GLOBAL PRODUCTION & DESTRUCTION (Part 2)

Posted on July 4, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In part one of this series further evidence was produced to demonstrate that hierarchical mass societies prior to the ones dominated by the capitalist mode of production, were also dominated by the characteristics of increasing levels of production and destruction. Elites in control of such societies always wanted more essential and non-essential material. Consequently, hierarchical mass societies of humans have always exhausted the local supplies of inorganic and organic materials faster than local nature could reproduce them and so stealing resources from other human beings and other life forms, becomes a periodic strategy sooner or later.

In this part two, evidence will be presented that this phenomenon, because it is structural, still continues. Thus on February 4, 2022, before the actual invasion of Ukraine territory, Vladimir Putin travelled to Beijing, and during that visit Putin and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping exchanged a partnership agreement with no limits attached to it. Since that date, China has not condemned the invasion and destruction of much of Ukraine and has supplied military equipment to assist Russia in that dedtruction. The hierarchical mass society system grinds out and reveals it’s own inner logic.

It is clear from this ‘no limits partnership’ that the accrimonious disagreements leading to the well known Sino Soviet split and even a possible Sino-Soviet war during the mid 20th century that those particular tensions are no longer in existence. But it is less well known that there is some close family history involved on the Chinese side. Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun, became influential within the 20th century Chinese Communist Party and was promoted to (and led) a Chinese-Soviet Friendship Association from shortly after the final victory of Chinese Communist Forces in 1949. However, Xi Jinping’s father was purged by the Maoists for being suspected of colluding with the Soviets.

Despite being assisted by the Russian Communists and having the same ideological framework as the Russian Soviet system the Chinese regime also soon operated on the customary hierarchical mass society socio-economic assumptions that the Russian Communists had already adopted under Lenin and Stalin. The assumptions being a class system of; a ruling elite class; an administrative elite class; and a class of workers in industry and agriculture. In addition, the two so-called ‘socialist’ regimes did not combine economic and social forces but quickly became rivals and competitors, for resources, territory and ideological influence on the world stage.

It is clear that not long after their ascendency, both regimes abandoned their earlier ideological commitment to something they called ‘socialism’ but which was still an authoritarian and hierarchical version of social control and ruthless exploitation of wage labour. The concept of a workers state and workers control was never implemented and campaigning for and world revolution remained nothing more than a rhetorical gesture. Therefore, for multiple decades they have approached each other as hierarchical mass societies both committed to the capitalist method and means of production and both effectively run by one party political regimes. So their no limits agreement needs to be understood in this real socio-economic context. It is not even a renewal of the old state capitalist form of hierarchical mass society. Since both regimes are in open socio-economic and military rivalry with the USA and the EU, the hierarchical elites in each bloc have agreed to have no limits to their mutual support against the NATO alliance headed by the USA and Europe.

It also needs to be remembered that both the 20th century Bolshevik Leninist/Stalinist elite and the 20th century Maoist elite saw their world historic task as to become the leaders and promoters of world socio-economic revolutionary activity based firmly on combining forms of wage labour and state control of past stored up labour or capital. That is to say that their original intentions were to promote political revolutions to initiate regimes that would put into state ownership all the previous private means of production (thus private capital would become state controlled capital) and the regimes communist elites would control the state by authoritarian or totalitarian means. These state-capitalist forms of hierarchical mass societies were always intended to employ the workers as wage and salary slaves, and to replace previous individual or corporate capitalist elites with politically appointed elites.

Ever since their inception, the socialist and communist elites of Russia and China have controlled their wage slaves via their authoritarian bureaucratic and state law enforcement institutions – and have done so ruthlessly. So within less than one generation, that world revolution rhetoric was abandoned in its Bolshevik and Maoist iterations along with their state capitalist forms of economic production, but of course the hierarchy retained the hierarchical mass society form and in due course re-privatised the states capital assets which benefited the new hierarchical elite.

Consequently, both these regimes are now unambiguously committed to the capitalist method of production and commited to the continued existence of a privileged elite to both control socio-economic affairs and to benefit from that enforced relationship. Therefore, they both exhibit the structural motives of production and destruction of inorganic nature in general and of all organic life forms in particular. These highly politicised versions of hierarchical mass societies have just joined the ranks of all hierarchical mass societies and have become a continuing part of the problem for humanity even though some of the elite involved thought themselves to be the solution. But then all elites think that whether they are aristocrats, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists or fascists.

These facts alone should be a reason not to spread illusions that the 20th century petite bourgeois ideological expressions of Bolshevism, Maoism (as with those of Liberal, Conservative, socialist, social democratic or fascist) 9have anything positive to offer 21st century humanity. With this in mind, there is another important reason to reject the suggestions of those exhibiting this 100 year old uncritical and misinformed left nostalgia for 20th century Bolshevism and Moaism. Since many of those individuals and groups uncritically peddling these 100 year illusions in 2024, claim to be influenced by Marx and Engels, it is worth contrasting their own social and historic responsibility with how Marx and Engels dealt with the passage of time and the repetition of old dogmas. In a Crtique of the Gotha Programme, produced by a left faction of the German Social Democratic Party, in 1875, Marx noted that his purpose in writing this criticism was;

“…to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which cost so much effort to instill into the Party……by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists.” (Marx. Gotha Programme.)

The contrast Marx drew between a ‘realistic outlook’ and ‘idealistic nonsense’ and his scathing remarks concerning ideas turned into dogmas and amounting to ‘trash’ and ‘verbal rubbish’, just couldn’t be made clearer. How both Marx and Engels faced up to their own past mistakes and illusions, is also informative in this regard. Writing earlier about the crisis situation during the 1850’s Fredrick Engels, commenting on behalf of himself and Marx, wrote the following;

“But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at the time to have been an illusion. It has done even more: it has not merely dispelled the erroneous notions then held; it has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion.” (Engels. ‘The Two Tactics of Social Democracy.’)

Now I agree with the statements by both Marx and Engels that neither were ‘Marxists’ as they both publicly insisted at various times in order to distance themselves from such illusions and dogma and I remain somewhat critical of Engels, particularly after Marx had died and was no longer available to correct Engels on his misinterpretations of his ideas. However, the above extract does display a crucially important characteristic they both adhered to. It reveals a level of honesty and humility that both Marx and Engels applied throughout their lives. It emphatically illustrates their ability to publicly admit being wrong and to adjust their assessments of socio-economic developments in relation to the changing conditions introduced by the technological dynamism of the capitalist mode of production. They display a level of honesty and integrity that I have found missing in most of their self-declared followers.

In my sixty plus years of studying as a working class activist and participant observer of the left tendencies of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism as well as of the many bourgeois political tendencies from Labour, Liberal and Conservative, honesty and integrity have been a routinely absent individual and collective dimension. Never admitting being wrong; rarely diligent in even reading the longer analytic economic and political studies written by Marx; never apologising for misleading others with their often half-baked opinions; and never being embarrassed by lying to (or deceiving) each other and their followers. These political symptoms have become not just a hallmark of the original bourgeois hierarchical elites but also of many of those petite-bourgeois so-called anti-capitalist radicals who claimed to be opposed to the capitalist system and yet who aim to become part of a future governing elite.

So in stark contrast to the 20th and 21st century ‘Marxists’, left sectarians and other bourgeois and petite bourgeois tendencies, Marx and Engels in these and many other extracts, openly noted that their earlier assessments and recommendations could be the result of their own illusions and erroneous notions. More important I suggest, is their recognition; that during their own lifetime, the historical unfolding of reality had on many occasions also ‘completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight’. If the most astute and rigorous anti-capitalist thinkers of the 19th century knew that after a short passage of time and after some accumulated material changes, their earlier assumptions were wrong and required a ‘closer examination’, then how much more so, should a closer examination of the relevance of 19th and 20th century opinions and notions be required in the 21st century?

Since Marx and Engels studied the socio-economic system in Europe, there have been Two World Wars, further Globalisation, Automated levels of Industrialised production, 24/7 global Air and sea transport, numerous Fascist type regimes, and the collapse of two supposedly Marxist-led revolutions in Russia and China. Then on top of all that economic and political change we now have climate change, ecological destruction and serious species extinctions, which were all unknown to Marx and Engels. Furthermore, how much credence can be given to those anti-capitalists in 2024 who simply regurgitate and recommend these century old opinions and notions by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao and their often context-specific and unconvincing notions, without issuing any warnings and caveats to their readers? Working people would be extremely unwise to put their trust in such uncritical and unself-critical advocates of anything to do with important issues of the future of their own welfare and that of life on earth as a whole.

There is indeed a profound crisis facing anthropocentric focussed humanity and that crisis extends beyond the disfunctional economic, financial, social and political spheres of hierarchical mass society global living. The crisis now reaches deeper than repetitions of warfare and genocide and deep into the very bio-chemical foundations and climatically evolved cycles of life on earth itself. Therefore, it should be obvious that these increasingly deep and wide levels of 21st century crisis will not and can not be understood or negated on the basis of 20th century anthropocentric ideologies with merely the tacked-on addition of an appendix expressing vague ecological awareness on the end of 19th and 20th century type manifesto’s and political party programmes. Unless the extent of the above noted material changes and social crisis within the current anthropocentric hierarchical mass society is reflected in the consciousness of those who have at least recognised there is a serious problem, then the answers to new problems will continue to be cobbled together from partial readings of such dredged up ast opinions. In any case it should be equally clear that simply regurgitating past opinions derived during previous historical stages of the hierarchical mass society systems is no longer good enough.

For example, proposing to peacefully remove the privately owned capitalist mode of production from within hierarchical mass society structures (even if that were possible in reality) and assuming that hierarchical mass societies would still continue on the basis of an alternstive elite who would determine – from their own perspective – what is produced, when it is produced, where it is produced and how much is produced. Similarly, the contradictory anti-capitalist promoted idea that cities and countries of multiple millions can function humanely on the basis of a top-down but self-governing multitude (which was suggested in a ‘left’ document that I read only this month) is pure fantasy. With numerous divisions of labour between those who produce the basic bio-chemical essentials of living (food, clothing and accomodation etc.) and  those who consume them, there arise profound social contradictions when the numbers increase beyond a certain point.

There are therefore limits to the numbers who can socially aggregate on that basis without conflict arising and of course with conflict comes the need for social control which in turn leads logically to the imposition of a separate controlling hierarchy with the means to enforce their control.  Also for another form of mass society future to be possible, whether some people like it or not, it will need to be one which collectively restricts the amount of production and destruction it routinely engages in. Humanity, needs to reduce it’s own production, consumption and the destruction of natural resources to a level at (or below) the naturally evolved rate of reproduction of all those essential life-forms in the food (and environmental renewal) chains, upon which all life on earth depends. Therefore, to ensure a future for a continued blue (and green) planet, rather than a red one,  a radically different form of human aggregation, and a different existential purpose and process of production and consumption for humanity will be needed.

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)

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GLOBAL PRODUCTION & DESTRUCTION (Part 1)

Posted on June 30, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In the globalised system of hierarchical mass societies the combined global input of raw materials and the combined global output of production and waste materials – issuing from all countries – are staggering in their volume and frequency. The results of this 24/7/365 economic activity constitute the primary factors which have led to the global pollution of air, land, sea and fresh water. The combined raw material extraction, commodity production, transportation, consumption and waste deposition, is a direct result of the current industrialised and now automated method and mode of production.

It is this mode of production in general which is also resulting in climate change, polar ice cap melting, sea level rises, high and low temperature fluctuations, vast areas of ecological destruction and escalating cases of species loss. Crucially, some of the species losses are those essential to life in general but which are routinely taken for granted such as microorganisms, plants, algae and insects. It is these species which form the basis of all organic food chains and which are also the transformers and providers of the inorganic gases all other species need to breathe. The ecological balances that over millions of years all life forms on earth have evolved to be healthy within, are provided by the inorganic and organic material available on this one finite planet. This is why the type and purpose of global production and consumption currently practiced by humanity needs to be drastically reduced.

With this reduction of production in mind, the four hierarchical mass society blocs, Russia, China, EU and USA, are by far the biggest global producers and consumers of essential and non-essential planetary material. Consequently, these blocs are also the largest contributers to the above noted continuous degredation and destabilisation of the bio-chemical and ecological balances of life on earth. The same four blocs of hierarchical mass societies also contain the 21st centuries most powerful and powerfully entrenched and protected elites who are supported and defended by their political and legal systems in general and their specially trained and armed forces in particular. These elites can therefore initiate change or effectively prevent it whenever they decide to.

In this latter regard, it is important to understand that the elites in control of these 20th and 21st century hierarchical mass societies are dedicated to maintaining and conserving the existing mode and method of production – in all the attributes of it that are essential to them. Therefore, what is really seen as essential and therefore ‘important’ by such powerful elites is a crucial determinant in what happens to global production and consumption (and thus to the health of people and the planet) in the coming decades. The last dozen decades in general and the last year in particular have revealed some clear pointers as to what is considered important and essential to the global elites and in particular to those in the above named big four.

In the last 12 months, we have witnessed that what is considered important – above all else – to the elites in at least two of the above blocs, (Russia and the USA) has not been the well being of humanity in general nor their own citizens in particular. They have ramped up production across every main economic sector and particularly in the production of weapons of mass destruction. Russia has done so in order to use them to invade parts of Ukraine and the USA has done so to supply weapons of mass destruction to Israel in support of its campaign of genocide within Gaza.

It has been clear for some time that the elites in China have not only increased military production for land, sea and air based military combat but have also focussed on increases in non-military production by implementing the Belt and Road Initiative. The latter is planned to create improved trade links between 75% of the world’s populations by creating a high tech and more extensive version of the ancient Silk Road commercial links between countries in the East and West. 140 countries have already signed up to it, revealing that these too are anxious to increase production and consumption by the methods of mass production, extraction, transportation and waste disposal. Furthermore, the EU countries have agreed to increase military expenditure, which is of course, like all forms of production, is based on the extraction of inorganic and organic materials by industrial methods. In addition the elites of each EU member state have all tabled plans for increased general production. These elites are an obvious part of the problem and not part of the solution to climate or ecological extinction events.

If the big four polluters and producers are not prepared to even plan to significantly reduce extraction, production, transport, consumption and waste accumulation and instead are intending to increase it, then the ‘hopes’ of the ‘green’ campaigners and other wishful thinkers for sustainable production to be embraced by the worlds elites are more than likely to be dashed yet again. In fact it seems from the planned increase in military expenditure by the elites in the countries of the big bloc economies that these elites are anticipating future wars over the planets shrinking resources of inorganic and organic materials and also further wars over free access to markets for their planned increase in levels of commodity production. This is logical for them because for the capitalist mode of hierarchical mass society to function, whatever is produced must be sold, otherwise the investors in economic production cease to invest in it and production grinds to halt – and with it the social fabric built upon it begins to unwind.

