In recent articles, I have pointed out at length and with a wide range of supporting evidence that all ideological trends within hierarchical mass societies, both ancient and modern, have reflected primarily on how the human species has lived since the formation of hierarchical mass societies. That this reflection has been done accurately or in a distorted fashion accurately or in a distorted fashion, is a subject for historical debate, but both the volume and focus of the historical records indicate a self-absorbed fixation on it’s own particular species designated as Homo sapien. The biological base line of how humanity has sociologically acquired and maintained its essential biological processes of (N-M-G-R + A – D) has determined how human societies have positively related or negatively related to the broader biological reality of life on earth.

I hold that the self-absorbed sociological dimension of human communal life has obscured and distorted the species reality of its origins and continuing dependency of the human species upon the the whole biological network of life on earth. On the basis of historical and biological evidence, this assertion of mine holds true, whether that ideology is held by its adherents within a conservative, religious, secular, liberal, radical or supposedly revolutionary framework of thinking. The human species, under the leadership of its elites, has, since the development of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, been socialised and educated into relating to the rest of the organic and inorganic material of the planet it evolved upon and within, not as an integral and dependent part of life on earth, but as the owners, controllers and consumers of anything and everything that they have found useful or desirable.

Within the limits of their technological know-how and physical capacity to extract, the elites have ordered the taking of as much of nature’s resources as they like, with little or no regard for its effects upon the rest of life on earth or the effects upon the environmental and ecological balance of the biological system they live in and on, as a whole. The evidence substantiating this assertion is contained within the mass of historical documents and Stele produced during the pre and post Common Era (now known as BCE, formerly BC). But the evidence of this assertion also appears in a more condensed form within the religious ideological discussions and documentation recorded during the same historical period. The domination of this religious variant of anthropocentric ideology is particularly embodied and embedded within the trio of Abrahamic Monotheisms, (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

I suggest that this historic embodiment, represents one of the clearest historical (and well preserved) codified expressions of the universality of anthropocentric practices and the varied ideological expressions radiating from them. The period of human consciousnes which consolidated the settled, agriculturally based hierarchical form of obtaining the individual and collective biological (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes (prematurely and narcisistically referred to as ‘civilisation’) first produced the oral and then written religious narratives of that anthropocentric tradition concerning the origin of life on earth. Its final result was in the priestly creation of the Jewish, Torah, Talmud or Old Testiment Bible and by geographical and intellectual association, the later formation of the Islamic Qu’ran.

This Abrahamic narrative, was accepted as logically and spiritually authentic (and still is) by all three monotheisms and expresses its anthropocentric ideological assumptions in the following condensed way;

“God created the heavens and the earth In the very begining….And God said, let the earth bring forth vegetation….And God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let fowl fly above the earth…..then God said let us make man in our image and let them have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle… and over every creeping thing..” (Genesis 1 verses 1 to 30. Holy Bible; Peshitta Edition.)

However, it is important to recognise that this anthropocentric assumption that the human species was a ‘creation by an invisible unknowable force’ was not unique to the Abrahamic trend of Anthropocentrism. It was widespread within the middle and near east and independent of its later embodiment into and onto monotheistic forms of mythology. Given the immediate surface level of understanding that humans had at that period of ancient history, it is not surprising that their reasoning was severely limited by the restricted amount of reliable evidence that was then available to them. The best that some of the religiously inspired ‘influencers’ at the time could imaginatively come up with (and it was not a brilliant best) was the idea of the creation out of nothing of a single human male, (Adam) followed by a single human female created out of the first man’s rib.

The ancient spiritual ‘influencers’ received no other inward or outward inspiration than that these two highly developed biological organisms (male and female of the species) were created by an imaginary, invisible and unknowable super male-type being called God. The idea that the rest of this God-‘created’ biological biosphere (nature) was then gifted to humanity, was an evidence-lacking, religiously tweaked modification, of a widespread anthropocentric form of thinking. This anthropocentric form of reasoning was based upon successive contemplations of the partial and distorted reality of human-centred (i.e. anthropocentric) settled hierarchical mass society productive capacity. It was a socio-economic capacity enabled by the development of an agricultural mode of consciously planting seeds in land cleared for that purpose, in order to harvest the resulting biological growth of certain selected nutritional species.

