UK RIOTS: THE NEGLECTED REALITY. (Part 1.)

Posted on August 6, 2024 by stutteringsteps

The recent riots in various UK cities sparked by the tragic stabbings of little children in Southport have highlighted two social narratives, which are primarily based upon narrow ideological understandings rather than on factual ones. This symptom of narrative selection is further demonstrated by the evidence that the actual stabbings have been quickly neglected and the focus directed exclusively upon the issue of immigration. It is here that the two partially correct narratives have been counter-posed to each other as alternative truths. It is being asserted within one narrative, emerging from within the indigenous working class communities, that the already much depleted social resources once available to them are being further reduced and redirected to immigrant communities. Once the facts are examined, this viewpoint cannot be denied so its relative truth has been deliberately ignored or neglected by those in government and media.

The amount of financial and fixed resources directed to support immigrants has been expanded astronomically during the same period as a decline in previous indigenous community resources have been reduced and replaced by austerity reductions, food banks and charity shop purchases. The descendents of the indigenous working classes have had their mid 20th century relative security gained from secure employment and social distress relief reduced by unemployment and cuts to education, health and other social services. Consequently, many UK citizens have been angry, frustrated and relatively powerless for decades and are now joined by a new generation also experiencing deteriorating circumstances.

Yet these facts are missing from within the narratives championed by the right and left leaning political classes. Frustration and anger have therefore, increased exponentially. What is currently happening is that the cause of this relative decline in life experiences and future life chances of current indigenous working people in the UK and Europe, is being attached to the existence of those human beings displaced from other countries who have now become immigrants to Europe.

One set of victims of the current global crisis of the neo-liberal capitalist system – the indigenous victims – are being told by the right wing extremists that this is the fault of another set of external victims – the immigrants!. The additional reality missing from the narrative of the right wing and liberal wings of the political and media ‘establishment’ in the UK is the following. During the same decades that were used by the governing elites to reduce wages and benefits for working people, the resources going toward the rich, super rich and moderately well off were increased either moderately in some cases or astronomically in others. Tax cuts, cheap labour costs and reduced industry and financial restrictions in the UK and Europe have enabled the class of millionnare and billionaire capitalist exploiters to expand their wealth, their numbers and their influence within all countries – including the UK.

Consequently, the reality is that in the 21st century, there are not less socially produced resources to go around, for indigenous and foreign victims of the global system, but far more than there was in the 20th. It is the social distribution of these resources which has been manipulated and altered by successive governments of all political complexions. This unequal social distribution of resources has become part of the problem which lies behind many of the current riots and civil disobedience and is conveniently being ignored.

The right wing organisers of these demonstrations and riots know these basic facts, but for various reasons, are choosing to ignore or neglecting to mention them. This undoubtedly is in order to continue to promote the one-sided blame game of picking on the immigrants rather than on the rich elites who control how disproportionately the global economic system functions. So the various figures in the political establishment are asserting an opposite, also partially correct and valid point, in their narrative of justification for the existing inequality by asserting that immigration benefits some people and the country in general. Whilst it undoubtedly does to some extent, they also choose to ignore or downplay the above noted dispossessed reality for the indigenous working classes. The fact is in 21st century UK and Europe there are enough social resources to adequately feed, house and educate all indigenous working people together with those immigrants terrorised or victimised by their own governments who are now seeking sanctuary.

What ultimately stands in the way of re-distributing these resources to all those who need them is the current hierarchical mass society system governed and controlled as it is by a relatively small class of greedy, overprivileged, inhumane elite individuals, who for decades have shaped the social, economic and financial systems to benefit themselves. These elite minority sectors of hierarchical mass societies are so dehumanised by their privileged life-styles, that in summer 2024, in the background of the riots, they have preferred to financially support the exclusive elite focussed Olympic Games, and a continuing Genocide in Gaza, rather than financially, supporting the schools, hospitals, care homes and local councils of their own struggling communities.

It has also been clear for some time that they would also prefer to financially support the war in Ukraine and continue to despoil and pollute nature rather than relinquish the smallest fraction of their wealth in taxes. Incidentally taxing the rich and super rich would at least ease some of the current burdens upon ordinary people, the environment or the other essential species necessary for the existence of life on earth. With this obnoxious 21st century reality in mind, is it any wonder, that there is widespread discontent, even if some of it is currently confused, misguided and counterproductive?