What has yet to dawn on most people is that the hierarchical mass society system is locked into a system of production and governance of it by anthropocentric pro-capitalist, patriarchal elites who have no intention of reforming their mode of production or their way of governing. This is vividly illustrated – even in the cases when this way of governing leads to mass murder in the form of aerial warfare and systematic genocide. Consequently, the elite perspectives on the future are very different than the rest of their populations. They reason that they will be able, by their wealth or ‘official’ position, to escape the worst effects of what will visit the rest of us and they will be able to protect themselves from any adverse climatic conditions or potential disasters.

This historic pattern of elites looking after their own welfare before all else was repeated during the fears over a Nuclear War in the post- second world war decades. At public expense in time, labour, materials and money the elite ordered deep bomb and contamination proof isolated bunkers to be built into which at the outbreak of war they could descend while their populations were being incinerated by thermal blasts, or tortured by food and clean water starvation or by being frozen to death during nuclear winters. Given this relatively recent track record, it would be naive of the rest of us to think that if plans have not already been made and implemented by the elites for their protection against any future climate associated disasters, then they will be made and implemented when the possibility of a dire straits situation becomes imminent.

Having boozy parties, while their vulnerable citizens were dying during Covid pandemics were only a tip of the iceberg example of the mental difference between privileged elites and the majority of ordinary working citizens. Elites have a different perspective on life and radically different assumptions about what is fair or right. Consequently appealing to them by petitions, demonstrations and campaigns involving pleas to protect or benefit the masses has proven a complete waste of time in the past and continues to be demonstrably futile in the present.

Over many decades, it has become obvious that the elites in most of the hierarchical mass societies harnessed to the capitalist mode of production, have become split over the increased use of multicultural labour within the economic system of capitalism. One section of the elite in the advanced capitalist countries forming the left wing liberal and social democratic sections of their countries, want to increase the internal and external use of less expensive labour of whatever skin colour, ethnicity or religious ideology it may be part of. These particular elite sections pretend to be champions of internationalism, humanism and equal rights, however, beneath their political correctness rhetoric they represent the rights of national elites to exploit and make profits from wherever they think appropriate within a global network by employing any kind of human labour either in their home countries or abroad.

Another section forming the right wing populist and Republican elite sections of their countries currently wish to exploit low cost labour in their foreign bases but wish to restrict the use of foreign low-cost labour within their own particular countries. So these particular sections pretend to be champions of local indigenous labour and advocates of preserving national cultures. However, beneath their populist policies and anti – woke rhetoric they also represent the rights of national elites to exploit and make profits from wherever they think is appropriate. The only difference between the two elite sections is over when and where they think exploitation and oppression should take place.

Neither section is really concerned (and never have been) with the human rights or welfare of the working and unemployed classes. Both are united in wishing to preserve their class right to exploit and oppress whoever they can and in forcibly maintaining the hierarchical mass society system which allows them to do so. Sadly, many on the left have seen this split between the elite sections superficially in conventional political terms and have failed to grasp what is occuring at the socio-economic level. This superficial grasp of contemporary reality  even extends to parts of the seemingly radical left and  has led to a false dualistic paradigm in which one section of the elite is viewed as Fascist and the other section as Liberal democratic. Therefore, in political elections which decide which section of the elite shall continue to govern hierarchical mass societies, they simplistically advise working people to choose what they personally judge to be the lesser of two evils.

Of course choosing the lesser of two evils is still inviting an inhuman level of ‘evil’ (!) upon ones self and ones contemporaries but worse than this they condemn those workers whose alternative viewpoint sees the greater evil as the so-called left-liberal, social democratic section of the hierarchical elite and then claim these non-establishment workers also as Fascist or fascist dupes. In doing so they introduce deep socio-economic splits among the working classes, based not upon any underlying socio-economic analysis but upon their own inhuman personal and often politically sectarian opinions. Sadly, sectarian inhumanity, is frequently demonstrated on the left as well as the right. In fact in historical and contemporary terms these two sections of the elite are extremely authoritarian and both of their authoritarian tendencies will sooner or later morph into fascistic levels and even combine in order to protect their system from the efforts of workers to defend their living standards.

A further interesting and crucial litmus test of elite humanity in general comes with the issue of protecting children. Even most animals will do their utmost to protect the offspring of their own species, from danger and death. Even predatory animals do not mass kill their own or any other life form.  Furthermore,  within the human species the desire to protect children (not just our own but others also), is normally even greater than that of other species. But look at the callous indifference and disregard to the fate of thousands of the children of Gaza by the US, UK and EU elites. They could have stopped supplying the means to bomb the bodies of children into unidentifiable shreds of skin and bone by nothing more difficult or demanding than a simple phone call or by issuing an order paper to the manufacturer or supplier to cease munitions deliveries. Internationally the genocide support group of elites did nothing except find reasons not to suspend their political agreements to supply the means for systematic genocide of civilian men, women and children. This and the obvious fact that by increasing non-war production they are nevertheless also effectively continuing to maim and kill parts of the global eco-system which keeps us and them alive, is the strongest possible indictment of the social effects of their hierarchical mass society system.

Incidentally, the hierarchical mass society economic system has been unfit for the purpose of an intelligent homo sapien species for multiple generations and has frequently been rebelled against. It has also collapsed from it’s internal and external contradictions on a number of occasions but it keeps on managing to be revived. However, this system has reached it’s most unfit levels in the 20th and 21st centuries. In its western liberal form it has become such an obviously destructive and inhuman socio-economic system that in a mood of desperation some individuals are currently suggesting that the ideas behind the hierarchical state capitalist mass society systems created in 20th century Russia and China, as bad as they were, are worth copying or replicating elsewhere. This suggestion demonstrates a complete absence of a thorough evaluation of these particular hierarchical mass society systems which were then, and now, partially camouflaged by describing them as benign systems and calling them socialist.

The reality, however, was completely different and a substantial amount of detailed evidence and evaluation of the practices and ideas of its early leadership in the Soviet Union which substantiate this negative assertion is available in three parts. They can be download for free by clicking on the ‘Free Downloads’ tab along the banner under this blogs picture above and following the links. But I shall also produce further short sections of this article in order to update some relevant evidence concerning the current 2024 situation of Russia and China.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2024.)

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SENSE & NONSENSE ABOUT REGIME CHANGE

Posted on June 23, 2024 by stutteringsteps

Discussions on Regime Change have ebbed and flowed over the decades, even though the phenomenon has not always been described in this way. It is now used by pro-capitalist elites to describe getting rid of an elite in charge of a hierarchical mass society or movement that is resisting the desires and expectations of another dominant hierarchical mass society also harnessed to the capitalist mode of production. The First and Second 20th century World Wars between two sets of political regimes resulted in the replacement of the elite regimes of the defeated side. The Vietnam War was a failed attempt by the Western Aliance to change the North and South Vietnam Communist Regime as was the war on the Korean peninsular.

The two more recent wars in Afghanistan were also attempts to replace regimes hostile to the western alliance as were the wars conducted by NATO in Iraq and those in Syria. The current wars between Russia and Ukraine essentially commenced as attempts to change the regime in Ukraine and the war on Gaza is an openly stated attempt by Israel to forcibly replace the regime of Hamas over the Palestinian people. Although in this latter case the larger truth is that the war on Gaza and the West Bank represents an attempt by the Jewish State of occupation (designated as Israel) to gain absolute control of the entire land of historic Palestine.

Therefore, it is a form of distorted nonsense to consider, as some recent commentators have suggested, that Regime Change by modern hierarchical mass society ‘states’ is something exceptional or something new. In fact, Regime Change is as old as the establishment of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation itself. It matters little what formal expression has been used to identify this process, the ‘essence’ is invariably the same. The essence of regime change and genocide started as early as approximately 860 BCE in the middle east, and as one ancient ruler then boasted about it, it frequently took the following form.

“I drew near to the city of Tela. The city was very strong; three walls surrounded it. The inhabitants trusted to their strong walls and numerous soldiers; they did not come down or embrace my feet. With battle and slaughter I assaulted and took the city. Three thousand warriors I slew in battle. Their booty and possessions, cattle, sheep, I carried away; many captives I burned with fire. Many of their soldiers I took alive; of some I cut off their hands and limbs; of others the noses, ears and arms; of many soldiers I put out the eyes. I reared a column of the living and a column of heads. I hung up on high their heads on trees in the vicinity of their city. Their boys and girls I burned up in the flame. I devastated the city, dug it up, in fire burned it; I annihilated it. (Standard Inc. , col. I. 113 – 118./ quoted in ‘A History of Babylonian and Assyrians’. By George Stephen Goodspeed. Section 168.)

Three thousand years later, and boys and girls are still being burned up but now in the flames of US supplied and Israeli delivered bunker bombs and other munitions in similarly  devastated Gaza. It is also well known that the Macedonian Greek ruler Alexander (frequently spun as ‘great’) later took his armies around the middle and near east and ‘changed regimes’ left right and centre, from India to Egypt and many places in between. Indeed, he instituted regime change wherever he decided it was possible and lucrative to do so. In the two later Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, the elite generals of the Roman Armies decided to get rid of the elite regime in charge of Carthage in the most emphatic ways. This included overthrowing them and stripping their assets in foreign domains from Carthage elite possession in the second Punic War. Later still, in the third Punic War, the Roman promoted to General, (Scipio) ordered the decimation of the entire population of Carthage either by genocidal slaughter or by enslavement of the remaining survivors.

So the sensible conclusion is that regime change and genocidal elimination of populations are two aspects of the same elite-driven socio-economic logic operating within all hierarchical mass societies. The nonsense talked about regime change is that it is only deranged madmen such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Gaddafi and such like who engage in such brutal forms of regime change and genocidal activities. That opinion is clearly ill-considered nonsense because a long series of British, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and American elites – designated by historians as rational and stable – nevertheless over three centuries of colonial aggression conducted regime change operations throughout the continents of India, Africa, South America, North America and of course Europe.

The above, indisputable historical facts, in each case demonstrate almost exactly the same thing; that regime change and genocidal actions against indigenous populations are part and parcel of the general socio-economic logic of hierarchical mass societies. It does not matter who is in charge of them, the same dynamic evolves.  Moreover, this socio-economic logic unfolds irrespective of what historical period, what geographical location or what ideological tendency (secular or religious) they were created within. This inhumanity is a built in structural issue. But this overwhelming historical and contemporary evidence also demonstrates and reveals much more. In addition it demonstrates the tendency of hierarchical elites to either downplay or totally ignore the inbuilt logic of their own hierarchical system of socio-economic activity. It also invites the question (and reveals the answer) why the ‘rational‘ and ‘stable‘ elites and their intellectual and propaganda servants ignore this indisputable tendency and its ruthless manifestation.

I suggest the reason for elites ignoring this inbuilt tendency stems from a mixture of ignorance and self-interest. The self-interest of elites in the hierarchical mass society system lies in the fact that the obvious power, influence and relative wealth these systems are designed to deliver to those elites, is a powerful incentive to ignore any shortcomings or existential problems the hierarchical mass society system continually displays. The degree of general ignorance of this fundamental systemic flaw in the hierarchical mass society system of social living arises from the fact that to eradicate this level of ignorance requires a detailed historical knowledge together with an informed revolutionary-humanist perspective, both of which are lacking among elites. These two factors, historical ignorance and a revolutionary-humanist perspective, are inadequately developed or totally undeveloped within elites in general and are particularly absent in those elites who are trained to govern.

But this twin absence is also strongly evident among those intellectuals whose consciousness arrives at partial forms of criticism of the latest iteration of the hierarchical mass society system, now known as the capitalist mode of production. Anthropocentric ideology, in it’s latest bourgeois form, dominates intellectual thinking across the whole social and political spectrum of educated citizens. This abscence was evident in the dominant ideologies circulating among the 20th century anti-capitalists such as the Bolsheviks and Communists headed by Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in the Soviet Union and Charman Mao in Communist China. The socio-economic form of hierarchical mass societies was not fully understood by them as the cause and therefore was not merely a symptom of the alienated and alienating structure of human to human and human to non-human relationships within life on earth. Therefore, strict hierarchical leadership and authoritarian control was as ruthlessly promoted and adhered too among those ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ leadership ranks (and their imitators) as it was among, Fascists, Islamists, Zionists, Conservatives, Liberals, Labourites and Christian Social Democrats.

Sadly, this unquestioning and uncritical tendency of promoting and retaining hierarchical mass society systems is perpetuated among their modern anti-capitalist ‘followers’, who in the 21st century often simply regurgitate essentially the same sectarian platitudes as their long dead ‘hero’ leaders. The best many of their dedicated followers of that particular fashion, can come up with is to recommend that modern critics of the current elite anthropocentric system read the early 20th century works of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao for inspiration and guidance in the 21st. This, phenomenon illustrates the long established truism that educators are always first in need of education themselves and that teaching something before you have fully understood it yourself frequently represents a case of the extremely short-sighted arrogantly offering to lead the blind through a minefield.  To my knowledge, not one of these modern advocates of following 20th century anti-capitalist vanguardist perspectives of Bolshevism or Maoism have pointed out the essential similarity between the hierarchical regimes of the left, the right and the centre or the long historical record of all such hierarchical mass society regimes, that are briefly noted above.

This tragic shortcoming represents not only their own personal failure to understand the real history of all hierarchical mass societies, but also involves them in putitive attempts to misguide present and future generations of working people into repeating the drastic mistakes of previous generations. These mistakes begin precisely with the ‘trust me and follow MY LEADER’ syndrome that were made in previous generations and are due to the same lack of understanding by the ‘left’ of the hierarchical anthropocentic system as a whole. If anyone recommends reading Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao without mentioning their uncritical acceptance of the hierarchical mass society model both in their theoretical studies and in their actual institutional practices, this I suggest implies a level of wilful or neglectful ignorance. Like cigarette packets those left orientated ‘brands’ intended for intellectual consumption as with other right wing and liberal orientated political ‘brands’ should carry a warning that utilising  ‘the contents can seriously damage your health’ as well as the health and well being of those around you.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2024.)

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THE GENESIS OF GENOCIDE (Part 2).