This development was then, and remains so today, nothing more than a socially mediated act between human groups and biological nature, but which was retrospectively given the categorical terminology of agriculture. Superficially agriculture ‘appeared’ to be replacing natural forms of biological growth, when in fact it was merely a re-location of the pre-existing form of biological processes. It formerly took place in naturally formed landscape environments such as jungles, forests, valleys and plains where species reproduction was aided by wind, insect and animal seed dispersal. All that humanity strenously created were artificial landscapes such as fields, terraces, orchards, plantations and supplimented wind, insect and animal seed dispersal by their own hands. Sociology did not replace biological processes, it merely re-located them and consumed more of them than previously. Sociological understanding did not advance biological understanding, the former remaining partial and limited to the surface characteristics of plants and animals.
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However, the further implications of these partial and limited understandings about nature, were far more profound than the lack of understanding of the cellular structures (Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic) at the microscopic levels of life on earth. That the latter were essential parts of all forms of life on earth, remained hidden for generations. One of the profound implications of this lack of knowledge was that it encouraged intellectuals among the elite to make the anthropocentric and arrogant assumption that nature and biology operated according to humanities own limited sociological understandings. Thus according to anthropocentrically constructed pre and post- scientific understandings, nature was considered to follow and function according to predetermined processes intellectualise in the form of abstractly conceived laws. But of course these intelectualised LAWS were ‘products’ of humanity deduced on the basis of an extremely limited knowledge and understanding of life on earth.

It had clearly not occurred to early elite intellectuals, that simply making assumptions about the form and structure of the natural and biological world from within their own limited anthropocentric sociological paradigm of experience was not the same as how biology and the natural world actually came into being in the first place. Nor how it needed to function in order to maintain itself within its dynamic equilibrium. The fact that biological reality had preceded sociological reality and human intellectual processes, by billions of years was not known then. Nor were the origin and universality of the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells and the viral archaic forms of ancient life on earth, known until the 20th century. These now established facts have condiderable and substantial ramifications for the past as well as the present. It means that human thinking about life on earth was woefully inadequate during the ancient formative period of history. Moreover, the 20th and 21st century lag in understanding between reliable evidence based ‘scientific’ discoveries and the general levels of understanding among the population, suggests that a woeful inadequacy still exists.

It is more likely, that what really happened during long tracts of evolution development, was that over billions of earth orbits around the sun, the biological system evolved the way it did and the best that human thinking could (and still can do) to understand how this occured, was to construct hypotheses about it from the available reliable evidence and test these hypotheses (where possible) to evaluate how accurate (or innacurate) they were. Yet the innacurate idea that science is actually discovering natural laws that exist independently of humanity still prevails in general and within anthropocentric focussed scientific and political discourse in particular. This form of putting the cart before the horse has become an intellectual habit of long standing. In reality, humanity, at it’s best, is learning from the natural world by studying it and experimentally verifying our understanding.

However, science at its worst, makes badly evaluated approximations and publishes them as fact before it is discovered that the evidence the science was based upon was insufficient, seriously flawed, or what is now classed as confirmation biased. This is why one generations scientific certainty, sooner or later, has been questioned as false and modified or rejected completely and a different hypothesis formulated in its place. Over hasty anthropocentric certainty more often than not guarantees that its assumptions will always need to be corrected – sooner than later if possible. The left Marxist trend of anthropocentric thinking is especially vulnerable to making such non-sexual ‘premature ejaculations’ with regard to its publicised conclusions. For example, a recent publication by one such pro-Marxist author asserted that;

“Is nature dialectical? The short answer is “yes”. A series of essays on contemporary advances in science and technology written by Engels between 1872 and 1882 were not published until 1925, after his death, with the first English edition of Dialectics of Nature in 1939. They included his ground-breaking but unfinished, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Human; a demolition of the paranormal, Natural Science and the Spirit World; and notes on physics, chemistry, biology–and dialectics. Dialectics subsequently became codified by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Marxists as a series of ontological principles or “laws”; the transformation of quantity into quality; the unity and interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation.”

We need to remember how the progress of thinking has developed within the intellectual history of hierarchical aggregated mass society humanity. Elements of contradiction were introduced by the ancient Greek schools of philosophical discourse, but the idea of dialectical contradictions driving social changes forward were developed in the European countries by Kant and primarily by philosophical trends leading up to the German philosopher Fredrick Hegel. The dialectical framework of thinking was then further developed by Karl Marx who famously stated that he had needed to turn Hegel back onto his feet to produce a materialist dialectic out of Hegel’s Idealistic Dialectics. Hegel like most philosophers before him dealt primarily with ideas and their refinement as the root to all human understanding. An anthropocentric closed circuit so to speak. Whereas Marx insisted that critical thinking must always proceed from a critical study of, and engagement with, external reality.