What also stands in the way of solving the many problems that the current hierarchical mass society systems have created are those who have only managed to grasp partial truths and regurgitate them along with promoting other mythical fabrications. Among those are those fabricators and defenders of the ideologies of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, who also ignore the fact that these ideologies openly justify and condone patriarchal exploitation, state orchestrated oppression and revenge killings in the name of their imaginary god. Marx’s characterisation of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ only scratches the surface of the alienating circumstances attached to living within the past and present hierarchical mass societies. Incidentally, being a childhood victim of religious indoctrination adds to the difficulty many adults have now in deciding how to act collectively together to change the oppressive and exploitative reality of their societies.

Let’s summarise what is currently happening to the low, paid, hard working, precariously employed working classes of the UK, Europe and elsewhere. Many are reduced to living in shop doorways, others on park benches. Others, are just surviving by having multiple part-time low paid jobs, to feed themselves and their children. The exhaustion, stress and mental turmoil this kind of existence brings leads to drug taking, alcohol abuse, self-harming and mental illnesses of various kinds. Others are drawn into the internet world of interconnected and intensified anger, frustration and distorted fantasies of revenge (games and chat rooms) against the half understood processes and actions occuring around them. How can these thousands of mistreated, rejects of the modern hierarchical mass society system be expected to make calm rational sense of a system in which its educated elite are themselves in a constant state of denial concerning the corruption, the injustice, the low and high-level violence and neglect caused by  the socio-economic system they govern?

Far too many citizens have been rendered by the current socio-economic system of neo-liberal capitalism, completely unfit for rational thinking and calm reflection. Within any humane paradigm of understanding of social realities, the blame for the existence of a section of modern societies who are, mad for revenge, full of erratic rage and distorted perceptions cannot be laid entirely on the heads of those citizen victims displaying these symptoms. The system which at a governmental level bombs people into oblivion, starves others to death, builds prisons rather than community centres and homes, and falsely imprisons its critics, is producing on a small scale – in some of its citizen victims – essentially the same irrational and self-centered characteristics which define it at an elite level and on global scale.

Yet typically, it is the neglected, mistreated and misled working class victims who are to feel the full weight of the law at the urging of Labour and Conservative politicians, who stay silent or complicit when in the presence of those responsible for mass killings and genocide.  To use an agricultural metaphor, the system is reaping what it has sown as it did in the 20th century in which two world wars, resolved its many contradictions by removing at least six million of those earlier victims who potentially personified them.

The modern versions of these alienated citizens’ of the system, are among those victims of the present system who are currently being recruited by the right, in the UK and elsewhere, to target the weak and defenceless immigrant victims and to riot and destroy objects in various towns and cities during August 2024. Of course, it is much easier to classify those who the present system currently renders ‘unfit for rational thinking and reflection‘ as ‘fascists’ and condemn them outright rather than trying to provide them with a more accurate view of what is wrong with our global societies.

Explaining to them that what they are being misled into fighting for, will ultimately turn on them and destroy them as it did to others like them in the 1930’s and 1940’s, is currently a necessary – but a completely neglected task. It was in the 20th century,  that a previous generation of angry and frustrated citizens in Europe, initially joined the then small groups of sectarian conspirators who went on to create the openly fascist mass parties headed by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin. The evidence of numerous  historical archives indicate that these organisations and their leaders turned upon everyone (high or low) who would not implement the orders they had been issued with. Then when they gained power, they unleashed total war and dragged  global humanity into a previous era of shameful episodes.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2024)

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REMINDER: ENGELS WAS ONLY HUMAN.

Posted on August 3, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In the context of the 21st century multi-dimensional crisis visited upon the planet and its many species of life-forms, it has become popular in some circles to suggest reaching back to the writings of long dead individuals for contemporary guidance. The ones chosen have invariably made outstanding contributions to the understanding of life on earth, and that is the prime reason normally given to urge some of us to consult their opinions. A recent suggestion from some on the left in 2024 has been to study the works of Fredrick Engels.

However, three cautionary factors need to be recognised before undue reliance is placed upon any past researcher’s and their conclusions – and that includes Engels. The first is that they were limited by the quality and quantity of the evidence they had available and chose to base their conclusions upon: Second; they were subject to at least some of the general, class based socio-economic assumptions that were popular and taken for granted during the period they existed on earth; and third, they, like all human beings, were subject to their own emotional responses to events as well as to the intellectual processing of their experiences.

In this article I will provide some additional evidence for recommending a degree of caution before anyone relies too heavily on recent uncritical suggestions that the 19th century opinions of Fredrick Engels are still worth accepting in the 21st. Although Engels was a consistent radical, he nevertheless shared many assumptions typical of the educated men of that period. It was generally assumed by most of the educated elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that the history of humanity – and thus the world – had evolved through a sequence of definite stages.