Posted on June 9, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In part 1 of this article, the internal socio-economic form of hierarchical mass societies based upon agriculture, were shown to comprise of a top-down authoritarian class structure. The external relationships with the rest of life on earth (nature) are such that in order to maintain or increase the population numbers of this particular economic form, a certain existential logic unfolds. The life support resource requirements of its class structures will sooner or later, require increasing amounts of land and resources to meet them. Therefore, if the only extra organic and inorganic resources available are already fully supporting another human (or plant, insect or animal) community then it becomes obvious that to survive as discrete species systems both human communities must struggle to possess and control these vital resources. Forests, must be cut down, animal herds, insect colonies and human communities will be disturbed or dispersed to make way for fields of intensive planting or animal grazing. Human communities, therefore, by either defending existing resources or by conquering new ones, would tend to become even more authoritarian and even fascistic, than when not faced with an existential crisis. Nevertheless, when they are, a war of some kind both within or between communities would ensue.

In most cases, the decision to expand will be taken by the respective elites regardless of any previous ideological stances or preferences individuals may have because it stems from the logic of the hierarchical mass society system. The fierce ownership and/or control of extra land and resources needed by the expanding community, arises therefore, not from an abstract intellectual desire, but from an existential imperative. The historical record of European hierarchical mass societies over several thousand years, stretching from ancient Sumer to the Roman empire, provides evidence that if the existential imperative is strong enough, these societies will exhibit periods of fascistic intolerance and genocidal extermination of anything or anyone standing in their way. Moreover, in the last four decades, with the global population expanding by billions, the symptoms of this logic have again reappeared. An increasing number of hierarchical mass societies have moved away from left-democratic forms of authoritarian governance toward right wing and openly military backed authoritarian regimes. Russia and Israel are just the latest example of the trend of establishing authoritarian forms of governance and forcible resource-grabbing tendencies which are already embodird in the regimes governing North Korea, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Syria and Saudi Arabia, etc..
Genocide becomes generic.

Thus crimes against humanity in their most extreme form of genocide are not the occasional wayward aberration they may seem to be from a less than comprehensive consideration of them, but a necessary part of the development (or further development) of any kind of hierarchical mass society. The facile nonsense that war between human communities is somehow ‘in the blood’ of humanity (I read that again this week in a left journal!!! RR) or the superstitious nonsense that ‘evil’ is part of the bedeviled human psyche, just demonstrates that Victorian levels of relative ignorance are still circulating in 2024. Those who utter or write such banalities have not bothered to discover and fully understand either the bio-chemical essence of life on earth nor the socio-economic structures of human societies. The only things circulatihg in blood are cells, microorganisms, minerals, assorted other nutritional materials required for distribution around the body of animals to their various organs or the occasional absorption of a virus. Evil is just an invented term to fill or cover a large gap of ignorance concerning human motivations. Despite any spurious triggers or flashpoints, wars and crimes are the results of the existential needs of hierarchical mass society elites and other individuals to take from other communities more resources than they already have, or to prevent other such societies from grabbing them first.

Moreover, this socio-economic logic, outlined in more detail above, will unfold whether the needy or greedy hierarchical society elite identify themselves as Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Socialist, Communist, Fascist or by a geographically located National identity. In this way, “the project that commits genocide in our name.” which the Jewish writer quoted in part 1 (and many others before) wished to be free from, is a hierarchical mass society form in general but in that case with an ethnically concentrated Jewish population. The formation of a Jewish identity cohering around a hierarchical mass society form, like any other human sub-group identity (i.e. German, French, Spanish, American, Russian, etc.) is itself the project which commits genocide in the ‘name’ of its socially chosen structure. Furthermore, every ‘project’ of determined nationalism has antecedents leading up to its ‘final solution’ in genocide.

The Jewish/Israeli final solution to ‘their’ Palestinian problem is now nearly complete. It is in it’s late ‘stage-management‘ phase which is being ably assisted by the holocaust alliance led by the elites of US, UK, France and Germany. Their fake concern for Palestinian loss of life and their pretence of censure against Israel will continue for some time until it is unnecessary and its all gone and forgotten and the elites on all sides (including Hamas elites) having sacrificed their pawns, will move on in their hierarchical mass society positions. Meanwhile as usual, because killing and conquest is fundamentally abhorrent to practically every normal human being, particularly when perpetrated on a mass scale, there becomes a need for the ‘thinkers’ of each developing hierarchical mass society system to create a convincing ideological justification for engaging in it. Conquest, dispossesion and the killing of those human beings already occupying the desired land and resources has to be justified before, during or after the main genocidal events.

Ideological justifications.

Such prior or post ideological justifications for conquest and dispossesion invariably comprise of the following two anthropocentric focussed elements. A) The manufacture of reasons why the targeted community do not deserve the land and resources they currently control. (Reasons of religious superiority such as ‘Our god gave us this particular land, not you’;) This can also involve an intellectually constructed dehumanisation of the targeted group. (Such as; ‘you are an inferior/uneducated people’); B) The manufacture of a superior categoral definition in order to elevate the status of the conquering group above the needs of the targeted group. (Such as; ‘We are Yahweh’s/Allah’s chosen people’; ‘We are ‘civilised’ you are no better than animals.’ .) The reader can confirm the ruthless continuity of this intellectual pattern of de-humanisation of other humans by doing their own research on the practical history of ancient and modern society conquests, dispossessions, tortures, rapes, killings and enslavements of human beings and their resources.

The historical and contemporary evidence validating the above assertions I have made here is overwhelming, conclusive and very easy to locate and verify in libraries and on internet sources. Similarly, the material on the dehumanisation of the ‘other’, the ideology of racism, the imagined superiority or inferiority of pale or dark-skinned people in the past and current colonisation and financial control of Africa, the America’s and Asia is easily available. That together with material on the imagined partisan superiority of each religion over all other religions, and the long history of distorted mentality of ‘killing in the name of God’ are all readily and easily available. Interestingly, the written evidence on these characteristics are all easily available because more often than not the original authors of the religious and secular histories of these systems (and their modern counterparts) were (and often still are) actually proud of, and boast about, the genocidal acts and ‘great’ conquests of their ancient and less ancient ancestors.

From this historical record it is not difficult to conclude that the so-called modern European and North American ‘values’ are elite values and are fundamentally values of a hierarchical privilege to exploit their own citizens, dispossess colonised people and to exercise extreme forms of financial control over foreign communities. In order to justify this practice to themselves and others, the realities of oppression and exploitation are intellectually distorted and misrepresented as ‘economic necessity’, ‘civilised progress’ and the promotion of ‘democratic sensibilities’. But from a natural, evolutionary and non-European, non-Anglo-Saxon perspective these values are neither necessary, progressive, democratic or natural. Evolutionary logic and archaeological evidence suggests that over many multiple generations, a species of hominid, developed from within the animal species of social life forms and gradually became fully bipedal.

For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years these ‘stone age’ hominid species sustained a voluntary form of cooperative living in bands and tribes which spread across the planet and this species eventually evolved into our present homo sapien form. Later still in a number of places, some members of those voluntary forms of cooperative human living (also using only stone and bone tools) engaged in the most talented, ambitious and unique forms of cooperation. They did so by collaborating together to build megalithic structures of immense size and sophistication such as Stone Henge in the UK and numerous other ‘henge’s’, stone circles and huge mounds around Europe and elsewhere. Parts of South and North America also had similar structures.


Imagine there’s no Country..

I maintain that these Megalithic structures were a series of voluntary-association community builds, because the means of compelling any such large-scale cooperative ways of living and working were lacking prior and during, those long stone age periods. To compel animals, human or otherwise, to do things that are beyond what they consider is necessary to survive, that are not pleasurable and are not ‘natural’ requires a system of shackling and punishment. Moreover, such compulsion needs to be administered by a separate armed and determined contingent within any human community. If such fundamental divisions and enforcement techniques within communities are lacking, the animal labour force or the human community members needed to labour excessively just get up and leave any situation which they have not fully agreed to become part of. This is why slaves and animals used as compulsory labour forces were chained and shackled day and night or locked away in the caves, dungeons and stock yards of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome. It is also why slaves were shackled and whipped when the large-scale practice of slavery reappeared in the New World and Asian colonies of 17th, 18th and 19th century administered by elites in Britain and in other European nations.

Incidentally, it is also within the above noted ancient hierarchical mass societies, based in Europe and the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East, that the ideologies of superior people, exceptionalism and entitlement to plunder were initiated on the basis of this hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, such ideological expressions of what was actually taking place within and between the rising city states in the region, eventually became embodied in the triad of Abrahamic monotheistic religious belief systems. Consequently, the Abrahamic God in the guise of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheistic personifications, became the mythical dispenser of real-estate acquisitions in the minds of some hierarchical mass society elites of that period. In resource acquisitions and transfers within the ancient Mediteranean and Middle Eastern region, the winning sides elites invariably claimed God had both willed the conflict and assisted them. Even the Jewish secular elite heading up the 2024 Israeli genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people could not resist utilising the Jewish Torah (Bible) narrative of the Jewish destruction of the rival tribe of Amalek.

So the term “exterminate all the brutes”, used in much later centuries by the author Conrad to sum up the attitude of the European colonisers on the African continent to those ‘natives’ who resisted them, is symptomatic of the attitudes developed within the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation as far back as ‘by the rivers of Babylon. The term ‘brutes’ was just a more modern version of the ancient hierarchical mass society attitude toward indigenous communities who already peopled territory and controlled assets coveted by rival hierarchies. It is perhaps no accident that the pioneers of European colonialism were a mix of those ruthlesly and persistently seeking to extract material wealth and those ruthlessly and persistently seeking to extract conversions from pagan belief systems to their own version of the Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Religious ideology since then has been as much of a tool of elite social control as the sword or gun. From the ancient period to the modern, the elites of all three Abrahamic religions, whilst assisting in building hierarchical mass societies in the form of tribes or nations, considered themselves the upholders of superior versions of a ‘true’ form of belief. From that period on they have addressed themselves enthusiastically to the process of relieving other communities of their land, goods and often their lives. The practice of ‘killing in the name of God” as well as in the name of the nation, started way back then and continues to this day.

Although monotheistic religions did not initiate hierarchical mass society building their elites and followers have done nothing to prevent it. They merely adopted the previously established pagan pattern of genocidal elimination of the ‘other’ and the pillaging of their their naturally and socially acquired resources. What the previous conquering pagan elites in Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome had normalised was enthusiastically adopted by the religious elites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam when they took over the unnatural social pyramid they had inherited and continues because of its internal logic. . What has yet to dawn on those who subscribe to these belief systems, is that the intellectualised categories of division among the human species, such as religion, nationality and race are also neither natural nor essential. They are just entirely made up categories invented by a species, that for many generations has lacked a level of wisdom and understanding commensurate with the level its technical capabilities. For those who doubt this assertion, just consider the following.

And no religion too.

Even a superficial consideration of the evolution of life on earth leads to the following conclusion. That throughout the previous 100, 000 year period of natural human evolution between the hominid stage and the Homo sapien stage, there were no such thing as institutionalised religions. Indeed, for hundreds of thousands of years prior to that pre-historic period of hominid and human existence there is absolutely no basis or evidence for religious or secular belief systems – of any set in stone kind. Humanity for hundreds of thousands of years had no option but to aggregate in relatively small numbers until the advent of large-scale farming or fishing. Furthermore, outside of Europe and the Middle East, there existed no institutionalised Abrahamic religions in the rest of the globe until during the 16th century period of colonial exploration and colonisation when European based religious and national identities were exported and imposed upon indigenous peoples.

At certain points in the evolution of our homo sapien ancestors (approximately ten thousand years ago) some human communities commenced to live either seasonally or permanently in settled communities based increasingly on obtaining nutrition from agricultural crops and animal herding. Written historical evidence suggests that by five or six thousand years ago some settled human societies had begun to form into independent hierarchical social structures, with an embryonic three-class (or multiple caste) system replacing the earlier hunter-gatherer egalitarian social structures. Humans organised in these settled social formations were grouped into an upper class of elites who governed; a lower class of agricultural, mine, quarry and craft workers; a middle sector located socially between the elite and the workers, who became administrators/organisers. In some hierarchical mass societies the divisions were further sub-divided into separate categories such as in India with its multiple Caste divisions based upon occupational categories. It is from the genesis of this hierarchical mass society model, that the divisions, competition and unreconcilable antagonisms within humanity began and all the characteristics noted in the first five paragraphs of this second article on the Genesis of Genocide, commenced.

Incidentally, the failure to fully understand the socio-economic dynamic of hierarchical mass societies is also why the modern middle classes think the global climate crisis can be solved by nationally organised reductions in fossil fuel use. Yet this COP strategy is bound to fail – and indeed is already failing. The elites of each hiearchical mass society and their citizens are almost exclusively focussed on their own particular (and often) internally conflicting needs and interests and they will continue to prioritise these. It is precisely how these hierarchical mass society systems have been designed to function. Consequently their elites cannot operate in any other way, nor do they wish to alter their status or the system which benefits them disproportionally Their one and only overriding task is to ‘conserve‘ the present hierarchical socio-economic system – at all costs. This fact should be glaringly obvious by now. If during 2024, the international elite can manage to put so little effort into preventing a whole human society from being almost totally wiped out by industrial levels of genocide in Gaza, then continuing to put very little effort into reducing their extraction, production, consumption, pollution and energy use will continue.

So when, and while, other communities are being slowly or rapidly decimated and even destroyed by climate change-induced heat or floods or other forms of eco-system collapses or human ‘manufactured’ disasters, the fact that elites will be focussing exclusively on their own welfare and their preferred system, will simply be par for the course. Indeed, despite all the current climate, pollution and ecocide ‘writing on the wall’, practically every hierarchical mass society elite in the global network of such societies in 2023 and 2024 have devised plans to increase their national productivity and the levels of their economic output and this includes increasing the levels of ‘ready for action’ military weapons production. Even while engaging rhetorically with climate and pollution related issues during one part of the day, (or week) at another part of the day (or week) they are are engaged in introducing national measures and practices which increase the international problem.

Living life as one.

Viewed from within the intellectual and anthropocentric cultural confines of the hierarchical mass society systems themselves, the tasks facing humanity are primarily conservative. They are to conserve the entire hierarchical socio-economic global social system in its current conceited form defined as – ‘civilisation’! In contrast, viewed from the ecological and humanist perspective on ‘life on earth’ – as a whole – the tasks facing humanity are revolutionary. There is an urgent need to revolutionise the relationship of humanity to it’s own species, by replacing competition with cooperation: and to revolutionise the relationship of humanity to the rest of the currently ‘unbalanced’ systems of life on earth. Recreating an economic system which does not undermine the balance between natural reproduction rates and the consumption of them by humanity is a task requiring globally integrated cooperation. To implement the latter, humanity must eliminate the current hierarchical socio-economic system or the current hierarchical system will continue to eliminate humanity directly by wars and also indirectly by continuing to eliminate the life-support networks supplied by plant, insect and animal forms of life on earth.

