interactions, YouTube shorts and three word advertising slogans have reduced most things into sharp, short bytes until attention spans have got shorter and shorter, whilst lengthy computer and AI aided academic theses seem to be getting longer and more incoherent and incomprehensible as well as proportionally longer. The 19th century ideologically created anti-capitalist perspective of a popular revolution motivated by disgust or de-humanised conditions of living and working conditions, still lives on in the words and writings of a few of those who remain intellectually attached to that tradition, but it is neither convincing theoretically or possible practically.

Its mass human basis (factory based industrial proletariate) no longer exists, and its dedicated revolutionary leadership (Stalinist, Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist) are revealed as hierarchical mass society replacement reformists with a smattering of green agenda tokenisms, dragged along behind them. They seem to have learned little or nothing useful in understanding the past, the present or the future of life on earth. They remain sectarian and dogmatic anthropocentric idealists, whose sects are at war with each other and who are narcissistically in love with their own intellectual output. They are afraid to admit the failure of their own tradition or to embrace any serious form of self-criticism or to consider any alternative perspective.

Yet this failure means that any ability to convince and mislead future community and worker activists to follow an already failed revolutionary top-down strategy of vanguard-led elite, industrialised mass societies, disguised by the words socialism or communism, is highly unlikely. The utter failure of the 19th century anti-capitalist revolutionaries in Russia, China, and Cuba to facilitate bottom up localised communal forms of human aggregation or to abolish the categories of contemporary wage labour and past fixed labour as state or private capital indicates they only attempted to reform the worst aspects of hierarchical mass societies, not revolutionise how humanity related to it’s own species and to nature. Consequently, once this latest capitalist based hierarchical mass society system collapses due to its structural contradictions and the unprecedented scale of its systemic wars, genocides, global land, air, sea and river pollutions, consistent ecocide and Epstein-style elite oligarchal inhumanity, there will be little chance or appetite for resurrecting it in any comparable or even diluted form.

The fact is that changes in modes of production, never appear as revolutionary from the get go, and never start with a hierarchy of ideas and individuals. They commence with small groups of community minded individuals who untypically initiate a qualitatively different way of living and co-operating for their (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological processes, whilst painstakingly persisting with this form until it is successful and if necessary modifying it as they persist with pursuing the humane and ecological principles they feel are relevant to themselves and to the environmental constraints they find themselves functioning within. The original middle eastern mass society settlements based on agriculture did not commence as heirarchical top-down mass societies, but as small scale egalitarian collectives and only later adopted or were commanded to adopt the hierarchical form of city states and the ancient expansionary polis.
That type of embryonic bottom up process was repeated by the original scattered Soviets in 1916 and 1917 which were started by local peasant and soldier activists who, during war torn socio-economic collapses, re-opened factories, and re-vitalised peasant farms, before they allowed themselves to be persuaded (in some cases forced) to become wage workers for a Bolshevik run hierarchical mass society disguised under the populist term, a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. From that stage on (1917-1950) working people in the Soviet Union were ruled by a hierarchy of Communist Party chosen Commisars, who replaced the previous hierarchy of Aristocratically chosen Officials. Nothing can be seriously pimped up and presented as revolutionary, when the slogan; ‘The Czar is Dead; Long live the Czar! is effectively replaced with; The Romanov Elite are Dead; Long live the Leninist (or Maoist) Elite! Elite words, invariably misrepresent reality.
Roy Ratcliffe (June 2026)