For the human species, the problem of really understanding the breadth, depth and range of ‘life on earth’, including the life of it’s own species, is that it is mostly a subjective endeavour. The only corrective to that one-sided individual perspective is through the collective contributions of many different perspectives and the correlation between those combined understandings with freshly observed reality. The remaining difficulty arises because the only physical and intellectual tools available are those devised and manufactured by humans, who are doing so under the influence and direction of the dominant elites. Our human languages, which both conserve and preserve meaning based upon past collective experience and thinking, is predominantly used to serve and conserve specific anthropocentric self-fulfilling functions and purposes. The latter are determined primarily by elites in society. Consequently concepts about the real world – even when they are unprejudiced attempts to describe it accurately – are only approximations.

All descriptions of reality, whether sophisticated or crude, are abstract opinions which only exist in the minds of those who form them and in the minds of others who are introduced to them through a process of education and aculturalisation. At best concepts and ideologies construct an abstract, virtual intellectual world, that with due care and attention approximates reality as accurately as possible, but recognises that these approximations do not fully describe actuality. At worst ideology deliberately distorts human concepts beyond any resemblance of reality. For a contemporary example there are no black or white skinned human beings or women without female reproductive organs together with specialised gamete cells, yet a large percentage of humanity have been persuaded or pressured think, write and talk as if there were. Moreover, some ‘influencers’ official and unofficial, eventually demand fiercely and aggressively with punishment threats that other individuals perpetuate the same fiction.

There are as many blatant and subtle language distortions of reality as there are words in any comprehensive dictionary. For example; ‘God created the world and lives in heaven‘ is another fictional distortion of reality which some people have had constructed for them and have gullibly accepted it at face value. There is not an ounce of reliable independent evidence to support it. We humans live 24/7/365 in a real biological world but understand it and our function within it through a 24/7/365 intellectual prism of anthropocentically and socially constructed linguistic approximations and fabrications. At best we flick between the objective reality and the virtual realities constructed for us and by us. The proliferating volume of AI produced media content, demonstrates this difference between reality and virtual reality vividly and prolifically. Consequently, at worst we live predominantly within one or more ideologically constructed prejudices and expect others to accept this. There is strong social pressure to only see and remember what the dominant ideology wishes us to see and remember and a tendency to ignore and/or forget any alternative perspectives. For multiple generations, this complex historic anthropocentric self-centred fixation only considered nature (biology) as a secondary or peripheral concern falling almost completely outside humanities own species-centric history.

Until modernity, for example, the idea of a biological evolution of life in general was not even a vague intimation, never mind a seriously considered hypothesis. Consequently the focus of history has always been, both literally and metaphorically ‘His Story’. History or ‘His Story began to be spoken and later written about by elite men, for elite men and from the perspective of elite men, only once herarchical mass societies such as originated in ancient Sumer, Ur, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, had been constructed and consolidated. This patrifocal anthropocentric concern has dominated ever since. Before that ancient period, (and for much, much longer after it) human communication was about current issues along with various myths and fantasy origin-narratives. Everything else living outside of that male anthropocentric narcisistic paradigm of hierarchical acting, thinking and being, (i.e. the rest of the plants, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, hominids and pre-historic Homo sapiens) may or may not have got a vague, an occasionally detailed, or a frequently fabricated mention – but only in passing and only in terms of how it effected the interests of males of the elite class.

This was clearly the case with ancient writers such Homer, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc., (there are simply too many of them to mention). The focus of their patrifocal concerns was almost entirely on the ‘progress’ or otherwise of the human communities to which they were part of and owed allegiance to, and it is still the case. Because of these immediate limited concerns, for multiple generations, the human species was not considered as part of the evolution of a widespread biological (organic) foundation of life on earth or as a continuum of living organisms, within a self-reproducing biosphere, fuelled by the energy and material of a solar system. The fact that biological cells reproducing and evolving from ancient single Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells through various lengthy stages to multicellular life forms within a dynamic biosphere, made up the biological essence of life forms, was completely unknown until modernity. Moreover, even in the 21st century the biology and evolution of life on earth is still not fully accepted as the essence of what it is to be human. The biological essence of Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N – M – G – R + A – D) of all life on earth is largely overlooked and even denied in favour of sociologically derived origin myths and vivid but limited imagination.