The ideologies of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism which for the last several thousand years in Europe and the Middle East have been the additional elite based rationalisations for prejudice, discrimination and warfare were unknown to humanity until these organised religions were created in that region roughly two or three thousand years ago. The whole billion year old evolution of nature and all its species – including the human species – existed without hierarchical mass societies and without organised religion for 99% of its evolutionary development. The ideology of nationalism is even more recent and again all species evolving within nature (including the human species) existed for 99% of their evolutionary period of existence without the social form of nation states.

Finally, the invented categories of ethnicities and race among the human species is of even more recent construction. Religion, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Race are the intellectually invented ‘idols’ of an anthropocentric obsession which are currently naively worshipped and need to be abandoned. These socially devised categories played no part in the past evolution of life on earth nor in the biological evolution of the human species either and can play no positive part in the future of humanity or of life on earth in general. They have led literally and metaphorically to dead ends for past generations of humanity and now threated a dead end for multiple complex forms of life on earth. The only project of any current and future value for humanity is the project of pursuing an international solidarity of the human species and creating a movement among us dedicated to changing what goes on now and what has gone on in the past by ecologically balancing the global modes of production. There is an existential need to end and reverse the current causes of climate change, ecological destruction, pollution and the self-destructive path that elite humanity has imposed upon human life in particular and the whole of ‘life on earth’ in general.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2024)

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THE GENESIS OF GENOCIDE. (Part 1.)

Posted on June 3, 2024 by stutteringsteps

1. I recently came across the following quotation in an article on the situation in Gaza and it seemed to me to sum up, in two short sentences, a large amount anthropocentric confusion. I think it is a level of confusion that needs addressing.

“We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name.”

2. It is clear that the ‘We’ referred to in this statement by a well known  Jewish writer and celebrity is the Jewish people. It’s yet another version of the frequent ‘not in our name’ plea from within a narrow social constituency that tries to serve two contradictory needs. The first need is to conserve the advantages of belonging to a narrowly drawn relatively privileged section of humanity and the second need is to avoid being held responsible in any way for the inhuman actions of that privileged section. However, I hope to demonstrate that these two practical needs cannot be reconciled. The reason being that in this case Zionism, is actually an authoritarian expression of Jewish nationalism. The two aspects of hierarchical mass societies, nation creation and genocide are part of the same project. Unlike ideas about them, which can be separated by full stops, in practice, nation-building and genocide are only separated by commas. They are part of the same project; you cannot have one without the other.

3. For example, Fascism in the 1930’s and 1940′ was an extreme authoritarian expression of the ‘expansion’ of German, Italian and Spanish nationalism. Similarly, the earlier ‘Empire building ‘isms’ of the colonialist and imperialist period were also extreme authoritarian expressions of European nationalist expansion, manifested by Britain, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal. Incidentally, extreme authoritarian expansions of hierarchical mass societies are not something entirely new or unique. There has not been one hierarchical mass society since those of ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome that hasn’t ruthlessly controlled it’s own citizens and seized territory and assets from control by another human community. In the internal and external processes of authoritarian control the ruling elites throughout history have killed and tortured their own citizens as well as the citizens of other communities (frequently at genocidal levels) or enslaved them at the level of entire communities.

4. Extreme authoritarianism, territorial conquest and genocidal elimination are part of the essential socio-economic DNA of hierarchical mass societies. Therefore, the idea that members of a hierarchical mass society are free to reject what they do not like and accept what they do, does not reflect how such societies function. The menu of available choices to its citizens is strictly limited by the governing elite and obedience to their defining characteristics and actions are mandatory. It is not individual objectors, but the governing elites, who by law and custom, define and determine what ideas and actions constitute the essence of their respective communities. Hierarchical societies are defined by what the elite do, what ordinary citizens think is immaterial. Individuals who genuinely and seriously object to elite determined characteristics of their society must either seek to overthrow the governing elite or must renounce their adherence to the collective. Anyone who really wants “freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name,” needs to emphatically renounce the nationalism and hierarchical mass society forms of social organisation which produces it and embrace a consistent and unequivocal humanist identity and perspective. Otherwise, their rhetorical opposition is just token posturing.

5. At a more global level, anyone who supports hierarchical nationalist divisions among humanity implicitly or explicitly supports past, present or future acts of genocide against other human beings. In order to understand why this is so, the first thing to fully grasp – and not skip over when considering this particular form of mass society living and producing – is the following. Hierarchical mass society forms have similar physical charactetistics to the pyramids of ancient Egypt and elsewhere. They require large areas of land to be located upon and require huge natural resources of labour and material for their construction. More specifically, large scale, settled agricultural and pastoral modes of production, require sufficient land and sufficient general fertile resources to satisfy the actual and anticipated needs of the three basic classes making up the hierarchical mass society social pyramid. First, there are the existential needs of the bulk of the working population located at the base of the social pyramid (resources in the form of food, water, clothing and accomodation) which need to be met 24/7 and 365.  The labour and products of this sector in various ways supports everything and everyone that are ranked in the classes above them.

6. Second, there are the substantial additional resources required to meet the daily needs and official demands of the administrative middle classes. Finally in the top layers of the hiearchical mass societies the luxury needs (and demands) of its ruling elites are also required to be met on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. All this must come directly or indirectly from the land and its inorganic and organic resources, available to the society. This socio-economic necessity – for each and every form of hierarchical mass society – means that whenever the available land and resources are (or become) insufficient, then severe implications follow. To continue their collective existence each hierarchical mass society must obtain ownership or absolute control of extra land and resources to meet all of these extensive socio-economic needs and demands. This ownership or control of extra land and resources by the elite, therefore, is not a pious wish but an existential imperative.

7. However, if nearby land and resources are already occupied by a similar or different form of social organisation, then struggles, including wars over and conquests of, already occupied land and resources become inevitable. Indeed, these characteristics (and others) have epitomised this hierarchical form since the very first ones based upon agricultural production for feeding mass societies, were created. The histories of ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, vividly demonstrate this inevitable outcome of the hierarchical mass society form. Furthermore, two other characteristics of such human societies also arises from within this particular social form. First; sooner or later there becomes a need for armed bodies of citizens to a) defend their existing land and resources from dispossesion by other hierarchical mass societies; and b) to be able to settle on or conquer new land and resources when these extra resources become urgently needed. Zionism is the Jewish form of authoritarian nationalism which emerged from within the Jewish community itself in line with a general communal desire in the 20th century to create it’s own national community by controlling it’s own exclusive stretch of fertile land.

8. Furthermore, it should be obvious that the idea of Zionism did not create the Jewish desire for a country and a national identity. It was the Jewish experience of living in a global environment made up of competing nationalities, whose elites had already occupied and/or controlled the fertile resources of the entire planet, that some of them eventually came to the conclusion that the Jewish people should follow suite. Following suite meant obtaining or conquering a sufficiently large territory and creating their own nation. However, rather than choose some huge unoccupied tract of land in South America (or elsewhere) to build this Jewish state, the decision was made by the Zionist pioneers, to locate it in the former Ottoman controlled land called Palestine. However, this land was already peopled with a viable culture, a mixed economy and a thriving population. Thus the occupation of Palestine by the Jews was not the erection of a false idol but a practical Jewish national project, and it has been understood and embraced as such by almost all Jewish people since 1948.

9. The fact that the Jewish people – as a whole – endorsed the dispossession of the Palestinian people of their historic land and natural resources, and still do, is indicated by the following facts. 1. Even during the Nakba and the subsequent sixty plus decades of atrocities carried out by the Israeli defence forces and the militant settlers, no significant questioning of the entire nationalist and colonialist project has ever seriously arisen within any of the Jewish communities. The best that has emerged from within the entire Jewish ethnicity has been an apparent willingness by a few liberal minded Jews to allow a legitimate Palestine social existence within a small area of the historic land of Palestine. But this patronising willingness by a small section of the Jewish people, was always a tokenistic non-starter because the majority of the Jewish elite understood what was outlined in paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 above.  That a viable and sustainable hierarchical mass society required a large area of land and substantial control of sustainable resources.

10. Moreover, once hierarchical mass societies have become firmly established it is the elites that determine practically everything. The whole point of hierarchical mass societies since their inception is that through direct or indirect control of certain social structures, the elite determine how society functions and of course, also by direct or indirect means, their interests always dominate those determinations. The two modes of social control by elites are a) relatively peaceful by the manufacture of majority consent, backed up by legal regulations and restrictions;  and b) relatively violent by ensuring compliance to elite directives by the use of police forces or armed soldiers. Even in relatively peaceful periods, it still remains a demonstrable fact that half a dozen elite individuals at the pinnacle of hierarchical power can start an all out war; decide to atom bomb a whole society into oblivion; decide to curfew, silence or bio-chemically infect a whole nation; or even violently suppress a peaceful strike, whenever they see fit to do so. And apart from a revolutionary overthrow of the entire system, its hierarchy and its entire ethos, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, anyone can do to stop them.

11. For example, massive global demonstrations against the Vietnam War did not prevent it continuing. The huge demonstrations against the Invasion of Iraq could not alter or prevent the decisions of Bush and Blair (et al) to unleash the dogs of war. More recently, the hundreds of countries assembled in the United Nations and the massive global demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza could not prevent the Israeli government from continuing the genocidal massacre of the unarmed civilian people of Palestine in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The hierarchical mass society system locally, nationally and globally is designed to be unstoppably in exactly that way. It is the failure to recognise the purpose and function of hierarchical mass societies, particularly by middle-class citizens who are provided with certain financial and cultural benefits from membership of such societies, that gives rise to a typical level of confusion among those classes. They imagine they can effectively distance themselves from the bad sides of this system, whilst continuing to be comforted by the good.

12. It is an aspect of this individual and collective middle-class confusion which today, as I write this article (3 June 2024), globally celebrates the election of a female President of Mexico as – an unprecedented and meaningfull historic event – when in actual fact the Mexican Nation is in existential meltdown with organised gangs and political corruption ruling and ruining whole districts and populations whilst carrying out daily assasinations of working class male and female activists. All this petite-bourgeois theatrical celebration of an individual females ascendency further up the chain of hierarchical mass society authoritarian control, is occurring when this form of hierarchical mass society has already caused an unprecedented level of regional and global climate disasters, wholesale pollution of air, land and seas and ecological destruction. Even the level of ecological disturbance that is releasing sources of viral infection, into continents and regional areas with no pre-existing immunity, has been insufficient to deflect the petite-bourgeois Anthropocentric self-absorbed narcissism of the  middle-classes  away from the project of nation building and further destruction of human and non-human life on earth.

13. The sad fact is that most educated citizens trained within their own particular socio-economic community are provided with particular illusory tropes, concerning human societies, democracy and the so-called rule of law which renders them unable to see the hierachical mass society system as it actually is. They also fail to consistently view humanity as one biological species that via its dominant mode of production is now causing multiple existential problems – for all forms of life on earth. Therefore, most individuals continue to view humanity and the world through the distorting ideological lenses of personal self interest, religious affiliation, national identity, ethnic orientation or ‘racial prejudice. Most human beings have been persuaded to prefer an individual or sectarian group level of affiliation and identity over a species level of affiliation and identity which in combination with hierarchical mass society membership divides humanity into competitors who then carry out genocidal wars against each other and ecocide type wars against nature.

14. For example, in the initial quotation above, what is described as the ‘false idol of Zionism’, amounts to an extremely narrow sectional assessment of life on earth from a petite-bourgeois cultural perspective. Its focus is firmly located within the narrow ethnocentric perspective of Judaism which is itself located within a broader, but still narrowly drawn, anthropocentric set of exclusively human concerns. Thus, the conscious level of understanding of Life on Earth revealed by that particular ‘educated’ contributor to understanding the situation of humanity in Gaza (and many others recently) has been reduced to the narrowest individual level (the writer) located within a particular Jewish section of the human species. In starting from this self-interested individual and ethnocentric  perspective, the writer has failed to register that the rest of humanity, in every religion, nation, ethnicity or so-called race, has its almost identical ‘false idols’. These ideological falsities, whether ‘worshiped’ as idols or not, represent the intellectualised product of the now almost universal hierarchical mass society form.

15. This hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, consists of a pyramidal type social structure which in its ‘advanced’ forms has been mistakenly represented as the highest point in humanities evolution. The hierarchical mass society form is considered by its elite supporters and advocates as a ‘natural’ or even ‘supernatural,’ form of human aggregation, rather than a socially constructed, fiercely competitive and highly destructive form of human communal organisation. In fact the false idol for humanity – as a whole – is the hierarchical form of society itself. This is manifested in the various religious, national, ethnic and racial  hierarchical aggregations within the human species. The false idols are the actual social structures themselves not simply the various named ‘isms’ which are just the ideological ‘expressions of the practices taking place within them. Once hierarchical mass societies are fully understood as based upon elite domination and elite control of the production of essential material (food, water, clothing, shelter) extracted from nature in order to be used exclusively for human consumption, then such confusions can be more easily avoided.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2024)

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ELITE COVER-UPS & CLAMP-DOWNS.

Posted on May 23, 2024 by stutteringsteps

It becomes possible to recognise how serious a general crisis has become when the hierarchical ‘establishment‘ elites of such societies can no longer successfully ‘cover up’ crimes against humanity and must therefore either deny they are occuring or clamp down heavily on those trying to hold the elite accountable for their actions or inactions. Four out of the many such cover-ups and clamp downs in the last several decades have been running concurrently this last six months or so. In the US, the UK, Europe and elsewhere the first three are a) the Covid Pandemic debacle and cover-up’s; b) the UK Infected blood purchase and subsequent cover-up’s; and c) again in the UK the Post Office production of false accounting evidence, cover up and convictions against UK Post Office personnel.

These three have all been serious crimes by the establishment elite against the humanity of their own citizens in terms of their health, livelihoods and even of life itself. These actions and inactions were all initially denied and anyone challenging the official cover-up narratives were vilified and silenced before eventually the criminality of the ‘establishment’ became impossible to deny. Each of these long running incompetences caused serious loss of life, health and income and were malignly ‘covered-up’ or whistleblowers clamped down upon for very class-based elite purposes. The purposes were in order to try to mask the fact that the ruling elite establishments in politics, business, finance and public administration, are not only substantially incompetent but also morally deficient. They felt the cover-ups were necessary because the two characteristics of competence and upright morality are their chief – and only – claims that justify their elite status and pay.

