Anybody, even the most, talented amongst us can be wrong, moreover some of us are more prone to being wrong than others, some are repeatedly wrong and some of us can never admit to being wrong. Being individually or collectively wrong, however, can have serious consequences, for ourselves and others. Neveryheless, for most of us this most obvious of human tendencies doesn’t really matter whether we are frequently or less frequently wrong in what we say or advise. The reason being that the majority of us human beings are rarely in contact with a vast audience, so our chance of negatively or positively effecting those not closely around us in any seriously problematic way are slim. However, a few people within hierarchical mass society systems have attained a status in which their ideas, propositions and opinions, whether well founded or mostly not, have become influential enough to effect the lives of thousands or even millions of people and, it must be said, rarely positively.

Throughout, history and in contemporary periods, Politicians, Philosophers, Military and Religious Leaders, come to mind as exemplars in this category of getting things seriously wrong, but one such individual has so far escaped serious scrutiny from those who have claimed to have been influenced by him. I refer here to Karl Marx, who although I still reckon he was as correct as he could be on the many 19th century economic and social issues he commented upon he was not always so. I also hold that he was not responsible for the eventual consequences when other social activist individuals either misunderstood or deliberately distorted the results of his researches or proposals and then implemented their own distortions in his name. For example, once the Bolshevik and Maoists leaders distortions of Marx are examined in detail this becomes obvious. However, the same criteria applies to Marx. The extracts from Marx which follow indicate that Marx was definitely wrong in a fundamental way, which directly and indirectly has led to hugely negative consequences for millions of human beings and other natural species, particularly but not exclusively during the 20th century. Consider, for example, that in his economic and social studies explaining the materialist conception of history, Marx reasoned that;

“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.” (Marx. German Ideology. Section 2 Premises. M/E Vol 5 p 31.)

Of course a premise in the sense used here by Marx is a logical proposition from which further logical inferences are drawn. This normally includes any pre-suppositions relevant to the premise. But it is obvious from the start of this sentence, that Marx has failed to include anything outside of the human-centred or anthropocentric paradigm. In fact, the first facts and premises of human existence (and history) is of course the existence of two essential bio-chemical features of life on earth. The first premise of human life and its subsequent history is the existence of an organic and inorganic bio-chemical (biological) system (biosphere) containing multiple species interactions and interconnections, which have collectively created the external conditions (air, water and nutrition) for mammalian species in general to evolve and survive. The second pre-supposition is the existence and long evolution of a series of mammalian species which have evolved into the hominid and Homo-sapien species lineage from which the latter species (us),has has evolved even further. Marx, then goes on to state;

“Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself…All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.” (ibid)

So after acknowledging the biological (physical) essence of the human species has natural conditions in which the human species exists, he nevertheless decides not to go into the actual physical (biological) nature of the human species or the natural biological conditions in which the human species finds itself in. That is a remarkable contradiction, because what then follows is not a material conception of human history, but a sociological/ intellectualised conception of human history. In deciding not to set out from these ‘natural’ physical/ biological bases, of humanity, Marx then sets out the sociological base that he will set out from. That is he sets out from a sociological distinction between animals and Mankind. It is as if the human species is not a particular mammalian form if animal species. Thus he writes;

“Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.” (ibid Emphasis added RR)

Marx has in the above quote made the common anthropocentrically biased assumption that the sociological development of planting seeds and or roots in fertile soil by human labour and reaping the results by human labour has replaced the millions of years-old evolution of the biological production of their naturally chosen nutritional species. When in fact biologically it had not. All that the much vaunted agricultural revolution of the ancient world had altered between biological species and the rest of nature was merely adopting a slight change in the location of the crop bearing fertile soil from ‘wild’ natural settings to predetermined ‘contained’ natural settings (strips or fields) of land with humanly delineated boundaries. With settled agricultural communities, the continuing natural dispersion of seeds or roots by wind or animals, was then actively assisted by human hands and feet, rather than exclusively assisted by animals, wind and gravity.

However, once planted, the biology of cell Reproduction, Metabolism and Growth by their chosen crop species had continued – as it had for multiple millions of years before – on naturally formed fertile expanses. The difference between natural hunter-gatherer picking/digging and ultimate eating and farm planting, reaping and ultimate eating did not directly influence the quality or quantity of the nutritional results, it only influenced the geographical location and extent of the fertile land subsequently used. Indeed, there is evidence that ancient and modern farming progrssively degraded the metabolically available nutritional levels of plant species used as nutrition. But just as importantly, humans were not then (and are not now even with computerised tractors etc.) producing their own means of biological subsistence; they are merely organising the location of the biological development of the nutritional species they have chosen, somewhat differently. And it must be said, this difference is frequently disastrous.