So in fact history (His story) only approximately began less than 10,000 years ago whereas life on earth’ in its earliest archaea forms is estimated to have begun billions of years ago and sentient animals evolved multiple millions of years ago. It is worth pausing to think about the difference between those two approximate time scales for a moment for they are truly enormous, against our own six, seven, eight or nine decades. Reflect also that this ‘His story’, construction is so patriarchically distorted that it depicts women as secondary to men when the female partners of all the millions of sexually reproducing species, have over multiple millions of years, by pregnancy and gestation been the main conveyors of biological continuity and the main bearers of biological (evolutionary) development. This includes the fact that biologically determined females of our species have also been the biological and evolutionary conveyors of the unique physical and mental attributes (bipedal motion, hand/finger dexterity, higher cortical processing abilities and advanced linguistic communication) of the human species. All of these biologically advanced and enhanced abilities of the human species pre-date by hundreds of thousands of years the formation of hierarchical mass societies and the sociological development of ‘His Story’, that elites narcisistically designate as the highest stage of life on earth. So despite the sociological myths and wishful thinking, the biological Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cellular essence of the Homo sapien species, is like all life forms, a common and fundamental biological characteristic of all life on earth.

Therefore history up to now has undoubtedly been ‘His Story’. Consequently, it is not a subject focussed primarily on the evolution of the inter-species dependence and interconnected biological system of life on earth. Instead history has been and remains a sequential narrative focussed predominantly on the anthropocentric concerns of a male elite within their own limited, narrow and contradictory social and intellectual perspectives. What is thought by them to be in their own elite male changing and contradictory interests, is the begining, middle and end of their main concerns. Hence the perspectives of the previously mentioned ancients; Homer, Epicurus, Plato, Socrates, Exenophon, Lucretius, Augustine, the later Hegel, and on the left Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and the subject of today’s blog article – Karl Marx, are what these elite men thought were in the best interests of the sections of humanity they represented. For example, the materialist interpretation of history pioneered by Marx, Engels and their Marxist followers is not focussed on the entire biological material of life on earth which supports all life on earth in general. No! The materialist interpretation of history, although an improvement on God-centred or Kingly-centred history, it still remains focussed on the specific material form and ‘means’ of social production by the hierarchically organised form human aggregation.

The term Marxism itself is a secondary verbal abstraction not a thing, yet Marxists and others talk of it as if it existed outside of human thought processes and restricted thought processes at that. It is in the written His Story record, that Marx did not approve of the term ‘Marxist’ and actually declared categorically – with good reason – that he was not a MARXIST! Clearly the modern ‘Marxists’ are either ignorant of that declaration by Marx or have chosen to ignore it. Is that surprising? Not really! Once seriously studied the Marxist’s of all shades reveal themselves to ignored Marx more after his death than before it. The core of Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanist ideas, have never been at the forefront of his ‘Marxist’ followers. Unlike Marx, they use his published and unpublished works, more like a menue of tasty abstract intellectual morsels to pick n mix and chew over. The materialist interpretation of history, for example is not a thing, it was (and still can be) an incomplete intellectual framework for considering the way that the human species, organised in societies, produce and reproduce the means of their biological existence. It considered the production processes of essential biological inputs for the human species, which in turn was (and is) held by this hypothesis to determine the political, legal, and ideological “superstructures” of hierarchical mass societies. But for Marx and Marxists ‘His Story’ is problematically understood by them as a succession of modes of production exclusively for and exclusively on behalf of one biological species only – the human species! The rest of life on earth is little more than a backdrop or interesting side show.

A further big problem for the Marxists is that humanity currently lives in an intellectually dominated highly industrialised period, in which individuality is celebrated above the collective. Although all other social animal species, apart from hierarchical mass society humanity, exist on the basis of the integrated and complementary efforts of the entire collective, with no particular individual organism being elevated above the rest of the species in status, privilege or power, hierarchically organised humanity does almost the opposite. Of course specialised functions within many species collectives undoubtedly exist from time to time on a temporary basis, but as the saying goes ‘nature’ (i.e. biology) abhors a vacuum (i.e. biology does not grow or reproduce vacuums) but it is also a fact that biology (nature) does not create guns, films or cars, but more importantly for this current subject, nature does not create kings and queens, terrorists, politicians or dictators and therefore using the same imprecise metaphorical basis, nature can be said to abhor privileged elites (i.e biology does not grow or procreate any privileged individuals within any species, only human sociology does that.).