Crucially, it was imagined that  one stage preceded another and created the conditions and an accumulation of knowledge which was necessary for the development of the subsequent stages. Evolutionary developments were assumed to have a ‘progressive’ purpose! This assumption was a retrospective application to history of the bourgeois  notion of human ‘progress’ which itself had been adopted from the Abrahamic religious traditions of assuming a purposeful ‘creation’ of life on earth, by some invisible mystical being.

Fragments of  what was then known about history and  pre-history were selectively attached to this idea of human progress. Certain historical facts were selected from the historical record which ‘appeared’ to fit this theoretical construction of progress and the resulting assumptions presented as a series of necessary sequences. That type of purposeful narrative became part of a commonly held set of theoretical abstractions  across a range of religious and non-religious educated Europeans.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was an accepted historical perspective shared by a broad spectrum of conservative, liberal and radical educated gentlemen. They generally only differed on the relative (and not the absolute) merits of this supposed historical ‘progress’ unfolding by the mystery of God’s will or by the unfolding of another abstraction known as ‘natural selection’.

Fedrick Engels, the revolutionary minded friend and collaborator of Karl Marx  provides us with an excellent example of this general  retrospective idea of progress as applied to some pre-supposed  stages of history and pre-history. It was most clearly contained within in his lengthy polemic against a religious intellectual called Duhring and carrying the title; ‘Anti-Duhring’. In the section on Force Theory Engels justifies the existence of slavery on the basis that it served a necessary purpose. He asserted that;

“Without slavery,  no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery no Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism…..When we examine these questions , we are compelled to say  – however contradictory and heretical it may sound – that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward…..Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based upon class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from which the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted as at a still earlier period.” (Engels. Anti-Duhring. Section 4;  Force Theory concluded.)

Engels concludes from this 19th century general anthropocentric perspective that slavery was a “necessary stage”, “a great step forward” in the  “advance” of human hierarchical mass society that was leading toward socialism. He goes even further in his assumptions and considers that the slaves at the time should have viewed their slavery as an advance for themselves as it spared them from being killed or killed and eaten. With only limited 19th century knowledge of pre-history and history,  Engels accepts the general reactionary and bourgeois Hegelian perspective on assuming there is not only  a ‘purpose’ to the unfolding of history, but a necessary one, leading to a stage he and others actually desired – called socialism. How intellectually convenient and counterfactual was that?

Note also that Engels  accepts the 19th century prejudice against an imaginary pre-historical stage of humanity they called ‘barbarism’ in which they arrogantly assumed past Homo sapiens were so ‘ignorant’ that they didn’t know any better than to eat each other. Therefore, they concluded on the basis woefully insufficient evidence that the human species – as a whole – were then prone to routine killing and cannibalism. The well known fact at the time of Darwin and Engels, let alone the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, that no other species of life on earth, including predatory species, routinely turned on their own species for their sources of nutrition, did not cause them (or Engels) to question or refute that prejudiced assumption. He goes on to add imaginatively that;

“So long as the effective working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society – the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc. – the concomitant existence of a special class freed from actual labour to manage these affairs was always necessary;……” (ibid)

He retrospectively applies a modern bourgeois economic term of distinction (necessary labour) to a period long before the existence of hierarchical mass societies, let alone ones dominated by the capitalist mode of production. During the period that Engels lived and studied, sufficient accumulated evidence already existed within Europe to contradict that kind of biggoted received ‘opinion’. Evidence accumulated by the many voyages of discovery to the east, west, north and south of the planet had established the fact that native peoples around the globe, practised many different modes of production, which indicated the opposite. For multiple thousands of years, most human groups had plenty of time available after securing enough daily nutrition to engage in any other activities they deemed interesting or worthwhile. Art, music, story telling, craft work and even domesticating pets and modifying their behaviour had existed along with regular decisions of when and where to move their location, when resources became scarce.

Engels provides no evidence for the above asserted state of human society which implies that humans existed like ruminant animals and are assumed to spend most of their non sleeping time in grubbing around for low grade vegetable nourishment from low lying grasses. However, this perspective does not fit into any known historical or pre-historical modes of production such as hunter-gatherer bands, coastal and lake-side fishing villages, goat, sheep or reindeer herders or seasonal pastoralists, etc. His insertion of such an imaginary  fabricated scenario therefore can only be assumed to be part of a polemical construction used to provide a logical ‘progression’ to his following sentence – which encapsulates his own particular view of a hoped for socialist revolution. Thus;

“Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and this to limit the labour-time of each member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical. It is only now, therefore that every ruling and exploiting classes become superfluous and indeed a hinderance to social development… ” (ibid)

Elsewhere I have provided evidence that Engels often mis-understood, the revolutionary-humanist perspectives of his friend and colleague Karl Marx, particularly with regard to Marx’s forensic analysis of the capitalist mode of production, (in the three volumes of Das Capital, the extensive notes known as the Grundrisse or in the three volumes of notes on Surplus Value.) Indeed, the existence of large-scale industry is now demonstrably not the ‘progressive’ good or necessary stage for human emancipation as it was imagined to be, in the 19th and 20th centuries by all Bourgeois intellectuals, of conservative, liberal or even revolutionary persuasions.