The fourth current issue now exposing the true character of the international elite is the long-term denial and cover-up of the crimes against humanity occurring in the Occupied Territories of West Bank and Gaza in Palestine. The elite establishments of the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere have for decades obscured the savagery of occupation or justified their support for Israel’s ongoing colonial style war of dispossesion of the people of Palestine. Typical of all colonial elites the Jewish elites in Israel have long blamed their victims in Palestine for any brutal resistance to the brutal Jewish occupation and dispossession of their lands, buildings and water aquifers. Of course the unnecessary brutality of one side does not justify the unnecessary brutality of the other side. But in the case of Palestinian resistance to armed occupation by the Israeli armed forces, the west long ago decided to apply double standards.

So now Palestinian resistance to Jewish occupation is judged by the Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel differently than European resistance to the German occupation of European countries was in 1939 – 45. And differently than Asian resistance to Japan was during the Japanese occupation of Asian countries. Palestinian resistance to Israeli armed occupation is also judged differently than Ukrainian resistance to the armed occupations of parts of Ukraine by Russian troops. In the minds of the international elites their judgement of actions by other countries elites largely depends upon which team of colonisers and exploiters they are allied with.

The Israeli elite are clearly on the side of team NATO headed by the US, UK and Europe; whereas the Palestinian elite and the people of Palestine are not. NATO is an unequal alliance of mainly western pro-capitalist elites who have combined their armed forces to ensure that their own pecunary interests, along with economic, financial or mineral exploitation rights around the globe are protected from seizure by rival countries and from the previous indigenous exercisers of those rights. Israel has long been ‘team NATO’s’ crucial middle eastern armed outpost. Added to this elite collaboration of western based capitalists and pro-capitalist elites there are also three other fear factors motivating continued western elite support for Israel.

From the perspective of the various financial and political elites within NATO those three factors are fear of the removal of financial backing, removal of political voting power by the Jewish diaspora and the fear of being labelled anti-semitic. All of these human factors when sufficiently motivated can be used to effect the election results, the careers and status of those employed in politics, media and education. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the memory of the Nazi inspired genocidal holocaust and murderous blitzkrieg against what its elites considered were lesser human beings, has resulted in the provision of legal and moral constraints. In an attempt to prevent further crimes against humanity the populations once de-humanised by Nazi categories have been given the protection of a law and a moral obligation for other peoples to treat them as equals. These measures were introduced as attempts to prevent further severe crimes against humanity, later described as genocide.

The statutes against crimes against humanity and genocide, were embodied in the founding principles of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice and are now being activated against Israel and Hamas, by South African elites and others. Furthermore, as a result of the Nazi holocaust against them, the Jewish people in particular were also accorded a considerable degree of sympathy and a general humanitarian resolve to end future prejudice against Jewish people. Therefore In the immediate aftermath of that Second World War, the expression ‘never again’ became a generic sentiment expressed against any future attempt at annihilating an entire people, but it also became a particular focus in relationship to the often tragic history of the Jewish people.

Sadly, the generic aspect of that sentiment has been overlooked to such an extent that in fact in 2024 a form of genocide is happening once again. This time the most hideous crimes possible against a section of humanity are being perpetrated by a country populated almost entirely by Jewish people and which classifies itself as the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel. Of course, because mass killing (genocide) against humanity is so unnatural for a species and is so universally obnoxious, that no perpetrator of genocide ever admits to perpetrating it. The Nuremberg trials of the Nazi hierarchy demonstrated this tendency of denial emphatically. Some Nazi elites claimed they were only engaged in legitimate (!) acts of war, others that they were simply following orders. It cannot be expected therefore, that the Jewish elites in political and military control of Israel will admit to carrying out a genocidal extermination of the people of Palestine in Gaza or elsewhere. True to form, they too are vigourously denying it and claiming what they are doing is just another legitimate form of warfare.

Furthermore, the machinations of the capitalist dominated hierarchical mode of production have also placed the non-Israeli western elites belonging to NATO in the centre of an obvious massive scandal and contradiction. They have now placed themselves between, on the one hand, a legal and moral code against genocide which they agreed to be bound by; and on the other hand, the fact that an ally of theirs, Israel, is openly and repeatedly perpetrating multiple acts of genocide. Stupidly they have dug themselves further into a deep quagmire of their own making by parroting the same puerile tactic of denial as Israel and the Jews who support their elite have. To openly deny what practically everyone has clearly witnessed on their Television screens since October 7th 2023, is further evidence of their immorality and professional incompetence. Only intellectually or morally impaired people can attempt to deny what is clearly obvious to anyone not blinded by self-interested prejudice.

Unlike other previous genocidal type war activities by the western elites, this time it has been impossible to effectively cover it up. By assassinating journalists, media people and removing crime scene evidence, particularly in Gaza, attempts have been made by the Jewish military to eliminate or at least reduce incriminating evidence. This tactic alongside a strategy of obviously false claims concerning the war guilt of the men, women and children of Gaza’s civilian population has only made the genocidal intent and execution more obvious. In addition the arms and high explosive bombs supplied to Israel by the elite supporters within the NATO alliance has also further sunk these European and Western elites into the mire they have created by becoming active accessories to the perpetrators of the crime of genocide. Arrest warrants have now been applied for those in the leadership positions of Israel and Hamas and whether they will be granted and served remains to be seen.

The guilty elites in question may be powerful enough and wield enough influence currently to avoid the legal consequences of their obvious guilt, but they are not influential enough to avoid the moral condemnation of current and future generations. It must be an uncomfortable fact for them to consider that nearly eighty years after the Nazi holocaust perpetrated in Germany, the German people as a whole have only just begun to overcome the ignominy and guilt cast upon them by a previous generations complicity in the attempted extermination of the Jews throughout Nazi occupied Europe. Make no mistake about it, that long term example of global damage to the reputation of the German people for conducting or endorsing by silence severe crimes against humanity is a precursor of what is yet to come. The overwhelming Jewish support in Israel and elsewhere for the actual and attempted extermination of the entire Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank will mean that the Jews of Israel and their international supporters will also carry the deep and damaging stain of this latest crime against humanity – for at least another generation – and perhaps even more.

In the history of humanity and its recurrent ancient and medieval religious wars instigated by Christian elites, Muslim elites and Jewish elites, and particularly those infamously highlighted in European history as the numerous Crusades have lived on in infamy for almost a thousand years. The genocidal war of a powerfully armed Jewish State with bunker-busting bombs dropped upon the homes and schools of the non-combattant Palestinian citizens of Gaza and the West Bank in the 21st century will stand out just as starkly in the subsequent modern history of the human species. This blitzkrieg on Gaza, along with the Covid death toll, the infected blood scandal and the UK post office persecutions will also be blights upon the character of all those in the elite and those who supported them, who did not uphold the ancient humanist golden rule of; ‘do not do to others and their loved ones, what you would not want done to yourself and your loved ones.

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2024.)

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ONE STEP FORWARD; THREE STEPS BACK?

Posted on May 14, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In the current context of global economic, financial, social and military dystopia it is not surprising that every few months there are some groups in the world trying to make sense of what is happening to the planet it’s people and its environment. I have previously drawn attention to a number of such proposals in earlier articles on this blog. This months selection is no different in this regard and I present examples published this month (May 2024) emanating from Sweden, Malasia and Argentina. In a short article I am not able to delve deeply into these three positions concerning the current and future crises they seek to address, so I have selected extracts which I consider represent the essence of these positions

Extracts from a Swedish Democratic Left Political Party Campaign.

“There are three key priorities for this campaign: the climate transition, securing good and safe jobs, and the cost of living crisis. In some respects, the EU is more progressive on climate than the right-wing Swedish government, which is now dismantling years of climate policies, but the neoliberal dogma that prevails at the EU level prevents state aid measures to deliver the large investments needed for the green transition. EU member states must be allowed to make huge investments for a just transition, creating jobs and a better life for many people, and the EU must stop subsidising the fossil industry.” (Hanna Gedin (Left Party, Sweden.)

And:

“As the left we’re still looking for a better strategy, and we need to prioritise better than we have ever done before. People must be able to better understand what we stand for. So, we are trying to focus on very concrete things in people’s lives, like pensions, like the fact the government is cutting the public sector and health, those kinds of things. We are also seeing growing inequalities in Sweden, with more and more people no longer covered by social security and standing in line for food. The lines keep growing, as people can’t afford to buy food. This is not a new thing in Sweden, but it’s been aggravated a lot.” (Ibid)

I have highlighted in italics those sentences which to my assessment indicate the level of thinking and understanding of the person heading up the initiative they are promoting. This first example indicates a membership of an established political (Parliamentary) section of the modern European Bourgeois democratic order. In the first extract there is a wish for the individual bourgeois state elites to deliver huge investments for a green transition of production to create a better life for many people. In the second extract the author reveals they are focussing on concrete things such as pensions, maintaining the public sector whilst extending social security and are concerned that the traditional food poverty in Sweden is getting worse. To my mind it is a step backward and wishful thinking to imagine that a bourgeois system which, in a very rich country like Sweden still has food poverty, is going to make great, let alone huge investments for a just transition from what is (and has been) occuring for the last five or six decades.

Extracts from an article by the Socialist Party of Malaysia.

“But we have come to see that Gramsci’s analysis of society speaks to our predicament. Gramsci said that the ideology of the ruling class becomes dominant ideology of the entire society. He termed it the hegemonic ideology of society. People make decision based on the ideology perpetuated by the ruling class.” ((Dana) Langaswaran, from the Socialist Party of Malaysia)  


And;


“This is because of the model of development adopted in Malaysia. Malaysia relies on foreign direct investments to create jobs. We compete with Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines. All these countries try to be as business friendly as possible. And all of us are keeping the cost of labour as low as possible to attract investments. That is why real median wage of factory workers only went up 1.4 times over 50 years in a country whose GDP increased 24 fold.” (ibid)


And;


“Another way of sharing the wealth of society is by subsidizing public services like transport and health care as well as implementing social protection schemes like universal old age pension. But our government says that they cannot expand the social safety net because the government deficit is too big. (ibid)

Now it is a long time since I sat down and gave the works of Gramsci a good examination, but I do not remember reading anything about the specific ecological, climate and pollution crises which we now face and require solutions for. However, the extract which follows from that Gramsci perspective, suggests that re-examining his ideas would be a waste of my time. The second extract reveals that the authors political Party is part of a collective system which competes with other countries to keep wages low and workers in relative – if not absolute poverty. The third extract reveals that in the midst of a multiple symptom crisis, the ambition for the future of Malasia by the Malasian Socialist Party is for the state to subsidise public transport and health and implement a pension scheme.

To me, this is a further example of a step back to outdated thinking whilst reality is being carried forward into a radically new set of circumstances. These ‘aims’ were once all laudible (but failed) 20th century reformist ambitions concerned with improving working class lives in the ex colonies. However, those socialist authors formulating them then had no knowledge that it is the life of multiple key species and lives of working humanity – as a whole – which is now being negatively impacted by capitalism. Consequently, it is no longer a reform of the worst aspects of the current capitalist system in each country which is needed but a revolutionary transition of the whole international system of mass society human living. We now have an increasingly fragile, climate, ecological and environmental situation – everywhere! Local solutions need to be globally and ecologically capable of being integrated.

From the the organisers of an Eco-Socialist Meeting in Argentina.

“The global ecological and geomorphological system has been altered for the first time in history. The main geomorphological force behind this is the current capitalist mode of production, distribution, and consumption, which is based on “endless” growth and accumulation. This affects not only the features and characteristics of the Earth’s rivers, seas, and oceans, but also the scale, diversity, and complexity of the planet’s biodiversity.” (Maria Elena Saludas. On 2024 International Eco-Socialist Meeting.)


“Creating these alternative worlds that prioritise social, ecological, and climate justice is a challenge that inspires and motivates us as we observe anti-capitalist movements taking place globally. To revolutionise every aspect, dissidents, workers, youth, women, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, peasants, and scientists are resisting and battling. They denounce the obscene accumulation of capital and the defence of the rights of a small minority that appropriates and destroys our common goods.” (ibid)


“The context is becoming more complex by the day, with the advance of an extreme right that aims to destroy the rights won over years of struggle by workers, trade unions, and feminist, social, environmental, and human rights organizations that have fought—and continue to fight—for more democracy and popular sovereignty in the face of dictatorships and neoliberal projects. However, this whole scenario also invites us to build possible horizons based on socio-political and ecological struggles from below and to the left.” (ibid)


The first extract has clearly identified the problem facing the bio-diversity of life on earth in general as well as humanity in particular, but it does not identify the type of alternative worlds they hope to create. And the type and content of future human social forms is crucially important given that the vanguardist left statists (admirers of Lenin, Stalin and Mao) are once again promoting the idea that another alternative world to a neo-liberal capitalist one is possible and preferable. In these latter cases it would be some form of vanguard party-led, state-capitalist one, which would also be a step backward. The second extract suggests the alternative worlds should prioritise the ‘just’ concerns of the human species. No other species in the inter-connected and inter-dependent web of life on earth are referenced to be prioritised in this particular ‘eco-socialist’ perspective.

In the third extract the exclusively anthropocentric human focus continues. Moreover, the rights won by years of struggle by workers, trade unionists and others, where not necessarily ecologically sound ones. I know that from experience! As a shop steward and activist in industry and on numerous social issues for 40 years I was for much of it (in the UK and elsewhere) campaigning for the right of working people to democratically enjoy an ever increasing share of the annual surplus-value we created by the industrial and mechanized appropriation of organic and inorganic nature.

As an aircraft engineer, trade union and social activist I was for a long time largely unaware that the product of our mass producing working lives (civilian aircraft) for tourism and long-distant trade were seriously undermining, global air quality and ruining indigenous peoples occupation of pristine examples of nature when their coastal villages were being converted to holiday destinations. Even a marginal level of ignorance can be a form of relative bliss, but eventually overcoming ecological and climate ignorance became a choice we could make and it remains so. A lack of ecological and limited economic knowledge in the mid-twentieth century was understandable and perhaps forgivable, but that is no longer the case. This ommision also represents a step back to earlier paradigms of thinking.


It may seem disrespectful to bluntly point out such shortcomings in other peoples good intended proposals for social improvement, and I take no pleasure in doing so. I wish it were not necessary. However, as the saying goes; the way to hell is paved with good intentions’ and climate change and pollution are currently making life a modern hell for many humans and many other species. If we do not critically appraise every suggestion for change from the basis of the most comprehensive understanding we have concerning life on earth, then in a sense we become part of the problem, not part of the solution. So with this in mind, there is also a common but mistaken myth that also needs confronting. It is one promoted and sustained by all those in the 21st century who have not understood the way that hierarchical mass society systems have always functioned economically. 