There are NO other species of life on earth (and there are billions of species of life on earth) that have produced a privileged exploitative, ruling caste with the power of life and death over members of it’s own species and over the existential future of other species. None! No microorganism, no plant, no insect, no bird, no fish, no mammal species. In biological species terms, a privileged caste or class within the human species is a sociologically created aberration. Hierarchical mass societies since their very early development have been distinguished by creating a hierachical elite leadership form, (the biological and species abberstion) in which certain individuals have demanded, conquered or been granted privileged positions over the rest of their very hierarchical mass societies. This privilege may have been granted or asserted on the basis of might, wealth, intelligence, lineage or common assent from the social collective, but humanity having experienced many generations of such hierarchies being or becoming a leader has become both an aspiration for some and acceptance (reluctantly or enthusiastically) by others.

.And this is where the aspirational symptom within socialised humanity can manifest itself among those whose privileged knowledge base is considerably above the average of their contemporaries but not as high or as acute as their living or dead mentors or original initiators. This happens within all walks of ancient and modern life in general and the 20th century anti-capitalist left in Europe and the west in particular. In the 19th and 20th century periods, the ascendency of actual and potential left sectarian leaderships in the working class movements became noticeable to both Marx and Engels both of whom frequently commented upon it. Hence Marx, speaking of one such would be leader, noted;

“Moreover, like everyone who maintains that he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, he gave his agitation from the outset a religious and sectarian character.”(Marx. Selected Correspondence. Page 201.)

And at one later stage of the 19th century, Engels concluded that;

“…the solidarity of the proletariat is in reality everywhere being realised in different Party groupings, which carry on life and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in the Roman Empire did amid the worst persecutions.” (Engels)

After a lengthy practical and documentary research into the disintegration of democratic procedures within various democratic forms of 20th century collective organisations the left wing author (R. Michels) conducted a lengthy study on oligarchical tendencies within collective organisations and demonstrated from extensive evidence, the following patterns occurring within political parties. He stated in 1915 that;

“In the history of party life it is undeniable that the democratic system is reduced, in ultimate analysis, to the right of the masses, at stated intervals, to choose masters to whom in the interim, they owe unconditional obedience.” (Robert Michels. ‘Political Parties’ Page 217.)

According to Seymour Martin Lipset, in an introduction to Michels book, that only one senior Bolshevik, Nicolai Bukharin, bothered to read Michels research and then essentially dismissed it by asserting that any ‘incompetence of the masses’ would soon disappear under communism. Yet Michels was not claiming mass member incompetence at all, but that the system of delegation, specialisation and party officer control rendered the party leadership more institutionally dominant and capable than ordinary members. The point being that the material circumstances of mass system organisation created severe and insidious conditions of inequality not of incompetence. All this became chrystal clear in the Soviet Union by the mediocre intellect of Joseph Stalin being able to outmanoeuvre the highly sophisticated and articulate Leon Trotsky and then have him expelled and assassinated.

My own direct experience and documentary research throughout the mid 1950’s to the year 2026 in schools, clubs, political parties, local authority bureaucracies and left wing activist groups amply confirms the conclusions reached by Michels that “Who says organisation says oligarchy’ and this phenomenon was further demonstrated outside of the patriarchal paradigm by the early mid 20th century feminist liberation movement was revealed in an internal document entitled ‘The Tryanny of Structurelessness’ by Joline, where attempts to organise without hierarchy and structure within 20th century feminism were constantly being frustrated. Sociological practices and theories, no matter how sophisticated and far reaching they intend to be cannot escape the fact that biological systems and socially constructed mass relationships do not function satisfactorily or indefinitely in any form of hierarchical system and therefore that human organisational practice needs to stop trying to create them and then to maintain them begin imposing penalties in order to enforce obedience to an unnatural system.

For example, in the post-Second World War period feuding budding ‘sectarian leaders’ emerged again within UK Europe, North America, South America, Asia, India and Africa, in the form of small cells and sects based around one or other of the following identifying ideologies; Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism, all of which were continuous at intellectual (and sometimes physical) war with each other and their ‘leaders’ claiming to have sufficiently understood Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Trotsky or Mao to be capable of becoming local and national leaders of the downtrodden masses of humanity. For anyone interested in more detail about this late 20th century period of left sectarian arrogant pretentiousness there is a free download of a book (Revolutionary – Humanism and the Anti-capitalist Struggle) I wrote containing considerable evidence on this symptom from their own publications on my blog at www.critical-mass.net. (See Free Downloads in banner Section)

For a long time Marx’s intellectual ability was considered a vitally important asset to anti-capitalist theory and practice. However, here is the rub. Marx was so exceptional that few could equal him among his contemporaries and that was also generally the case among his followers. In his copious notes finally published as the three volumes of Das Capital, Karl Marx almost singlehandedly advanced the understanding of the capitalist mode of social production beyond anything previously attempted, including Adam Smith’s two volume ‘Wealth of Nations’ or Ricardo’s, ‘Outlines of Political Economy’. Marx’s friend and colleague, Fredrick Engels, no intellectual slouch himself, rated Marx one or the foremost intellects of his time and with good reason. Marx’s personal declaration of conducting “a merciless criticism of everything” was followed by a life-time almost entirely dedicated to that type of task, primarily within the sociological and political spheres of human society. In doing so Marx constructed and promoted a materialist dialectic from a re- interpretation the detailed idealist dialectics developed by the philosopher Hegel.