From such inaccurate and severely biological (material) evidence-light premises, Marx had further consolidated the general, anthropocentric, religiously inspired mistsken world view that nature had been gifted to humanity (with the 19th century emphasis on the Man in humanity, not god) and at the same time he had provided middle-class intellectual radicals and their political representatives with a supposedly scientific rationale for continuing to extol the hierarchical mass society form of human existence. This Marx inspired sociological vision of the future – known as socialism or communism would logically become what it actually became in the 20th century, under self-proclaimed Marxists and others (i.e. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and Castro etc.). It became a replica hierarchical mass society form with themselves as the new elite (a vanguard leadership) of an imaginary new world of egalitarian plenty. Supposedly achieved by an equally imaginary workers revolutionary process of overthrow and replacement of the capitalist elite with a socialist one. The actual sociological results of which appeared in the form of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba and (occasionally elsewhere embryonically) in the 20th century. The above abstract formulations were written by Marx in 1845 and/or conceptualised before, but Marx was merely continuing along an earlier anthropocentric line of reasoning of his in 1844 when he wrote the following;

“An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product….Through this production, nature appears as his work and as his reality….he duplicates himself not only as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.” (ibid.

Humanity, does not produce the whole of nature in any shape or form and if it ‘appears’ to some human beings that all ‘natural production’ is their own work and comprises of their whole material reality, it is clear that this reality is a virtual, sociologically produced one from written and spoken ideas. It is clearly not derived from a detailed study of the biology of nature. The above quote by Marx has been, constructed out of a series of linguistic abstractions, or ‘thought entities’ as Marx had already described them in relationship to Hegel. That form of ‘reality’ is definitely not a biological one. Unsurprisingly, it had not been constructed out of an examination of organisms and their cells surrounded as the latter are by lipid membranes and containing, mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes, Golgi apparatus, nucleus and numerous other functioning organelles. I write unsurprising omitted because these microscopic detailed physical attributes of nature were at that time mostly unknown.

Therefore, the above anthropocentrically constructed excerpt vividly and quite accurately summarises a general, schizophrenic intellectual disorder arising from a biologically divided collective life. The hierarchical mass society was a form of human existence in which for the first time in hominid evolution, the human species as individuals and collectives had created a division in ther lives between existing amid a biological real world of (N-M-G-R + A – D) sequential biological processes and a sociologically constructed physical and intellectual (virtual) social world of hierarchically organised mass societies. These societies were organised around alienated and alienating labour processes, practices and experiences which became reflected back into its community level of intellectual understanding. This elite guided surplus – product producing system – coincided with the development of a professional intellectual elite who occupied and played an alienated and alienating role within it. The historical process was so consistently alienating that Marx concluded that for the human species;

Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs adding stature to himself…” (Capital Vol. 1 ibid)

Marx has here intellectually reversed the physical relationship between biology (nature) and the human offspring of biological evolution (humanity). Nature is posited as an organ of and for human activity rather than human activity being an long-term organic result of the immensely long evolutionary metamorphosis of multi-cellular organisms into animals, mammals, hominid species and finally Homo Sapiens. Treating nature in this way may have added intellectual stature to some self-absorbed narcisistic elite human beings, but human ingenuity and activity was already degrading the physical status of nature and along with that the status of the human species and its future. For those among us who have grasped that the 19th century Marx was not only significantly short of modern evidence concerning biology and hierarchical mass societies but also wrong in stressing the superiority of humanity over nature, this suggests more than just caution in giving to Marx more credit than was, or is, due.

Marx’s assertion that human industry was nature achieving its highest point in biological evolution, requires us think carefully before rushing to regurgitate old cliches and formulations made by him, Engels and other 19th and 20th century intellectuals who claimed to have carried his ideas forward. It requires us to read Marx – not slowly – as some backward facing ‘Marxists’ are currently recommending – but critically! And even before such critical re-reading of Marx we need to critically reflect on our own level of understanding or misunderstanding If the latter itself (our own level of understanding) is rooted no further forward than 19th century levels of evidence and 19th century levels of consciousness about that evidence, as provided by Marx and others, then we have become part of any problem for life on earth rather than individual contributors to any future collective solutions. We need to avoid what the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist ‘Marxists’ did in the 20th century when they (and others) knew nearly enough biology but intellectually swamped that cerebral locationt or drowned it out by copious deluges of anthropocentrically focussed sociological theories centred around themselves as the ‘vanguard’ leaders of humanity. Marx knew full well the general material basis of life on earth and the importance of fully recognising this fact, and yet was then deflected into noting the development of a two-fold appearance, of reality, writing;

“…life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things…..Therefore, in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its implications and to accord it it’s due importance…The production of life, both of ones own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. ” (Marx. ‘The German Ideology’. Section 1 History. Emphasis added. R.R.)