The myth of Consumer Demand.

The elite classes currently in control  of the latest capital dominated mass societies also promote the same convenient and self-serving myth-driven assumption. It is an assumption that consumer demand is what ultimately triggers and motivates commodity production. This myth conveniently serves to obscure the real dynamic behind the motive for ever greater production and consumption. It does so whilst implying that the problem of resource extraction is mainly the consumers fault for demanding more.  Based on this self-serving narrative, capitalist producers are just innocently following and dutifully fulfilling consumer demand. This narrative effects the way the current climate and ecological crises are framed. Based upon that assumption, therefore, if people wish to save the planet from climate change and ecological destruction then the solution is to reduce consumer demand, by voluntary or compulsory restrictions on consumption.

The above assumption however, does not reflect the reality of hierarchical mass societies in their Ancient,  Feudal or modern Capitalist forms. Apart from basic survival needs, the masses have never initiated a demand for ever more things to be produced and be consumed. Slaves, Peasants and early Wage Slaves had no means or opportunities to demand anything other than living wages from their owners, controllers or employers. Any serious study of ancient empires and city states, will reveal that the demand for ever more production and consumption has come overwhelmingly from the ruling elites – ancient, medieval  or modern. The process of gaining pillage, conquest, tribute, taxes (and now profits) from the resources of their own or other communities have always been initiated by the wealth and power hungry elites within hierarchical mass societies from ancient to modern times. 

In the modern era, the whole ethos of the owners of capital in capitalist dominated economic systems is  to invest ‘their’ capital in production in order to produce commodities or services for sale which will return the value of the original investment together with a proportion of surplus-value known as profit or delivered in the form of interest on capital. Where such capital investments are successful in this regard, they are continually repeated and where they are not successful new avenues of capital investment for production are frantically sought by the owners or controllers of capital in order to not interrupt the annual profitable investment cycles they desire. It is in this way that capitalism constantly initiates profitable production and then finds ways to create a demand for its finished results so that the production can be sold and the investment strategy become successful.

This is why investors put so much effort and expense into high cost advertisement, influencers and sales promotions.  So in general it is not consumers who constantly demand ever more new products or ever more production, but the owners of  capital that search for ever new forms of production to invest their capital in. This now also includes so-called green investments. The investment logic of the individual and corporate capitalists involves a never ending compulsive stimulation (direct or indirect) of production and consumption of the planets material resources. It is obvious that all private or public investment in any form of production requires new sources of inorganic and organic raw materials and energy to manufacture them. It is equally obvious that new raw materials and energy for new mass production can only come from the one  existing – already exhausted and polluted – planet.  Continual investment = continual extraction = continual pollution, climate change and species loss!

The quantitative and qualitative difference in the modern era is that the elites in control of the capitalist mode of production have in a couple of centuries, vastly increased the number of elites and middle-class high-earning consumers and globalised the capitalist system of exploitation of inorganic material and organic species. Furthermore it is clear from historical evidence that successful hierarchical mass societies are presumed by their elites to be ‘logical’, ‘natural’ or at least ‘preferable’ to other forms of social organisation. Therefore, those elites socialised within them cannot see why they should even question ‘their’ system let alone wish to socially revolutionise it. They therefore focus on attempts to deny, downplay, ignore or if absolutely necessary, marginally tweak any inconvenient symptoms that emerge, until eventually the system  collapses due to its own internal contradictions.

The internal contradictions within hierarchical mass societies are of course class based social contradictions,  which are  unresolvable without changing the hierarchical socio-economic system.   No amount of technical changes or scientific discoveries can remove social contradictions even if some changes may serve to postpone or extend the period of eventual collapse. Capitalist elites are no different to ancient and medieval elites in this regard and as long as they now exist off the above average proceeds of capital investments which produce the necessary surplus-value to convert into interest, profit, rents or super-salaries, they will fiercely defend their ideological narratives and political rationalisations whilst steadfastly  maintaining their system by force – as they are now doing globally – against campus activists, liberation struggles and working class resistance to poverty and unemployment.

This is why it is important not to be drawn into superficially plausible ideas (intellectual cul-de-sacs) that are  based not upon the real causes of  the problems the human species (and other species) face, but which are based upon myths, techno-fantasies or on a culture of ‘entitlement to consume’ whatever the capitalists decide to produce. Once the real world economic system of hierarchical mass societies harnessed to the capitalist mode of production is actually fully understood the focus of the prevention of pollution, climate change, ecological destruction and poverty etc., radically changes.  It becomes clear that it is the system of capitalism and its owners which needs to be permanently restricted from constantly investing in production and consumption. That is the only way to  prevent their preferred economic system from committing a form of socio-economic ecocide and homocide.

Therefore, I suggest that any modern social or ecological proposal, such as those noted above, which does not have as its theoretical and practical goal, the openly stated aim of transcending the capitalist mode of production and overcoming the short-sighted, anthropocentric self-obsession of the human species, has remained stuck in the past. Climate research has taken important steps forward in the 21st century but it seems many on the left are still stuck in the past or due to naive illusions (or listening to elite promoted delusions), have simply retreated to more familiar levels of past understanding.  

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2024)

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RESISTANCE & REVOLUTION. (Part 3.)

Posted on April 28, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In part 1 of this series, I suggested that for any revolutionary transformation to fully occur it is not enough for its advocates to be against the existing socio-economic system either in writing or speech. Socio-economic transitions simply cannot be wished or talked into existence. In order to realistically anticipate a transition to another socio-economic system there must already exist an alternative way of living and producing that has been successfully established and been developed. At that earlier point I used the example of the bourgeois civil wars occuring in Europe between the ruling aristocratic elites of the Feudal agricultural system and the rising elite capitalist based bourgeoisie. The former were parasitic upon a long established subsistence mode of agricultural production, whereas the latter were parasitic upon the commercial and industrial system of commodity production already developed and consolidated.

Under the capitalist mode, production was primarily undertaken for sale and exchange rather than for direct consumption. The key point being made in part 1, and again now, is that the bourgeois ‘mode of production’ developed and established itself by many practical examples within the existing Feudal agricultural system. In other words, the revolution in the mode of production had already occurred prior to the transfer of political and governing power to its commercial, economic and financial elites. The aristocratic elite in charge of the Feudal systems would not allow a peaceful transfer of political power in favour of the bourgeoisie and so a series of European and colonial civil wars took place which eventually resolved the problem of political governance in favour of the bourgeoisie.

Whilst civil wars are not inevitable in such socio-economic transitions, they are highly probable because the historical pattern of evidence indicates that established political and economic elites do not voluntarily give up either their privileged positions or the control they have over any existing mode of production. Substantive change in the governance of hierarchical societies is nearly always resisted by the ‘establishment’. Bourgeois resistance to change occured within the 19th century capitalist economic system when an alternative non-profit socio-economic system developed. It was based partly upon economic cooperation in the manufacture of cotton materials. In this case, the bourgeoisie, conducted an economic, political and financial war against the new mode. Most famously in the UK, the Manchester cotton based bourgeoisie organised a successful boycott campaign restricting supplies of raw cotton going to the alternative Owenite cooperative factory at New Lanark.

Therefore this alternative model soon collapsed in the UK, re-located in the USA before finally being terminated there. These setbacks were not the only weaknesses of this particular model of cooperation as that particular  version was a top-down model organised and controlled by Robert Owen, a member of the elite, who was also driven by a religious and moral agenda. Consequently, the only extensive non-religious worker cooperative model remaining in the 20th and 21st centuries was in Mondragon in the Basque region of Northern Spain. However, the early cooperative model, although severely limited in many ways, was extremely successful for a limited period of the mid 20th century in the UK and elsewhere. In the UK there were numerous cooperatively run Farms, Industries, Shops, Banks, and Training Colleges.

Marx, commented upon many of these substantially deficient 19th century models of cooperative working and suggested to their advocates that “…you are digging the grave of cooperation, while you think you are fashioning its cradle.” Nevertheless, he also suggested the means by which cooperative ways of working and living could become part of a revolutionary transition (within the capitalist system) from capitalist forms of production to post capitalist forms. He wrote;

“A cooperative association is formed; after payment of it’s working charges (including labour in production or distribution), it finds itself at the end of the year with a surplus in hand; instead of dividing this surplus among the members, it employs it to purchase land or machinery which it lets out to other bodies of working men , on the associative principle. The rent paid for the land or the machinery and the surplus of each concern beyond the working charges, is again applied to the further purchase of machinery and land, on the same terms and under the same conditions and so on continually extending the power, strength and resources of the association. This is cooperation. It is cooperation, because it establishes a community of interest – the success of each branch furthers the success of every other and of the whole collectively” (Marx Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 11, page 587)

Although intellectually, the above excerpt is completely located within the dominant anthropocentric viewpoint of that 19th and 20th century period, it does indicate how an alternative mode of producing and living could begin within an existing mode of production dominated by capital.  But of course revolutions in living and producing only actually begin by human beings starting to organise and sustain their lives in this revolutionary way. Unlike Resistance, Revolutions in modes of production do not begin by simply writing and talking about them.

Furtheremore, such revolutionary initiatives only become an example for others to follow, when they demonstrate their ability and suitability for sustaining the different model. Until such successful transitions happen, talk of revolution is just ‘pie in the sky’ hogwash. As noted elsewhere, Marx was a product of his time and its knowledge base. He and others had only begun to question the negative role of the capitalist mode of production on a few fundamental non-human aspects of life on earth.

A greater knowledge and understanding of the evolutionary past, present and future of life on earth – as a whole – and the dependence of all species upon the ecologically integrated system of nature, had yet to emerge. At that period in the 19th and 20th centuries, the main concern was with the existence of particular problematic human social forms and their political superstructures. Nevertheless, from the late 20th and 21st centuries due to evidence from practical ecologically based studies, a more Gaia-centric understanding of life on earth has arisen. This new ‘enlightenment’ understanding now indicates that humanity needs to solve more than just the unfair, unequal and genocidal relationships between members of the human species. Humanity also needs to revolutionise the current relationship between it’s own species survival and the survival of rest of the life on earth species.

A Gaia-centric  perspective views life on earth as an integrated, interdependent and interlocked system, which needs all its parts to function so that each species can survive. We now know that before anything else ‘life on earth’ depends upon each species of life being able to transistion through its own particular evolutionary determined process of Nutrition, Metabolosm, Growth, Reproduction + Ageing and Death.  Nevertheless,  during this process each species contributes essential mineral, liquid, protein, carbohydrate resources to the eco-system and thus ensures the (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes of all other species. That is to say that all life on earth fundamentally depends upon completing its sequential process which includes obtaining appropriate Nutrition (N) containing a balance of inorganic and organic material and processes. For example, the whole process  includes all those life-forms that replenish the air and water, and produce protein, fats, sugars and minerals present in the food and natural habitats – that all life needs to survive.

The empirical evidence which is derived from the sciences of biology and nutrition confirms in detail, the truism that an army marches on its stomach and much more. The fact is that any human community only continues to exist optimately by it’s own daily intake of adequately balanced nutrition. Moreover, the largest (organic) part of nutrition (N) for each species is composed of both the product of, and the bodily substance of, one or more other life forms on planet earth. The continuous supply of original inorganic and organic material needs to be digested and Metabolised (M) by the microorganisms and cells of each organism and the results of this process circulated around the cells of each organism in the form of energy supply and the releasing of essential particles and vital minerals.

So clearly it is not politics or social organisation which directly energises and motivates these biological and social processes of life on earth, but the absorbtion of energy and minerals, directly from inorganic matter and organic life itself. The biological foundation on which all human politics, social organisation and culture is erected is the whole of the interconnected and interdependent inorganic and organic web of life on earth. It is this fundamental bio-chemical process, which allows each organism to Grow (G) and Reproduce (R) (each at it’s own rhythm and pace), before eventually Ageing (A) and Dying (D). As already indicated, these processes – which are essential to all life forms – can be intellectually shortened as in the following abbreviation (N-M-G-R + A-D), but the actual phases of each species cannot be shortened or altered in the real world without dire inter-species consequences.

Consequently, this non-human global inter-dependent reality cannot be ignored when considering any future human socio-economic activity. In the past, this absolute dependence of humanity on all the other complex, inter-connected and inter-dependent species of life on earth, for the air we breath, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and many of materials we build and manufacture with, was mostly unknown. For generations, nature was generally seen philosophically and practically as something other than humanity; as a necessary but essentially different realm of existence to the human species on planet earth.

To the religious anthropocentric mind-set a creator God had magically created both man and and the rest of nature, including the complete separation between the two spheres. To the secular anthropocentric mind-set, it appeared that ‘evolution’ had created men and the rest of nature and that the two categories evolved differently creating and perpetuating this separation between them. So even from a secular perspective, the human species was viewed as having evolved from within nature but secular anthropocentric arrogance, particularly in its philosophically honed guise, considered humanity had qualitatively separated itself from nature. In elite intellectual circles it was imagined that nature was ‘determined’, by natural laws, whilst men were self-determined and ‘free’.

Both these anthropocentric tendencies, (religious and secular) mistakenly considered humanity was no longer limited or constrained by the same material boundaries as the rest of nature. The dominant anthropocentric mind-set considered that ‘intelligent’ Science and ‘sophisticated’ Philosophy would overcome any natural physical boundaries or any biological limitations. From an anthropocentric mind-set, the human species and its thinking was imagined to be the pinnacle of the evolution of life on earth. Thus the most outrageous modern anthropocentric forms of philosophical arrogance appear in the writings of the 18th, 19th and 20th century philosophers. For example;

“… the being of nature does not correspond to its concept; its existing actuality therefore has no truth; …” nature is a representation of the idea,” (Hegel. ‘The Philosophy of Nature’. Proposition 193)

Of course the term nature is an abstraction and therefore it is a general concept – not a real thing – and so the use of the term does logically correspond to itself. But of course the actuality of life forms which are included within the concept of ‘nature’, once carefully examined do have a reality corresponding to at least a high degree of relative truth. However, any non-obsequious study of Hegel will reveal that Hegel was a thorough idealist and thought that God had created man and nature and that the real evolutionary developed organisms within nature were physical manifestations of Gods perfect idea. I contend that undue regard for philosophy in general has sown much mischief among human populations, the reason why (and the dangers) are summed up below by another philosopher, Herbert Marcuse.

