critical-mass.net

Indications of the lack of serious Climate and Ecological concerns from various publicised Anticapitalist perspectives.

A) “Today the fate of the earth as a home for humanity is in question” (This appeared in a radical left blog)

The fate of the earth as an evolved integrated, interdependent biosphere system in which all species are playing active parts in sustaining that biosphere does not feature anywhere in this first perspective. This cannot be entirely surprising because the authors of this perspective and presumably their followers, view planet earth as primarily a home for humanity. This anthropocentric perspective on life on earth is basically a secular rehash of the monotheistic religious anthropocentric ideology developed by the early, hierarchical mass society religious and philosophic elites of the middle east. Therefore, that main anthropocentric essence also became tangled up within the Abramic Monotheistic belief systems and is the same ‘essence’ that continues to this day. It exists in the idea that the earth belongs to humanity to do as it pleases with everything in it and on it. The mythical element in the ’emergent visions’ of ancient and less ancient religious elites and their form of  Anthropocentrism lay in the ‘belief’ that God made a man and then a woman, and then subsequently;

B),”…blessed them and God said to them ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air , and over the cattle, and over all the wild beasts that move upon the earth.” (Genesis 1 verse 28.)

The secular version of anthropocentric ideology strips away most of the myth and magic from this ancient anthropocentric theocratic narrative but nonetheless ends up retaining it in practice within modern secular humanity in its bourgeois form. The elites within modern hierarchical mass societies having inaugurated and globalised the capitalist mode of production, have realised the same ancient Abrahamic aspiration of subduing the earth and having domination ‘over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air , and over the cattle, and over all the wild beasts that move upon the earth’. Thus the bourgeois and petite bourgeoisie elites in control of modern hierachical mass societies also treat the earth as a home for themselves and humanity, as long as rents or mortgages are paid to land owners. It appears that some of the modern left also have ’emergent visions’ this time of ‘ecological civilisation’ and ‘planned degrowth’. Thus we read;

C) There is a need to promote “emergent visions of ecological civilization” and “planned degrowth”, on the other.” (same radical left blog.)

The concepts of “ecological civilisation’ and “planned growth or degrowth’ are firmly rooted in the bourgeois capitalist hierarchical mass society anthropocentric ideology. This hierarchical mass society form, whether controlled by an individualised ruling elite (as in liberal and neo-liberal capitalism, per the west) or controlled by a collectivist ruling elite (as state capitalism as per China and the former Soviet Union) both of which forms seek to regulate economic activity by individual or collective planning. And of course this control and planning pre-supposes a state structure of social enforcement and a planning hierarchy, with all that that entails in terms of authority and the enforcement of its economic plans And again in this anti-capitalist planned de-growth perspective for the future of life on earth there is no reference to the central problem of preserving and sustaining the entire biosphere. A biosphere which of course through its essential species provides all life on earth with the oxygenated air it needs to breath and the food chains they need to obtain nutrition from. The implicit and explicit anthropocentric  assumptions behind the above statements is that that ‘hierarchical mass societies of human beings should continue to be classed as civilisation provided they are a bit less ecologically destructive’

Another socialist perspective called up the name of a long dead Einstein to add weight to the authors views on the necessity of superseding capitalism. By way of a summary of Einsteins views he writes;

D) “Einstein was a socialist. He believed in socialism because, as a convinced equalitarian, he was opposed to the class division in capitalism and to the exploitation of man by man which he felt this system facilitated more ingeniously than any previous economic organization. He was a socialist because he was certain that a capitalist economy could not adequately perform for the welfare of all people and that the economic anarchy of capitalism was the source of many evils in contemporary society. And, finally, he was a socialist because he was convinced that, under socialism, there was a greater possibility of attaining the maximum degree of freedom compatible with the public welfare than under any other system known to man.” (Left blog)