It is with the addition of the sentence highlighted in bold that we emphatically encounter an ideologically inspired caveat to the first and second sentences in the above extract. It is this which conflates the biological with the sociological. The first half of that highlighted sentence asserts that Homo sapien human beings have begun to produce their own continued biological existence via a social ‘production’ process as well as their species existence via a biological process of procreation. This is merely a continuation of his mistaken anthropocentric assumption that agricultural production had replaced nature (bio-chemical and biological processes) and substituted the human species for the multi-species natural production of nutrition which humans consumed. When in fact, as previously noted, human agriculture had only transferred the location of natural production from ‘wild’ soil environments to partially pre-prepared soil environments, landscaped by human agriculturalists. The ecologically and climatically sequenced bio-chemical processes of (N-M-G-R + A-D) continued as before because cells, microorganisms, plants, insects and animals can do no other than continue that evolutionary bracketed process and trajectory.

And of course this biological essence of life on earth also includes the reproductive phase which Marx identifies as pro-creation, because even this ‘private’ reproductive activity and ability is a totally dependent biological phase, although that phase also has a social dimension in all social species, not only the human species. This is because the substantive essence of all life on earth; large, medium, small or microscopic is bio-chemical or biological not sociological. Sociological patterns in human societies are simply the human form of dancing to (or prostrating) themselves to the timing, tempo and duration of the biological and astronomical rhythms of our solar system not to our sociological calender systems. But by starting from the two false premises a) that humanity was now reproducing the whole of nature and b) producing themselves socially; and collapsing the two aspects of human life (biology and sociology) into one, Marx continued along a commonly accepted anthropocentric path of reasoning. It was an intellectual path created long before him and to which he had added his own mistakes. Problematically, however, the anthropocentric path with nuanced modifications was still there for others to ‘follow’ and even for those bourgeois anthropocentric narcissists who wanted nothing to do with Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism and the egalitarian ideas he also promoted. Interestingly, Marx explains the logical reasoning behind this conclusion clearly and succinctly.

“Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the others existence for him. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence…...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.” (Marx. 1844 Manuscripts part V. Emphasis added. RR )

Whatever, harmony there may have been or was previously between the human species and the biological organisms and sequences which eventually evolved into that form, had been added a progressively accelerating disharmony with the creation of hierarchical mass societies and their voracious modes of production. A disharmony culminating in the commodification of of organic life and inorganic material. Sadly, although Marx accurately depicted the de-humanising class nature of the capitalist mode of production and its crisis-prone boom and slump cycles, he lacked the means to fully understand the biological dimensions of life on earth and thus draw more appropriate conclusions. He too was also immersed within the common of core of anthropocentric intellectualised ideologies to distance his own revolutionary-humanist criticism from, (or to break away from) orbiting around that intellectual core.

Consequently, Marx saw that the enormous productive powers of industrial methods of production unleashed by the capitalist pursuit of profit, was being artificially restricted by capitalists particularly when profits slumped or ceased to be returned. His idea that if the oppressed workers of the world would just unite and overthrow the capitalist class and utilise industry themselves collectively, they would then be ‘free’ to enjoy the full fruits of their labour. He did not realise that industrial level mass production – on a world scale – would need such high levels of extraction and consumption of organic and inorganic material, that it would undermine and/or degrade the biosphere’s ability to produce and reproduce its resources. That ultimately this orocess would lead to extinctions, pollutions, climatic dislocations and would thus undermine the planetsry foundations of life on earth as a whole.

Marx had continued along the same anthropocentric line of reasoning that dated back at least to Aristotle’s patriarchal deduction from the product of male/female sexual intercourse in which a new member of the human species develops inside the female womb, therefore the patriarchal wing of the anthropocentric coalition presumed that; man begets man. Marx continues that thread of anthropocentric evidence limited thinking; “….you see, therefore, even physically man owes his existence to man” (ibid section V). The extent to which Marx and his generation are rooted in the sociological, virtual world of intellectualised thinking is demonstrated by the ommission of any reference to humanity as a whole or the fact that biology in the form of life on earth – as a whole – provides and sustains the biosphere in which the human species (and all other species) can exist with enough energy and for long enough, to begin procreating and evolving.

Each individual human being within the human species owes his or her existence to the biological evolution of the human species as a whole, not simply to our parents, our religions, our nationalities or modes of production. Moreover, the evolution of the human species as whole owes its collective existence to the existence of life on earth as a whole, from the contributions of microorganisms, plants, insects and animals, etc. It’s not that Marx doesn’t knows this or that he does and has just intentionally or unintentionally omitted it. It is evidence of a more fundamental problem than that. It is because his 19th century world view (and much of ours in the 21st,) was still mired in the anthropocentrically fixated socialisation of the hierarchical mass society modes of production, socialisation and intelectualisation. The final extract below concisely summarises this ideological anthropocentric hold on one of the most perceptive thinkers of the 19th century.

“But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the emergence, the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so that he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.” (Marx. Volume 3, page 305. Emphasis added RR)

Marx undoubtedly did his 19th century best; but even our intellectual best is not always the ultimate evaluation of what is accurate or valid in one particular generation or another. That realisation is a reminder to continue to pursue our researches, but with less dogmatism and more humility.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026)

Part 2. Why correcting the human understanding of life on earth matters. Will follow soon.