“Philosophy had never ceased to claim the right to guide man’s efforts towards a rationally mastery of nature and society or to base this claim upon the fact that philosophy elaborated the highest and most general concepts for knowing the world” (Herbert Marcuse ‘Reason and Revolution’. Chapter 2)

And;

” ..the conquest of nature is practically complete..” (Herbert Marcuse. ‘Eros and Civilisation” Introduction.)

Think about the above (often repeated) assertions such as; Philosophy, (incidentally, an almost complete male preserve) “…claims the right to guide efforts toward a mastery of nature (and claims to have) “the highest concepts for knowing the world.” There is no need to make any further case against the arrogance and limitations of most of the 20th century anthropocentric understandings of the real relationship between humanity and the rest of life on earth, than those made by its intellectuals, influencers and politicians from their own words. It was not until the mid-20th century, that the ecological balance of the interdependent network of life on earth was anywhere near fully understood even by a minority.

Until the late 20th and early 21st centuries, looking after nature was at best a moral problem rather than an existential necessity for all life on earth – including humanity. Thinking about nature was conceived as rather like having the choice between a planned garden or an abandoned allotment. Now more and more of the above-noted inter-dependencies are becoming firmly established, if not yet consistently broadcast, widely disseminated, or sufficiently accepted. Therefore, much of humanity is in either a form of ignorant bliss or in opiate type denial with regard to themselves and life on earth. Consequently, it is an essential task to continue to draw attention to the connections between human activity and the increasing loss of key species, such as soil microorganisms (including fungi), insect and animal pollinators of plants along with plants and algae as photosynthetic oxygen producers and food chain sustainers.

Eventually, this existential reliance of humanity on life on earth – as a whole – will become more commonly understood. But meanwhile the problem and its solution should also become part of any future intelligently discussed and organised human society as a fundamental part of revolutionising its mode of living and producing. Humanity needs to balance it’s own nutritional (N) and habitat needs in such a manageable and proportional way that it does not by overproduction, over-consumption and over pollution destroy the key life support species needed to supply the general and particular forms of nourishment (N) either as air, water, or food based photosynthetic life forms.

A socio-economic revolution in the 21st century and beyond as its consistant priority would need to ensure that future human societies do not undermine the general ecological balance of all the life forms that the planetary system has evolved with. The continued viability of the whole planetary system of life on earth depends upon overcoming the past and present anthropocentric level of human understanding, particularly within the thinking of those advocating a revolutionary change in the existing mode of production. Sufficient evidence has already been accumulated to indicate that particular care should be taken to protect the following – often taken for granted and under-valued life forms – which we most depend upon are nurtured and protected.

For example, plants (large and small) and of course oceanic algae, all of which absorb the carbon dioxide other life forms exhale and using the suns energy emissions transform this gas into oxygen. These bio-chemical transformations are vital to all aerobic dependent life forms. Furthermore, land and sea based plants also provide the base-line food sources for all life on earth. Thus plants in their tiniest and largest forms are key organic life support systems for all other species of life on earth. But of course, given the interdependent essence of nature plants cannot do this on their own, they also depend upon soil microorganisms and fungi to allow optimum root absorbtion of vital inorganic and organic material and its effective metabolic processing.

Plants also rely upon other animals and insects as well as wind dispersal for their reproduction (R) processes by means of pollination. And, of course, understanding the importance of these microorganisms to living plants, is not the only concern necessary for the maintenance of life on earth. That is because many varied life forms also dispose of the dead and decaying bodies (using them as sources of nutition) of life forms – all of which will eventually leave a residue of inanimate organic and inorganic material. The dynamic balance of production and consumption created by and during the evolution of the (N-M-G-R + A -D) processes of life on earth has been achieved over millions of years by drawing energy from the continuous orbital revolutions of the earth around the sun.

Although based upon an ‘on-the-surface’ understanding, each species during its function of living is essentially doing it’s own thing, by being both a consumer of organic material while they live and a donator of organic material when later they die (either by predation or after ageing) they are collectively assuring the continual recycling of much of the organic and inorganic material produced by each species and its re-absorbtion into new forms of life. The vast biological system of ‘life on earth’ by it’s very ‘nature’ cleans up after itself and re-uses everything it can. The global results of this inter-connected and inter-dependent network – until the onset of the industrial revolution in Europe – has not only sustained the vast number of species of life on earth, but maintained them in a dynamic but ‘natural’ ecological balance.

Any revolutionary individual or movement of individuals, who put the welfare of the human species first, or defines it’s own welfare according to Anthropocene ideological assumptions, is not a revolutionary movement at all. It is in fact, if not in name, a reactionary single species movement. If in future, humanity is to cease damaging and destroying this essential ecological balance of nature, which after all is the material foundation of all life on earth – including humanities own – the revolutionary changes to be made need to be Gaia focussed. Humanities relationship to nature (life on earth as a whole) can no longer be addressed primarily by issues of how human societies are to be governed or structured.

Thus, any mode of human living, collectively producing and consuming (N) should know how not to detrimentally destabilise that inter-connected and interdependent balance of all those multifarious life forms essential to that balance. The form of human existence, like the existence of all other life forms, needs to achieve a balanced place within the entire web of life on earth. Therefore, it is not simply a different political elite or a different form of elite governance or a different social form of continuing mass production and consumption that needs to be addressed and revolutionised. It is the entire mode of living, producing and consuming which needs to be transformed.

For those who haven’t turned the 19th century Revolutionary-Humanist perspectives of Marx into a universally applicable sectarian dogma, his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ are still relevant, particularly the 11th.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Theses on Feuerbach.)

Waiting for (and encouraging other activists to wait for) the masses, to assemble under the banner of some male-led revolutionary sect with 19th and 20th century levels of anthropocentric understanding amounts to intellectually justified procrastination and is reactionary to boot. It is repeating the same old pattern of leaders-in-waiting expecting the masses to be dutifully led by a self-appointed clique who have adopted the tiered hierarchical mass society model in embryo and need the masses to fund them and carry them and their ideas onward and upward socially and economically.

Besides that process has been repeatedly tried in many countries, during the 20th century in Russia and China and beyond on a large scale and in mini and micro Trotskyist, Leninist, Maoist sects on a small scale. The combined evidence of all these misguided attempts indicate that the results and traditions of this vanguardist model are not worth conserving or repeating. The species task for humanity is to create consistent social and economic conditions of cooperation among themselves – as a species – in order to re-establish and maintain an integrated balance of their own species with the rest of the species of life on earth. The exceptions to the hierarchical mass society  patterns, such as Mondragon and the Kurdish Peshmerga groups in Kurdistan, are of course few and far between. Nevertheless, resistance to hierarchical mass society living and producing will continue whether the hierarchy adopts liberal, capitalist, fascist, or communist ideologies with which to fool the masses.

That is because the form itself is an oppressive, exploitative, divisive and ecologically destructive dead end – for all life on earth. Those really concerned with revolutionary transitions from current hierarchical mass society formations dominated by capital, should begin by initiating self-determining egalitarian, Gaia-centered community alternatives ASAP. Such alternatives would be not only an actual act of defence and Resistance to the death agonies imposed by elites upon our human and other species communities, but where successful, would have Revolutionary potential. Even by success on a small scale, such alternatives will speak far louder than any number of carefully considered revolutionary sounding rhetorical  pronouncements.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2024)

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RESISTANCE & REVOLUTION. (Part 2)

Posted on April 22, 2024 by stutteringsteps

Resistance & Revolution in the 21st Century.

The human centred bourgeois ideological constructions, noted in (Part 1), have for generations been intellectually integrated into a set of largely unchallenged assumptions based upon the social domination of the ancient hierarchical mass society structure of human living. Consequently, the aim common to most of these left, right and centre proposals for revolutionary transitions is the need to ‘save human civilisation’ from it’s current self-destructive trajectory’, whatever they think that trajectory is. However, this is exactly the same abstract purpose as understood by the liberal bourgeoisie.

In other words it is the ‘content’ of hierarchical mass society forms they disagree upon and wish to change, not the form itself. In the name of ‘civilisation’ (i.e. the current hierarchical mass society form) the liberals  think and profess they have been saving humanity for multiple generations from the barbarity of so-called ‘ignorance’ and primitive backwardness and (for more recent decades) by the ‘progress’ of industry and science. If 20th and 21st century genocide, industrialised warfare and ecological destruction is a result of enlightenment and progress, then perhaps a little nostalgia for pre-civilised life on earth would not be so irrational as at first it may seem.

It turns out that for a century or so the elites in control of hierarchical mass societies have been destroying life on earth (human, insect, animal and natural plant material), in every possible nook and cranny for their own self-gratification. And of course classifying that as civilised behaviour. Civilisation is of course the bourgeois term used to describe the ancient, middle and latest advanced hierarchical mass societies based upon elite directed production and consumption. So one unanswered question in all such ‘saving civilisation’ proposals for revolutionary change is what is deemed worth saving and for whom is it to be saved?

But even before that question can be adequately dealt with, another missing aspect of most left liberal fantasies concerning revolution is the fact there are the two necessary dimensions to human existence (the biologically determined economic dimension and the socio-biologically determined organisational dimension) mentioned in part 1. And again, whilst these two aspects; ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ are linked, they are not achieved in the same manner.

Most anti-capitalist thinking concerning any future human society to the capitalist dominated hierarchical mass society form, therefore, is still based upon a hierarchical mass society model but imagined to be differently governed. The only slight difference is that the left version of saving human ‘civilisation’ is to be organised on the basis of the ideas of a progressive elite and managed by elected or appointed representatives of the class from which this progressive elite emerges. In essence this new idea of a progressive elite is not so new. It is just a repetition of the old bourgeois idea of a progressive elite, leading humanity torward to an elite determined future.

Here again we have parts of the revolutionary left uncritically accepting the bourgeois ideas of general material progress and the continuation of class distinctions. They envision a class of politically educated rulers, a class of institutionally educated bureaucrats and a class of ‘trained’ workers. This is why this type of idea of revolution arises primarily among the dissident thinking classes, who assume their ideas are necessary to determine what happens in future once  implemented at a practical level. Therefore, if they produce clever or logical sounding ideas and put them out there, this will enable discontented people to implement them and change the miserable reality of their lives.

Therefore for several generations, most ‘revolutionary’ thinkers have formed themselves into groups to spread their ideas and even invite workers to pay to read their ideas, by selling them magazines, papers and now blog subscriptions to fund their own existence. That is how any class of intellectuals continues to exist within bourgeois societies. They sell their ability to think and eloquently express those thoughts in literature and to talk about them in front of paying (in some way) audiences whilst convincing themselves they are doing it for the benefit of mankind. The ‘revolutionary’ intellectuals are no different in this regard and within their organisations they invariably replicate the traditional hierarchical mass society system in miniature.

They soon (often immediately) choose a leader (elected or appointed), select a managerial support group (editoral staff or central committee) and rectuit an almost endless supply of discontented worker/followers to appeal to for funds and other forms of support such as providing free labour. If such ‘sects’ become relatively successful, they invariably institute all the typical infrastructure of hierarchical mass societies, such as paid staff, appointment and promotion procedures, competitive jockeying for staff positions, resorting to disciplinary and expulsion procedures, when challenged. So even whilst advocating a revolutionary transition to a different form of living and working they, like the elites they oppose, are actively conserving the ancient form of hierarchical mass society living and working.

The above paragraph outlines why the social reality of Soviet Russia, under the Leninists, Trotskyists and Stalinists, and Communist China under Mao and his successors (and other similar so-called revolutionary transitions) so closely resembled all other hierarchical mass society forms – including the ones designated as Fascist! The fact that the leaders are designated differently as Fuhrer”s, Commisars, or Ministers, matters little to how the system functions. This is also why simply advocating the elimination of the third defining characteristics of hierarchical mass societies (elite wealth accumulation) does not solve the problems associated with hierachical mass societies.

Nor would it solve the destruction of the ‘natural’ foundations of all life on earth – including humanity! In the modern context, even a policy of levelling down the rich and eliminating the incentive for wealth accumulation and profit, the existence of nine billion human beings continually consuming organic and inorganic nature inorganic would still be existentially problematic. Such numbers, producing and consuming at even a moderate level on a finite planet with a rapidly diminishing number of ‘key’ species supporting the rest, does not represent a solution for life on earth in general, but a continuation of the same old anthropocentric problem.

The above noted intellectual limitations imposed by this combination of lived experience within hierarchical mass societies and its inherited ideological assumptions has prevented many anti-capitalists and those who class themselves as ‘socialists’ from understanding how human social reality has unfolded with regard to the socio-economic and bio-chemical aspects of the evolution of all life on earth. Marx summed up this intellectual tendency amongst the 19th century left-leaning middle classes when he wrote;

“The act of transforming society was reduced to the cerebral activity of their own criticism.”

And;

“They forget, however, that they are opposing nothing but phrases to these phrases, and they are in no way combatting the real existing world when they are combatting solely the phrases of this world.” (Marx. In Marx/Engels Collected Works Volume 5 page 30)

Life on earth, including human life, is essentially practical even in the case of the modern social domination of an intellectually employed labour force. The cycle of Nutrition, Cell-Metabolism, Body Growth, Species Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A-D) are all physical processes – for all forms of life on earth! They are certainly not the result of intellectual processes even though they are now more comprehensively understood by intellectual means. Indeed, thought itself is dependent upon the practical implementation of the (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes of living and producing. It is not ‘I think therefore I am’, but ‘I am (at a stage were) I can think. Also in reality only practical circumstances and, techniques can actually be revolutionised.

Therefore, any reference to socio-economic revolutions should primarily refer to a practical reorganisation of living and producing – not a reorganisation of people’s thoughts. To start a genuinely revolutionary process on the revolutionary left it is necessary to radically change what is being done by the revolutionary left – in practice – not in theoretical formulations! Simply carrying on as before and just talking and writing about what others (usually the workers or ‘the people’) should be doing in future is not revolutionary but conservative. In the 21st century, revolutionary phrase-mongering is an anthropocentric indulgence and essentially an act of conserving existing class distinctions and hierarchical assumptions of leaders and led; of a modern version of shepherds and sheep.

In particular, anthropocentric focussed intellects tend to ignore the biological reality concealed or conceptually obscured by the abstraction ‘modes of production’ and therefore they ignore or downplay the revolutionary changes needed to the  organization and purpose of production and consumption which are currently negatively affecting the biological processes required for life on earth to continue as previously. It should now be an absolutely taken for granted fact that the bio-chemical processes of life on earth pre-date the formation of hierarchical mass societies and politics, by millions if not billions of years, but even so, the practical implications of this evolutionary fact are still being insufficiently considered.