The Anthropocentric paradigm in the above extract, is revealed by the fact that it is the ‘exploitation of man by man’ which is the central concern, not the exploitation and extraction of all organic ‘life on earth’ in general and inorganic material in particular.  They use Einstein to advocate that it is the ‘welfare of all people‘ and the ‘maximum degree of freedom for people’ which are the focus of this socialism, and many other anti-capitalist ideological (political) frameworks.  Here is another example from a left article setting out reasons for some form of socialism in the US;

E) “The main reason is capitalism’s profound organic crisis. The Great Recession kicked off a long global slump of stagnant growth and low profitability, which has deepened class and social inequality throughout the world. That has been compounded by several other systemic crises, from inter-imperial rivalry to regional wars, global heating, mass migration, and pandemics.”

And;

F) “The Left failed to put forward an alternative to Harris and Trump that could have expressed the deep opposition to them both. We did not succeed in building either independent social and class organization or a new party out of the vast wave of struggle from Occupy through the Red State Teachers Revolt, the Women’s March, and Black Lives Matter.”

And;

G) “There was no credible Left alternative on the ballot that combined progressive positions on social and economic issues.”

All these statements are focussed exclusively on the current and future situation of the human species alone. There is not even a dim awareness of the fact that even if that is your exclusive focus, humanity cannot survive without ensuring the entire evolved integrated biosphere also survives in sufficient numbers to ensure that oxygen and energy rich sources of nutrition from photosynthetic organisms is available for all species. The condition of the biosphere and the inter-dependent and integrated life cycles which sustain and maintain it, cannot be tacked on in some eventual afterthought or a later hastily drawn up Appendix some time in the future. A fully revolutionary perspective in the modern era must correct the ill-informed, mistaken and short-sighted perspectives of past generations and put ‘life on earth’ in general, front and centre of it’s current and future perspectives.

Another radical left article announced the call for a new workers political  party to be set up, and asserted the following;.

H) “…at the heart of its politics must be principles of anti-imperialism against the US as well as all other great powers and of solidarity with all struggles of the oppressed and exploited, without exception. Such internationalism is necessary to meet the challenges of our epoch…..we must build stronger infrastructures of dissent, mass organizations for social struggle, rank-and-file groups in unions, and a new workers’ party”.

‘Internationalism, infrastructures of dissent, mass organisations, rank and file groups in unions and a new workers party, is just an example of the 21st century left regurgitating the 19th and 20th century objectives of the then left. These objectives were based upon the European and North American successes of capitalism in creating a massive organised international working class, based in huge factories, deep mines, vast commercial centres and global transport hubs, who could be convinced by propaganda and by difficult crisis times to rebel and take over the factories, shops etc., and run their own societies of mass production, mass organic and inorganic extraction, mass distribution, mass consumption and mass waste material disposal. The propaganda was for a future workers controlled industrial paradise of plenty, and the crisis would be triggered by slump and unemployment. Despite its superficial plausibility, that eco-light scenario didn’t happen – anywhere! And in the few instances were workers and peasants successfully revolted as in Russia, China and Cuba what occurred in its place was the following. Middle class, often self-declared Marxist revolutionaries, seized political and military control of the mass society model and became the new ruling class.

Those 19th and 20th century middle-class elites, who identified as ‘Marxist’ seemed not to have considered Marx’s proposal of a “merciless criticism of everything”, written in 1841 (Letter Marx to Ruge) and his conclusion at the end of section 6 in German Ideology that Revolution was “necessary” because a) the ruling classes “cannot be overthrown” except by revolution; and b) because only in a “revolution” can the “class “overthrowing” them rid themselves of the “muck of ages” and make themselves fit to “found society anew”. The revolutionary-humanist Marx, sensibly did not specify what a new form of society would look like, because he considered that was to be decided by the masses themselves not by self-appointed do-gooders or as he called them; “philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes” (Marx. Correspondence p 307).