Whilst that adjustment to the dialectic method by Marx was useful and partially true, the problem with Marx’s study of reality (as was indicated in ‘Means of Production Part 2, on this blog), Marx’s reality was the more narrowly drawn 19th century, anthropocentric, sociological, linguistically described reality. It was not the actual wider scientifically authenticated biological reality of life on earth as a whole. The contradictions within human hierarchical mass societies, which can lead to social revolutions that may or may not resolve those contradictions by overthrowing the negative human actors within them and replacing them with positive actors may or may not have some validity at certain times. But they remain in the self contained context of hierarchical mass societies. Therefore, to assume that the essence of biological systems function in that sociologically described way, as Darwin, Malthus, Engels and the above author has done, was and is, a premature and evidence-lacking assumption.

Indeed, when Marx’s associate, Fredrik Engels declared that ‘Nature is the proof of dialectics.” he unwittingly illustrated the problem which anthropocentric thinking encounters even in it’s most radically critical expressions. The statement that ‘Nature is proof of Dialectics’ contains no direct reference to any form of reality. It merely contains two main abstract designations; ‘Nature’ and ‘Dialectics’. These verbal abstractions only exist as words and ideas, not as biological entities. Take away these words and there is nothing there. In English, the word ‘rose’ is still an abstraction but it is an agreed rational one, as it does represent something real. It is a particular form of flowering plant species and if we remove the word ‘rose’ from it, the flowering species it represents still remains. So some abstractions do have a secondary reality, whilst others have no existence in reality at all. Nature, for example, is a collective noun used to embrace everything living and none-living in general and therefore nothing jn particular; and Dialectics is a specific noun embracing a method of thinking in non-static dualistic opposites whilst contemplating evaluative thinking in general. Dialectics exists only in terms of thinking, speaking and writing. So when Marx wrote that;

“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.” (Marx. Collected Works. Volume 3, page 298 and 303. Emphasis added. RR)

And;

“The earth itself is an instrument of labour.” (Marx. Capital volume 1. Page Emphasis added RR)

And;

“The history of industry is the open book of man’s essential powers”…..The objectified essential powers of man (humanity) are useful objects.” (Marx/Engels Collected Works. Vol 3 , page 302)

The objectified essential powers of humanity have resulted in an extreme form of commodity fetishism in which inanimate objects and materials have been worshipped with unreasoned devotion to the point that these ‘powers’ are daily undermining the current foundations of multiple species including the human species.
Moreover, the reader has just been invited by Marx in the first quote to read a linked sequence of abstractions, ‘society, unity, nature, true, resurrection, naturalism, humanism, man’, instrument of labour, which have actually designated nothing in particular and which the reader is left to smply remember or repeat these abstractions or to add any more concrete terms he or she feels would be appropriate. It’s almost a parallel analogy to Hegels philosophical reminder that we don’t actually eat ‘vegetables’ we eat carrots and peas or whatever. Marx in the above abstracts is not describing anything in particular, he is just articulating his opinion about what he considers is a logical relationship between two abstractions; humanity and nature. And he makes nature – of which we and he as individuals are temporary short-term visitors to its domain – into an instrument of humanity. Marx provides no verifiable concrete evidence to support these assertions, because none actually exists and also because nothing concrete has been identified by him. I suggest at this particular point, Marx had become an unwitting victim of the anthropocentric socio-linguistic paradigm of Hegelian abstract thinking. Thus Marx elsewhere reasons that;

“If mankind be not forced to labour, they will only labour for themselves; and if they have few wants, there will be few [who] labour. But when states come to be formed and have occasion for idle hands to defend them against the violence of their enemies, food at any rate must be procured for those who do not labour; and as, by the supposition, the wants of the labourers are small, a method must be found to increase their labour above the proportion of their wants.” (Quoted by Marx, in the Grundrisse.)

“Means must be found to increase human labour above the proportion of their wants”.. has been a central practice and theoretical expression of that practice by hierarchical mass society elites since their successful ascendency within the hierarchically organised mass society system of human aggregation. Indeed, that hierarchical mass society system was itself THE supreme means found to “increase humanities labour above the proportion of their wants”. And the capitalist mode of production has perfected that means to the point were it is undermining the very basis of the biological system which provided the biological foundation for the evolution of the human species to take place. To read these sentiments from the notes scribed by the pen of Karl Marx, demonstrates how strong a hold that system has had and still has over the practical and intellectual production of the human species.