The implications of such a perspective, however, are becoming clear. They are that any future ecologically balanced forms of human society would need to recognised (now from accumulated experience) the importance of two essential changes to production and consumption. 1. The need to stop and reverse the current profit-led, ecological destruction of life on earth by human productive  activity; and 2. To begin to reintroduce and replant or allow a repopulation of most of the already depleted forests, insect, animal, bird and sea life habitats and their inter-connected species.

To do that humanity will need to reject and reverse three past and current practically based elite assumptions and practices: 1, that we are not one species but made up of superior and inferior sub-divisions comprised of nations, religions or races; 2, that competition for sources of life support between human communities is not natural; and 3, That the concept of rich and poor is not a naturally determined outcome of biological evolution, but a continuing elite determined socially intended outcome. At root, these are practical 21st century issues which any genuine revolutionary activists should be discussing, resolving and implementing themselves whilst aiming to encourage others – by their practical example – to do the same.

Any proposals not including the essence of the last sentence of the previous paragraph is not revolutionary in any long or short-term term sense. Simply talking and writing about overthowing capitalist based mass society hierarchies and/or modifying the social composition of governing elites or removing class, gender, and ethnic divisions and prejudices, are only phrases and in any case these phrases only address anthropocentric concerns. These latter (original 20th century revolutionary perspectives) were drawn up by previous generations on the basic assumptions that all the above noted overthrows, modifications and removals could be achieved on a planet that would be relatively stable climatically, ecologically and socially.

The real world evidence for such assumptions, plus a further one that in an existential crisis, a majority of humanity could be relied upon to be rational – no longer exists! Those 20th century assumptions are no longer valid, even if they may have appeared to be still relevant in the late 20th century thinking of many of us anti-capitalist activists at that time. The globalisation of the capitalist mode of production and its associated bourgeois assumptions has introduced a level of socially determined irrationality among most of the human species.

It is now the case that far too many now consider competition, self-indulgent consumption and a high degree of narcissistic exceptionalism is the essential ‘natural’ essence of the human species. Thus such socialised ‘entitlement’ expectations are currently so embedded within the psychology of many mass society individuals that an endless supply of globalised commodities and experiences are not just longed for, but demanded and genocidally fought for by sections of humanity – even against the interests of other human beings – and against the survival needs of all other non-favoured life forms.

For the success of any future revolutionary movement, practical experience will need to have convinced a critical mass of citizens to reject entitlement exceptionalism among humanity in general. Moreover,  the practical rejection of such aspirations will be every bit as important as a defeat of the ruling elites who control the current capital dominated hierarchical mass society nations. Indeed, the practical ‘life on earth’ basis of a hoped for universal entitlement to conspicuously consume is disappearing fast. The  profit-based investments by the upper and middle-classes, is exhausting and deforming,  more and more of the natural inorganic and organic resources of planet earth. But despite this vivid backdrop of existential threats to life on earth, the current political reality is that entrenched elites, organising, campaigning and engaging in genocidal levels of mass killing is proving a more obtainable objective than the long term organised resistance to such outcomes.

Currently, where opposition to such entrenched elites actually develops, it more often takes the form of sectarian militarised groups, which as noted, replicate the male dominated anthropocentric social forms manifested by those elites they are actually opposed to. Civil wars then become wars between competing elite-led movements for the purpose of capturing power over economic, financial and social resources, rather than revolutions seeking the liberation of life on earth from oppression and exploitation. Whilst in general, the implications of understanding that the bio-chemical maintenance and reproduction of life on earth – as a whole – is essential for the future of all life on earth, the practical means of ensuring that outcome are not at all clear.

However, it is possible to say that the problems facing all the species of life on earth (including the human species) will not be solved by elite fantasies of how hierarchical mass societies can be continued, reformed and anthropocentrically governed politically, socially or economically. The historical evidence on previous ‘civilisations’ (sic) suggests, that despite warnings,  some things (including human societies) have to overwhelmingly collapse from their own internal contradictions, before enough time and space becomes available for the survivors of the collapse to initiate alternative ways of living and producing which cannot  then be effectively obstructed.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2024)

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RESISTANCE & REVOLUTION. (Part 1)

Posted on April 15, 2024 by stutteringsteps

Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century.

Resistance within hierarchical mass societies has taken many forms and has been almost continuous since the first emergence of this form of human aggregation several thousand years ago. Resistance, individual or collective, occurs because these hierarchical social forms are oppressive, exploitative and alienating. However, although there is occasionally a direct link between resistance and the outbreak of revolution, those links and occurances are few and far between. Nevertheless, some people seem to think that repeated high levels of resistance will automatically lead to revolution. This, however, is not how the two symptoms interact. This is because increased resistance is merely a quantitative development, whereas revolution is a distinctly qualitative development. No matter how violently or widely expressed, resistance breaks out among the victims of oppression their decision is only motivated to act against some of the oppressive or exploitative actions inflicted against them. By merely resisting they do not necessarily act against the entire system of oppression. In such cases of collective resistance, there comes a point in which one side modifies its position and backs down. On the one hand, the elite side will often cease or ease their oppression, or are replaced by a different set of elites, or on the other the resisters are appeased or defeated and the oppresive system carries on. Even resilant resistance is countered by reformist promises.


Revolutions, on the other hand see resisters go beyond a stage of progressive or intermittant resistance to any mass exploitation and oppression and become transformed into forming movements for a completely different way of living and working. A revolution to change a mode of production, therefore, becomes a struggle for and against an entire system of living and producing not just immediate acts of oppression. This is why throughout history, revolutions are both infrequent and different to the everyday class struggles within hierarchical mass societies. First of all activists who decide to take part in revolutionary struggles, whether these are successful or not, have to arrive at a practical realisation that the existing way of producing and living – as a whole -should not be allowed to continue any longer. Yet even that experience and its ideological expression, is still not enough to initiate an actual process of revolution. Secondly, and of crucial importance, there must already exist an alternative way of living and producing that has successfully materialised and been substantially developed. Unless these two elements are present, all talk of revolution is just fantasy. Although intellectually it can appear to certain individuals, that it is new ideas that can change old realities, in fact collectively the process is invariably in the opposite sequence. The ideas of large communities about how to live and produce generally only change from directly experiencing the existence of new productive realities. New forms of large-scale community living are not a result of direct exposure to new ideas, but to new ways of being.

This material relationship between reality and ideas at the social level is demonstrably clear from the case of the production and dissemination of ideas of socio-economic revolution. The concept of revolution has been used descriptively and rhetorically many times on the left and right particularly during the 20th century but without any notable changes in the ideas of the masses concerning a rejection of the dominant mode of production. Over a number of generations, the resistance of the working classes has peaked and troughed and yet questioning the system as a whole, has remained the exclusive intellectual pursuit of only a tiny minority. The mass uprisings and resistance shown by sufferers of oppression and exploitation prior to the so-called 20th century fascist and socialist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, China and elsewhere were not revolutionary with regard to the hierarchical systems of exploitation and oppression. These uprisings and resistances did not result in an end to the form of exploitation of the masses, nor put an end to the existence of an exploitative ruling/governing elite. In the end the energy of the working class resistance and uprisings only served to back one side or the other of contending or competing ruling elites, who, when victorious retained the existing class based system of hierarchical mass society living and producing.

So from a revolutionary-humanist perspective, all these so-called ‘revolutions’ have been misnamed. They were not actually socio-economic revolutions, for in essence, the resistance of the masses quickly came under the influence and direction of the radical actions and ideas of disident political elites. In the 20th century, these elites, supported by the masses, managed to replace the previous ruling elites by the means of engaging in extreme levels of civil war. These 20th century resistances to the exploitation of the capitalist mode of production, by being manipulated into focussing on replacing the type of ideology espoused by various elites, left the three essential structures of all hierarchical mass societies firmly in place. The capitalist mode of production (i.e. mode of living and producing) became merely the latest iteration of the general hierarchical mass society form. These essential socio-economic aspects of the capitalist domination of the hierarchical mass society form are 1, the existence of wage labour; 2, the separation of control/ownership of the results of past labour (now designated as capital) from the working producers of it; and 3, the existence of an elite with the protection of a militarily force to keep the labour of working people under a direct or indirect form of elite control.

In all the 20th century so-called revolutions, this elite control continued to be exercised over the ‘duration’, the ‘purpose’ and the ‘distribution’ of the results produced by the main means of economic activity. In actual fact the main ‘means’ of production in the 20th century had been previously changed from subsistence production based on agriculture to commodity production based upon commecial trade and manufacture. People were already living by engaging with this new (capitalist’) mode when the political power of its main representatives had later been consolidated by the bourgeois political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The class representing the new mode of production (the commercial bourgeoisie) had successfully existed by means of their trade for many decades during the late middle ages, before they were eventually challenged in civil wars, by the aristocratic establishment within the fuedal system to remain subordinate. Later still, the dominant means of production based upon ‘commercial capital’ had changed from agriculturally based technologies to industrial based technologies and the conditions of working labour had changed from land based tied labour to waged labour freed from all direct connections with the land. In other words, the means and part of the mode of production had already been changed technologically and socially, but the rest of the mode of production remained essentially the same. This general mode of production and living was based upon the three great classes of all hierarchical mass societies.

Basically, there remained a class of ‘rulers’, a class of ‘managers’ and a class of ‘workers’. Of course, lots of changes had occurred in the technology of production and in the social lives of the working classes, but the essence of the hiearchical mass society mode of production had been retained. Therefore, the fundamental problems and tensions arising from the two human devised triads remained. The first (human) triad comprised of a) the ‘ruling elite’, the social ‘managers’ and the workers (living labour) who produce. The second (economic) triad comprised of b) the ‘duration’ of production, the ‘purpose’ of production and the ”distribution’ of the results of production, were also retained, in the transition to capitalism from feudalism. But note also these two historic social and economic triads were also retained under the 20th century ‘socialist’, ‘communist, fascist and social democratic liberal regimes. Consequently, the Neo-liberalist stage of capitalism in the 21st century still contains all the defining problems facing previous generations of working people but it has also become clear that the capitalist mode dominating human production now causes existential problems for the whole of humanity and the rest of the species of life on earth. The economic, financial and political elites within the first social triad (the ruling classes), determine the purpose, the duration and the distribution of production, which ensures not only the relative and absolute impoverishment of many millions of humans but the relative and absolute degradation of other essential forms of life on earth. The managerial/bureacratic levels of hierarchical mass societies, ensure the elite wishes are fulfilled, and the workers are compelled by various incentives and punishments to fulfil them.

This system and the lack (as yet) of any viable and acceptable alternative mode of production is why the idea of revolution, partially or completely muddled or not, does not resonate with or become seriously considered by most of those oppressed and exploited within hierarchical mass societies. Since the marginalisation and undermining of the cooperative way of working and living, in the 20th century, there is simply nothing better, than liberal capitalism actually on offer. Until there is a practical example of a co operative way of living and working whilst protecting and nurturing the rest of life on earth, the idea of a revolutionary transition away from liberal capitalism will remain moribund. However, this does not mean that the idea of revolution will not continue to be raised among certain segments of society. Not only genuinely mistaken concepts of revolution will continue to appear, but also novel variations will emerge promoted by those wishing to replace existing elite structures with their own preferred elite cohort of ideologists. The latter are frequently quick to recognise that in a crisis, they need to sound radical enough to be taken seriously by people in desperate straits. This happens in any deepening social and economic crisis. Karl Marx, when he studied the Paris Commune uprising response of working people in 1871 noted the emergence of such people who in every serious struggle whether with good or bad intentions, are often;

“without insight…hamper the full development of every previous revolution.” (Marx. ‘Class Struggles in France’. page 84.)

Meanwhile, imprecise uses of the concept of revolution and differing motives for using it really hamper understanding and need to be rectified, particularly in the 21st century when the implications of human production and overproduction can no longer be considered from a purely or exclusively human standpoint. Human productive activity can no longer be intellectually and economically separated from the needs of the rest of life on earth (i.e. nature!). The current human mode of production increasingly threatens the very life-support foundations for all life on earth. Climate, air and water quality, sources of nutrition etc., are being altered by human production in ways that can no longer be corrected by natural levels of biological reproduction of the essential key species maintaining the evolutionary processes of life in general. So I suggest that in periods of 21st century crisis, the idea of revolution is of little use if it remains abstract and without any real clarity as to what is intended and how it is to be established and how it is to socially evolve. Indeed, the concept of revolution has again also been more recently used in terms of advocating a transition from the existing capitalist domination to a post-capitalist socio-economic system of so-called ‘de-growth’.

However, the concept of ‘de-growth’ in contrast to continuous capitalist growth may sound radical to some, but it still offers little overall clarity of content and form within such proposals for revolutionary change in the 21st century. The left alternative of green growth instead of polluting petro-chemical growth is no less dualistically framed as well as vague. This general level of confusion and abstraction is understandable and entirely predictable for obvious reasons. Most so-called revolutionary thinkers have evolved within an intellectual paradigm predominantly determined by the direct experience of the bourgeois mode of hierarchical mass society socio-economic production. The current socio-economic base of humanity has given rise to a narrow range of ideological assumptions and political structures focussed entirely on the exagerated needs of an elite-led humanity. Take a further ‘left’ anthropocentric example; such as the concept of ‘sustainable development’ This roughly translates to mean “development that meets the human needs of the present without compromising the ability of future human generations to meet their own needs.” ‘Yet what are the human needs of the present’?

In reality, the first existential requirement for humanity, arises from the biologically determined need for balanced nutrition (N), clean water, clean oxygenated air and reasonably stable climatic conditions, so that photosynthetic produced food and oxygen sources will be functioning and abundantly available for all life on earth. For humanity, their own needs are precisely these unreferenced and unmentioned biologically determined needs, which in order to be met, are absolutely dependent upon the existence of a whole interconnected and interdependent network (or web) of species life on earth. In the 21st century, any revolutionary perspective for the future of humanity, which does not include the needs of other life-forms essential to all existence, alongside it’s own needs, is not potentially revolutionary, but potentially reactionary. This is because the existing hierarchical mass society form of human aggregates which is currently ‘glossed’ as ‘civilisation’, is already deeply reactionary. It is genocidally destroying humanities species unity and damaging the complex interdependent foundation upon which the human species has evolved and which it needs to survive in any future form of social aggregation. The overwhelming experience of living in the bourgeois form of meeting these two needs, (by mass economic production and mass biological reproduction) has resulted in an anthropocentric paradigm of thinking by most citizens and also by many anti-capitalists. This closed paradigm of thinking needs to be not only resisted but also revolutionised.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2024).

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