Furthermore, I suggest that if the masses were to understand the direct and indirect links between hierarchical mass society extraction, production, consumption and waste disposal methods and its detrimental effects upon the organic life-support system which produces the oxygen and food chains they need in order to survive, they will not wish to replicate, either traditional capitalist or state capitalist (socialist) forms of hierarchical mass societies. Founding human societies anew for now and the future, requires human societies to end the current and historical social forms of socio-economic over-production and over-consumption. To be viable, present and future humanity needs to rebalance the level of human consumption of inorganic and organic material and maintain it – at least within the natural reproductive rates of the organic species they rely upon – and to also fully recycle the inorganic material they consume.

However, at the level of understanding of the 19th and 20th century intellectuals who led those previous political revolutions, took power and forced the workers and peasants in Russia, China and Cuba etc., to return to being exploited as mass production workers in mass production industries or in large-scale agriculture and mass extraction, mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption and mass pollution industries. As Lenin noted before he died, these were state-capitalist controlled industries, transport and commodity outlets, in which the rate of extraction, production, consumption and pollution actually accelerated, (and was boasted about) in the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cuba. The self-declared ‘marxists’ in the early Soviet Union, for example, were so anthropocentrically focused that specialists in biology (Lysenko, Schmalhausen, etc.) attempted to engineer natural reproductive rhythms to fit mass society consumption needs.

These biological, techno fixes are  something that modern capitalist dominated hierarchical mass societies attempt to do as all such societies constantly try to do. But of course, despite certain limited irrigation and selective breeding initiatives, this bio-tech fix ultimately failed in the Soviet era and will fail in the modern. Starting from human species needs and trying bio-chemically engineer specific parts of nature which are integral to the whole complex interdependent biosphere will either fail or negatively de-stabilise the interconnected biosphere. So despite these attempts,  the late 19th and early 20th century superficially plausible scenario based on anthropocentric – ‘Internationalism, infrastructures of dissent, mass organisations, rank and file groups in unions and a new workers party’ – did not ‘found society anew’ at the time and hasn’t since.

And of course that 19th and 20th century superficial, eco-blind anthropocentric based scenario cannot be intelligently championed now. This is because, the general reproductive rate of the species populating the organic biosphere of planet earth and used by humanity cannot be replaced as fast as mass societies numbering nine billion can consume them. In the case of the inorganic material humanity now relies upon, it is limited by the fact that it is finite and cannot reproduce itself. The hierarchical mass society model over four or five thousand years in biological terms has succeeded in progressively undermining and destroying it’s own local, then its international inorganic and organic resources and now its global organic and inorganic naturally distributed biospheric resources.

With regard to the group quoted in extract G) above out of 16 pages of anthropocentric based analysis and concerns, there is no reference to any of the above or mention made of the historic and contemporary ecological, climatic and polluting effects of hierarchical mass society formations upon the basic biological foundations of all forms of life on earth. It appears that the vast majority of the few remaining anti-capitalist sectarian groups and tendencies are simply re-hashing the anti-capitalist, anthropocentric programmes of their past  heroes or heroines and are replicating the sectarian dogmatism of the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist traditions.

The fact that these 19th and 20th century ‘leaders’ were just individuals and were severely limited by both the knowledge and understanding of the historical period they lived in but limited also by their shared anthropocentric bourgeois honed ideology of human centred species fixation on itself, is ignored. The fact that they have also failed to initiate any serious form of revolutionary-humanist practice in their personal and collective structures which is worth replicating, is also a glaring omission in the writings of their contemporary followers.
Here is another Anticapitalist perspective, on post-capitalist forms of hierarchical mass societies and the final exerpt for the moment. The promoter of this perspective writes;

I) “…the Soviet model brought significant economic and social progress for some 60 years. In my view, the problems of the Soviet model stemmed from its authoritarian and repressive political institutions and the highly centralised form of economic planning that was adopted. But while the Soviet model lacked popular democracy, it did include the key institutions that socialists have long supported: production for use rather than profit, public ownership of enterprises, and a planned economy. The entire experience of the Soviet model holds useful and important lessons for a future socialism.”