Claiming logical relationships between non-existent abstractions is a functional weakness of anthropocentric focussed language and discourse. A frequently associated assumption has been that a generally accepted naming of something means it is considered to be a real ‘thing’ and therefore must exist; God, time, and gravity for example are repeatedly said to exist. Yet no one would even attempy to touch God, time or Gravity, weigh them or taste them and for a very good reason. They don’t actually exist in the biological/material world, they only exist in the intellectual/sociological virtual world of consciousness. Nevertheless, talking or writing about them is possible, thus providing the illusion to the writer and to the unassuming reader that something real is being described. Yet there is nothing in words and concepts to touch, weigh or taste. In reality these named entities are nothing more than linguistic conjectures needing investigation, confirmation or rejection. Meanwhile, during the period Marx was celebrating industrial society as the true resurrection of nature, and nature as an instrument of labour, a naturalist named George P Marsh in 1864 published the following;

“The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes, Dureau de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster , Gasparin, Becquerel, and many other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster , Forry , Drake , and others in America……. There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece , and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call ” the historical period, ” they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted for human use…. (Man and Nature. George P Marsh. page 9 and 44. Emphasis added RR.)

Climate change was an issue in 1864! Since 1864, the technology of extraction has replaced axe felling, spade digging and horse and cart haulage, with petrol driven chain saw, excavator/digger, bulldozer, diesel road haulage vehicles and railway trsnsport. For the last 100 years, elite humanity has directed its varied labour forces to do to the entire world what earlier elites had ordered to be done to Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece and Alpine Europe by George Marsh’s day. So why are some modern Marxists, tracing Marx’s ideas back to Epicurus in ancient Greece, in order to understand Marx better rather than revealing why he was ignoring the findings of his own generation of naturalists in their warnings about economic system caused climate change and the over extraction and desolation being ravaged upon the planet 180 years ago? Almost two centuries later in the 21st century and a comparable level of elite ignorance and denial is still taking place within the ranks of right wing conservatives, left wing anti-capitalist revolutionaries and those Liberal socialists in between. All of them with no visible hint of embarrassment at their own complete lack of serious historical evaluation, re-evaluation and self-criticism.

In a sense the rhetorical question I have just asked as to why Marxists (and some liberals, conservatives and socialists) are looking backwards for understanding rather than forwards should be becoming fairly obvious. If Marx, as one of most talented and outstanding social critics and self-critical commentators during the 19th century, remained trapped within an anthropocentric sociological paradigm, it must be because the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking is constantly being reinforced by the hierarchical mass society form of securing the essential (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological processes. It follows then that if 19th century Marx remained immersed within it, then practically everyone else was unlikely to have escaped this practical and intellectual trap. Thus the solution to the contradictions identified by various estranged and dehumanised victims within these societies, have been and will be sought from within that hierarchical mass society system itself. The anthropocentric fixation in thinking and being forms a closed loop environment in which externalities to that paradigm are only viewed peripherally and fleetingly before anthropocentric business as usual focuses its narcisistic attention back on itself.

Moreover, in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries, these campaigns literally cover thousands of such discriminatory or oppressive practices. They are campaigns initiated in an effort to at least ease, if not end the contradictions emanating from within the existing hierarchical framework. They are anthropocentric sociological solutions to growing sociological problems and now to increasing biological problems. Hence, every individual campaign has only a one dimensional strategic and tactical direction, which is to make closed loop political requests or demands upon the only class that has the power to modify the hierarchical mass society system. The left in all their many manifestations, extreme left, to moderate liberal left are stuck in sociological ruts of their own and their predicessors ideological making. They have not even started asking potentially revolutionary questions, let alone circled their intellectual wagons around revolutionary answers.