In addition to his forensic levels of economic and socio-political research, Marx also provided a contemporary framework of human understanding which viewed everything in existence as being in some kind of motion, large or minute. Nothing stayed static, everything, inorganic and organic, changed and many things seemingly permanent were full of latent and slow moving dynamic contradictions, leading to slow or rapidly changing realities and changing perceptions. The organic and inorganic aspects of the biological world were perceptively and imperceptibly changing and so to was human knowledge and social understanding. During the 19th century Marx was so far ahead of most of his own generation of intellectuals economically, philosophically and politically that few in the 19th and even 20th centuries managed to catch up with that level, about the socio-economic situation of humanity let alone better his framework of critical and self-critical thinking about the socio-economic situation of humanity. And herein lies the dialectical social contradiction for his followers. No one could match him and very few even tried so most Marxists leaned heavily on Marx for intellectual support and prestige – and many still try to do.

But in doing so they seem to have too easily ignored two important facts. 1. That they are leaning on an outstanding intellect of the 19th century, not one of the 21st century. It would be like me consulting the written notes of a top surgeon living in the 1850’s for advice on how best to deal with a burst appendix in 2026. My real friends would urge me to consult one or more of the 21st century experts in this field, not joyfully wave me off for a sojourn down in the library stacks of some prestigious university, to dig out some 19th century manuscripts of a long dead physician. And yet Marxists still alive and actually living in the 21st century by relying on Marx’s 19th century manuscripts and revisiting his ancient sources are doing the equivalent! Therefore, unless we suppose that hardly anything significant had happened to the social and natural biological realms of the world during the 180 years since Marx did his research and writing then potentially a great deal would need updating or even flatly rejecting. Indeed, an incredible amount has happened in just one lifetime.

The 20th century has been a century of unprecedented radical changes in the science and technology, of production, destruction, distribution, consumption, pollution, ecological dislocation and essential species extinctions. 2. That no individual no matter how far ahead they are intellectually or in any other skill, can be a substitute for the collective. One hundred committed brains, let alone thousands, can gather and process more information than one individual no matter how dedicated or persistent that individual becomes. Therefore, for those Marxists living in the 21st century who are still less comprehensively knowledgeable economically and intellectually than Marx was in the 19th century, such individuals are clearly bound to be either floundering or obfuscating in the 21st. A gap of almost two centuries has occurred during which the capitalist mode of production has changed massively in both quantity and quality.

The technical and scientific tools of industrial production and processes along with the analytical tools for collecting, collating and considering the social and ecological changes within the earths biosphere have also changed in quantity and quality since Marx sat in the British Library and since he talked to delegates of the working mens trade unions and clubs. All this change needs contemporary analysis and critical current adjustments!adjustment. But revealingly a number of his followers in the 21st century, in an effort to catch up with Marx at his 19th century best are investigating where Marx actually got his 19th century ideas from. Some are researching his sources from as far back as Epicurus in ancient Greece and others are looking back at his study of a 19th century agronomist, Dr. Justus Liebig.

I suggest that these lines of Marxist study and research reaching back thousands of years to before the Christian era – in the case of Epicutus – and before the First Wotld War – in the case of Dt. Liebig are evidence of desperation by Marxists keen to make Marx and themselves more relevant, rather than a motive of academic interest or frustrated curiosity. Particularly if we ask-why Epicurus or Liebig? And why now? True, there is clearly a dirth of social and ecological knowledge and understanding within modern mainstream sociological, ecological and political tendencies which is reflected within current anti-capitalist tendencies. However, to search for 21st century social and ecological relevance in the distant past rather than in the creaking and growning present, indicates more about the limitations of the ‘searchers’ than of the social and ecological subject which need urgent attention. Dr Justus Liebig, like Marx was ahead of his time, but their ‘time‘ was a generation or so ago and although the formers 19th century interest and expertise lay in understanding organic chemistry as applied to agriculture which do remain relevant, Marx’s 19th century ideas about the limitless productive capacity of fully automated industry being beneficial for a mass ‘socialist’ industrialised society production processes are not.