And;

J) “The Soviet model transformed the lives of the Soviet people for the better in many measurable ways. Between 1950 and 1975, consumption per person in the Soviet Union grew faster than in the US. By the 1980s, Soviet production surpassed that of the US in steel, cement, metal-cutting and metal-forming machines, wheat, milk, and cotton. It had more doctors and hospital beds per capita than the US. There was continuous full employment, stable prices, and no ups and downs of the business cycle, while income was relatively equally distributed.”

The recommendations for an alternative future form of mass society from this tradition, were then summarised as follows;

K) 1) Economic allocation decisions are made by all parties affected by the decision. That includes workers, consumers, and the local community.

2) Differences are settled whenever possible by negotiation and compromise among the relevant parties. If necessary, majority voting can be used.

3) The mass media are free to criticise the state and its officials.

4) Individuals are free to criticise the state and its officials.

L) “Democratic socialism will inevitably face a contradiction between wide participation in decision-making and the need to make allocation decisions in a timely manner, as allocation decisions are inter-dependent in an actual economy. It will not be perfect, but it promises the best possible future for the human species.”

Note that in the (I), (J) and (K) extracts, production and consumption are praised and the class system is to be kept in place; a distinction is made between, consumers and communities, apparently not everyone will be workers. Differences, whenever possible, are to be settled by negotiation and compromise. If negotiation and compromise is not possible who resolves it, the state officials noted in point 4, which citizens and the media can criticise? It becomes clear that the model in mind of the proposers of this vision of the future hierarchical mass society have in mind the old Leninist and Stalinist championed State Capitalist form, which not only collapsed from it’s own internal contradictions and from its deadly sectarian violence against any opposition or criticism, but despite the most brutal forms of state oppression still collapsed anyway.

Conclusions.

The eleven extracts, (B) to (L) some taken from extremely long documents, others from reasonably short ones, exhibit the same basic anthropocentric perspective both in relationship to a severe intellectual and practical blind spot concerning an understanding of the absolute dependency of humanity upon nature and therefore the joint responsibility of humanity to protect all of it. This biological blind spot is combined with an inability to critically and self-critically address the contradictions implicit as well as explicit in the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. For example, the contradictions between the human species and the rest of the integrated and inter-dependent biosphere of millions of species are not exclusive to the capitalist mode of production. That is an inherited historical mistaken assumption based upon an insufficient level of material evidence and biological understanding that was general in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries when practical and intellectual opposition to, and analysis of, the capitalist mode of production began. Those who led the way and those who immediately followed those generations cannot be blamed for this lack of evidence or deficient understanding during those three centuries. But modern anti-capitalists can.

During those earlier three centuries the visual and statistical information needed to fully understand the above problems was lacking. The optical, statistical, medical and chemical tools and trained personnel needed to identify and visualise the direct evidence of large-scale climate change, air and land pollution, ecological loss and multicellular organism degenerations, had not been invented or perfected. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries however, through xray technology, electron scanning microscopes, satellite imaging, computer data processing and weather and climate simulations, and much else, the evidence, previous generations lacked to more comprehensively understand life on earth and what is degrading it is now available. This evidence now points to the fact that the contradictions between humanities increasing mass society rate of consuming the products of nature and the ability of ‘nature’ to replace the human induced losses is actually a product of the hierarchical mass society system.

Moreover, it is not just any one particular mode of production, it is all hierachical mass society modes of production. Capitalism, as the latest mode of production within the modern hierarchical mass society aggregation has merely extended and intensified the localised country and regional overproduction and resource exhaustion levels. Capitalism,  is merely a ‘special’ and more complex financially dominated case of the hierarchical mass society aggregation. In the ancient and modern past, for a period of time these localised and regional over-consumption resource losses could be compensated for by ancient and then modern colonialist and imperialist incursions and resource seizures. But by mid to late 20th century the problems of over-extracted essential resources had been extended to a global dimension. The organic and inorganic resource limits of our one planet are now close to being reached and now represent a barrier not only to further hierarchical mass society growth, but also a barrier to even sustaining the current level of human consumption.