Unsurprisingly, such context specific anthropocentric assumptions to varying degrees, were also made by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao. How could they not be? These individuals were also – only human and their understanding limited by their experiences and the knowledge available to them at the time! Therefore, whilst recognising the many contributions to anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal perspectives made by a number of the above noted individuals we should not abandon our own critical and self-critical research and we should avoid leaning too heavily upon the level of understanding achieved by all individuals living during earlier centuries.

The reminder to ‘Whenever you are sure of something; maintain it with doubt’, provided by Bertrand Russel to his students could be usefully followed by every one of us. We should research as diligently and critically as we can, but always remain open to new information and new perspectives, because these new facts and perspectives once proven  reliable may prompt us to refine, modify or even refute our previous conclusions. Reminding ourselves that we too are only human and as such are products of the limited social and economic circumstances that we are immersed in during our own lifetimes, is not a fatal weakness for us individually nor for humanity as a whole.

Indeed, I suggest this modesty represents a form of evolutionary development for our species. Knowing how little we still know or understand should create humility and caution rather than arrogance and impatience. Consequently, we should develop and retain a healthy suspicion of those who fail to recognise their own limitations and arrogantly assume they have gone beyond making mistakes or beyond arriving at ill informed conclusions.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2024.)

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VICTIMISING THE VICTIMS.

Posted on July 25, 2024 by stutteringsteps

A) Competitive victimhood.

An awareness of the extent and depth of hierarchical mass society forms of oppression and exploitation of all organic life forms has grown considerably over the 20th century. However, this awareness is fragmented into separate categories of victimhood as if there were no common source of these multiple forms of oppression and exploitation. Yet it is clear that the common denominator in the victims of oppression and alienation in such categories as; Young, Old, Disabled,, Sick, Poor, Female, Gay, Unemployed, Immigrant, Enslaved, Coloniised,, Ethnicity, Gender Dysmorphic, Low paid economic,  Precariously employed  or discriminated on the basis of Skin colour, is the existing dominant socio-economic system.

Nevertheless, during exactly the same cycles of social production, these hierarchical mass society systems produce enormous amounts of wealth in the form of visible fixed assets and multiple objects of consumption. The problem is clearly one of the unequal distribution of these abundant resources and it is a problem which is created by those who control the main means of production. The super rich and the extremely rich have for extremely long periods extracted far more than they need for a contented existence; whilst, the super poor and the extremely poor have for long periods extracted far less than they need for a contented existence. Only the moderately comfortable groups situated in the middle income sectors of humanity have enjoyed what is (and should be) the basis for the contentment of all members of any naturally evolved species.

Yet of all the millions of species of life on earth only the human species has created such excessive differences in the mode of existence within it’s own species. It is the disproportionate distribution of the proceeds of social production, based upon the social evolution of the historic and modern divisions of labour within these complex societies, that have created the exclusively human phenomenon of internal-species enforced deprivation and structural victimhood. The historic cases of economic slavery, domestic slavery and in the modern era wage and salary forms of slavery have created numerous categories of human, animal and even plant victims of the current versions of the elite determined anthropocentric system.

In the modern period of educated populations and political forms of governance this phenomenon has now given rise to multiple forms of competitive victimhood. Thus in modern hierarchical mass societies oppression, exploitation and marginalisation manifest themselves in the politicised form of openly orchestrated competitions between victim categories for which category should be defined as the most needy and whose members should be compensated in some social or financial way. We now witness the amazing spectacle of a species which has named itself wise (Homo Sapien) in its daily practice ignoring the practical implications of being a single species and acts as if it were a collective of different species or sub-species, based upon socio-economic class.

So instead of uniting against the hierarchical mass society system of human social aggregation which oppresses and/or exploits them all to a greater or lesser extent, they are all now struggling against each other. These modern categories are involved in often fiercely competitive lobbing and activist group campaigns to elevate their own category of socio-economic alienation over and above the socio-economic alienations of other suffering categories. Whether meaning to or not, these activist groups are engaged in exclusive ‘identity’ battles in order to virtually elevate their own particular category of victim status over and above the status of all the other victim categories. It effectively divides the real human world into a series of competitive sub-worlds based upon virtual levels of social and intellectualised separate identities, rather than  the reality of a ‘natural’ species identity which has existed for over hundreds of thousands of years.