Interestingly, Marx’s sociologically derived intellectual paradigm of analysing the materialist dialectical contradictions within bourgeois ideological constructions, which he identified and exposed during his lifetime, has not been applied by his ‘Marxist’ followers to identify and expose the sociological contradictions and limitations within the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist interpretations of Marx nor those of Marx himself. Marx, along with many others before him, had considered that no individual or generations ideas and conclusions were finished, final and complete no matter how rigorous and authentic their researches had been, yet trying to explain this recurring fact of generational practical and ideological redundancy to those who believe in one of the many imaginary narratives concerning an invisible, all powerful miracle man, who created everything in the universe called God will soon get tired. I know! I did as a teenager. Yet in my lifetime I have met a similar obstinacy when trying to explain to a ‘loyal’ and ‘faithful’ Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist that these ‘outstanding’ individuals and their followers were just men of their time and that period of time did not contain sufficient knowledge, or reliable evidence and understanding to make their conclusions completely valid for their own generations time – let alone valid for all future periods.

As Trotsky once asserted (prior to his being declared an enemy of the ‘Party’ by Stalin,) that as in the case of the bourgeois nationalists following the emotional proposition that ‘my country right or wrong’ so he too was prepared to followi Lenin’s Bolshevik faction and Party whether it was -‘right or wrong’. Moreover, Trotsky made this assertion at the 13th, Congress of the Communist Party in 1924 when Stalin was already mercilessly suppressing workers and peasant oppositions and inner party rivals and who within two years of that declaration had most of his ‘party’ comrades assassinated or incarcerated in gulags and had sent a trusted party comrade all the way to Mexico to bury an ice axe in the back of Trotsky’s head to silence his criticism. It certainly did! Yet It is interesting that Trotsky in an early 1904 pamphlet (Our Tasks) had made a shrewd observation that;

“The intelligentsia can be federalist or centralist, can tend toward autonomy or autocracy, democracy or dictatorship, without in any way changing its essence, or the nature of its political interests…..The nature of the intelligentsia is so plastic and supple that no one can enclose it once and for all.” (Trotsky. Our Tasks. New Park pub. Page 107)

You bet it can! Once 21st century AI plagerism has been incorporated into individual hesitancy and Central Committee deliberations. It is interesting that Trotsky outlines a characteristic of intellectuals which not only applied to Trotsky himself and others of that early 20th century generation but remained virulent in the post-Second World War period in Europe and North America. Among the Leninist, Stalinist and Trotskyist sectarian groups between 1950 and 2,000, it was virulent – with still fading echoes of it the 21st century. Indeed, as the 21st century social, economic, environmental and ecological contradictions caused by the hiearchical mass societies brutal and misguided interface with the biological reality of life on earth, continue to crack the facade of so-called civilisation, some Marxists are once again girding their ideological loins. As I have noted, a few remaining faithful adherents of Marx and Marxism are gathering around them the intellectual note book or iPad equivalent of buckets, shovels, trowels sifting trays and eager acolytes and keeping busy by excavating the remains of Marx’s previously recorded digs into the ethhnological sub-soil of human recorded existence.

The modern day intellectual excavators are looking for previously abandoned or neglected intellectual shards and clues that might be useful in the project of saving human ‘civilisation’ (sic) from its current descent into economic and militarised barbarism. Not a mention from them of the fact that the evolution of the capitalist mode of production has substantially and sufficiently altered the social as well as the environmental landscape of life on earth sufficiently to render Marx’s 19th century view of the present and future function of Industry as well ‘out of ‘use-by-date’. Nor of the fact that the means and essence of revolutionary social transitions, as envisaged by Marx are no longer available or valid! Instead, from the Marxists and their sub-categories among the Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists, we read not a word about the generational dialectics of practical and intellectual redundancy and the need for a radical re-assessment of how humanity needs to conduct itself within a life-sustaining biosphere located on planet earth. And that the ‘solution’ for humanity is far more simple and peaceful than their current top-down speculative fantasies of ‘climb the castle walls’; ‘man the barricades’, promote civil wars and conduct armed assaults to overthrow the armed working class soldiers currently on the side of the bourgeois state. The solution is for local communities to start small, sustainable local socio-economic initiatives and encourage others to follow suit. But that still needs to be thought through and tackled consistently, rather endlessly sketching out grand plans.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2026)