Stripped of any superficial rhetoric, the liberal and left strategies of organising petitions, promoting lobbying campaigns and suggestions of tactical voting are merely requests to the elites to implement reforms within the existing socio-economic system, which the elites know is collapsing and are trying to prop it up. Whilst the radical and supposedly revolutionary left call for demonstrations, uprisings and general strikes (the latter two only sounding radical while in essence they remain reformist) amount to nothing more than impotent demands on the elites to implement reforms within their system; a tactic and strategy with no historical precedence or logical consistency. Reforms concieved within and demanded from the sociologically closed-loop system are not revolutionary in terms of the fundamental basis of the biological system of life on earth. Hence the much vaunted Bolshevik-led, Maoist-led and Castro-led ‘revolutionary’ uprisings with their limited 19th century perspectives and objectives set on the conquest of political power within the hierarchical mass society system, did not even think of replacing that hierarchical mass society form. Nor did they attempt to end the de-humanised wage slavery of their peoples, let alone revolutionising its biological relationship to nature be compatible with the rest of the natural world.

Thus it is simply par for the course, that the anthropocentric sociological paradigm of left thinking has also drawn its understanding of the concept of ‘revolution’ from within the narrow limits of the systems direct sociological and political experience. The hierarchical mass society system has always been the one-off exceptional form of species aggregation, with a top-down social system, and a governing elite perched insecurely at the top who pass orders and instructions down chains of command to the middle and lower ranks. But life on earth from its beginnings and from outside of the hierarchically organised sociological dimension, has always been a biological system with no such categorical social divisions and imperatives. True, the biological species in general have indeed, formed large-scale aggregations (herds, flocks, schools, hives etc.) whilst in the process of obtaining the essential (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological inputs and outputs needed for their own survival, but the difference between the billion year old biological structure of life on earth and the several thousand year sociological structure of humanity is fundamental and irreconcilable.

These non-human collectives have never established or resorted to permanent or hereditary elites, with the rest of their species as the equivalent of direct or indirect slaves, serfs, peasants or wage-slaves providing the (N-M-G-R + A – D) means of support for their elite survival. Consequently, no other species of life on earth, no matter how large its individuals have become, (Whales, Elephants, Giraffe’s, Gorillas, Bison) have ever taken more from the biospheres organic and inorganic resources than its species needed to survive. None of the forest life networks, the plains life networks, the jungle life networks, the shallow and deep sea life networks, of life on earth, no matter how large their numbers have become, or how long they existed, have ever caused whole-scale, climate change, global temperature rises, plant, insect, fish and animal extinctions or inorganic pollutions of air, land, rivers, seas and lakes.

Only one species has done that, and in fact it has not always done so. It is only since some sections of the human species began a career in forming hierarchical mass societies and being under the control of top-down de-humanised elite state-run systems, whose modus operandi was aggressive physical confrontation, conquest and consumption of everything useful, that the dynamic balance of life on earth was increasingly disturbed. A new biological paradigm of one class within one species, taking whatever they could from whoever or whatever they chose, began an explosive increase in extraction, production and consumption, which has in the last 100 years has finally come close to a tipping point in which the dynamic balance of the biological system of life on earth has become systematically imbalanced, one vulnerable species at a time. If the current system of over-extraction is not ended and reversed, the remaining imbalance will be accelerated and possibly result in an eventual avalanche of species losses – until…..? At least the last set of predatory dinosaurs didn’t make themselves extinct.

Before the onset of hierarchical mass societies, humans in groups large and small (tribes and confederacies) lived modestly and relatively frugal lives which did not normally or perminently imbalance the biological system which produced and sustained them. A real revolutionary overthrow of that system cannot be achieved by replicating its top-down social form, such as having Priests Kings, Czars, Juntas, Vanguardists, Fascists, Bolshevists, Stalinists, Royalists, Supremacists, Liberals, Aristocrats or highly placed Revolutionary Comrades at their helm. The modus operandi, of discrimination, physical force, intimidation, or regimes of punishment, does not stem entirely from the personality traits of the ‘leadership cadres’, although much does, it stems equally from the sociological essence of the hierarchical, mass socio-economic system itself.

Yet apart from aggressive predatory species, life on earth has always been a system of species, cooperation, mutual support, resource sharing compromise and toleration (or even celebration) of the ‘other’ life forms. That is the only way life on earth has survived and evolved for billions of years in its earliest single-celled forms and for millions of years in its later multicellular plant, insect, animal and mammalian forms and it is the only way life on earth can continue evolving rather than further genocidal regressions at the hands of anthropocentric fixated elites. A broad spectrum of interconnected and interdependent varied and spectacular life forms of the plant, insect, animal, bird, fish and microorganism species forms, is not a luxury or a wistful tree-hugging dream option for life on earth, it is an essential material prerequisite. We either positively embrace it or continue in denial.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2026)