It should now be empirically and logically obvious that the consumption of organic and inorganic material used as nutrition and as other beneficial support materials – for any species – cannot for very long exceed the general rate of natural reproduction or replenishment of that essential organic or inorganic material itself. Consumption can only exceed reproduction in exceptional circumstances and then only for limited durations, before the obvious outcome begins to occur. The ‘system’ begins to collapse at its weakest or most vulnerable parts. But clearly this is not yet obvious to most of the pro-capitalist bourgeois establishment (as noted in Part 1), but also to the current anti-capitalist left because not only do they not mention it but they keep on repeating the limited emerging visions of their 19th and 20th century predecessors. Yet it should be obvious that if nine billion people (an unimaginable number to 19th and 20th century anticapitalist radicals) do not collectively replace or regrow the inorganic and organic material they collectively consume, eventually the quality and quantity of the inorganic and organic material they need to survive, will diminish or disappear.

This year on year extraction, production and consumption, (and therefore, progressive reduction in essential resources) will lead – sooner or later – to life and death struggles; first over the immediate essentials of life (particularly water – both in quality and quantity; air – both in quality and quantity; and nutrition – both in quality and quantity) and second; to struggles over control of the land-based locations of these essentials. The first form of struggle is already occuring within some countries between the haves and the have nots and food banks and homelessness are the early manifestations of the ‘have nots’, whilst mansions and scenic leisure trips into space are manifestations of the ‘haves’. The second form of struggle is again taking place between countries over land and resources and these current manifestations are clear and present; by Israel clearing Gaza and the West Bank of indigenous Palestinians; by Russia clearing parts of Ukraine of its indigenous residents; and of course the resouce battles occurring in parts of Africa.

If humanity does not address this issue of ecological imbalance and the responsibilities required by our species to reverse the current excesses of humanity in consuming nature beyond it’s natural rate of reproduction, particularly in the bourgeois era, then the direction things are going is practically and logically clear. Production and consumption motivated by the elite driven pursuit of surplus value, transformed into profit, will lead to even further extraction, pollution, species extinctions and climate instability. Consequently the above noted resource struggles will result in further wars and genocides, which, as was the case in the 20th century, will be waged over which set of elites will survive and which will perish in perpetuating its rule over their preferred mode of production.

However, in such struggles, as the historical records indicates, it will be the non-elite citizens who will suffer the most casualties and hardships as they will be conscripted to do the killing and culling of their own species to save the elites preferred mode of production. But even further episodes of mass human on human sacrifice in the millions will not solve the fundamental contradiction as the First and Second World Wars demonstrated. After a late 19th and early 20th century crisis of overproduction and over consumption of local and regional resources, wars broke out over territorial expansion for control over inorganic resources (for middle eastern oil and Russian oil) and organic resources (eastern agricultural land). When the war ended the whole elite driven production and over-production for military total-war purposes was redirected to industrial and commercial purposes.

Until the hierarchical mass society system is rejected in theory and practice and internal social relationships and external relationships with nature  are revolutionised – however long that takes – that pattern of overproduction, social crisis, ecological and climate crises will be the recurring pattern. I suggest that in the meantime, any individual, small group or larger collective, wishing to assist the masses in understanding the full scope of the problems that the ongoing evolution of life on earth is now facing would be failing utterly if they did not extricate themselves from the restricted anthropocentric ideological paradigm we have inherited from past and present generations. Exiting Anthropocentrism and commencing to view ‘life on earth’ from the perspective of all the species contributing to the upkeep of a habitable bioshere – which all species need to continue to exist – is now an essential intellectual prerequisite to any viable future practical attempts to found human societies anew.

Roy Ratcliffe (January 2025)