The primary aim of these campaigning groups is secure some current (or future) additional social or financial compensation potential in the existing 21st century informal and formal world of hierarchical mass societies. Despite widespread general over-production, over-consumption, and over-pollution, in the 20th and 21st centuries, this competive victimhood process has become a real world, distorted socialised form of ‘Victimhood Games’. At times it seems as if it is the real world which is mimicking the fictional ‘Hunger Games’  where geographical categories of humanity compete with each other for elite granted benefits. It is a most astounding feature of the success of modern hierarchical mass society divide and rule ideology emanating from our elites that has enabled the reality of an almost universal oppression of so many sectors of society to be corralled within their own almost self-ghettoised physical and intellectual limits within our hierarchical mass society aggregations.

Consequently victim categories have been channelled into competing with each other in the form of exclusive enemy guerilla combattant groups – within the jungle of mass societies – fighting for their own ultimate recognition and some form of compensatory benefit. The tortured logic of these formal and informal ‘Victimhood Games’ orchestrated by their ‘professional’ lobbying groups is to invite the elites in control of the wealth and power of our modern hierarchical systems to choose to put more coins into the modern electronic begging bowl of just one of the categories of the many victims of the elite system.

However, unintentionally meant, this amounts to making one set of victims active participants in effectively further demoting  another category of victim. It is a case of trying to persuade the elite with control of the modern state apparatus to choose to support one particular category of victim in preference to any of the other victim categories. Amazingly, this practice is currently described as motivated by humanitarian concern, rather than a manifestation of a restricted lack of humanitarian concern for all the other categories of victims. Real humanitarian and endangered species concern would be campaigning to create a unified oppositional movement aimed at representing all the victims of this oppressive and exploitative system of living. This single issue inversion of reality  demonstrates the political distortion of rational thinking within modern hierarchical mass societies.

As noted above, it may seem that these competitive charitable industry individual victim appeal sectors have become paradies of the fictional societies depicted in the the ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Hunger Games’ films. However, it would be more accurate to conclude that in actual fact it is these modern distopian novels and films which are merely an exaggerated parody of the real world unfolding around us in which the prequel to the present series of distopian events was the 1930’s Hunger Marches and the First and Second World War killing fields. The fictional paradies of those days were presented in Charlie Chaplins ‘Modern Times’ and the ‘Great Dictator’ and in Berthold Brecht’s, ‘The Threepenny Opera’, ‘Mother Courage and her Children’ and ‘The Good Person of Szechwan’.

B) Victims transformed into perpetrators.

Then there are the victims of hierarchical mass societies who turn themselves into intolerant persecutors of people whose experience of such societies has made them anti-social or intolerant of certain social ‘norms’ or traditions. In this way (and in others) the manifold faults of the ‘system’ become transferred onto the victims of the system. The real depth of this phenomenon is revealed in the behaviour and opinions of many individuals who have arrived at a particular critique of the current version of hierarchical mass societies and become highly intolerant of those who do not share that particular critical perspective. A case in point arises among those left anti-capitalists whose critique takes on a strong dogmatic political dimension so that anyone who takes a different political stance is declared an enemy of theirs and their ideas which needs to to be resolutely defeated. Such human victims of the system are not viewed as other human beings whose varied experiences of social alienation and exploitation have been processed differently and whose motives need to be fully understood.

Instead, a short-cut in selecting evidence and reaching conclusions is frequently chosen and the fact that another group of workers have reached different political conclusions is often interpreted by such sectarian dogmatists as that the former are suffering from some incurable personal mental or intellectual malady. Consequently they are not seen as a different product of essentially the same alienating socio-economic system, and also by only having limited information have reached different conclusions. For example, in the current multi-dimensional crisis, the fact that many traditional working class citizens, having – for very good reasons – turned their backs upon left reformist politicians and voted and/or campaigned for populist candidates, are being declared by many on parts of the spectrum of the left to have crossed some political Rubicon. From exploited and alienated working people they have been intellectually transformed into authoritarian fascists or proto-fascists and need to be openly demonised and actively fought against both intellectually and physically. .

Thus in a number of cases the intolerant so-called politically correct left become the mirror image of the intolerant right and raise the slogan ‘fight the fascists’, whilst the intolerant right raise the slogan ‘fight the liberals or commies’. In this way both sides of this hierarchical mass society politicised spectrum cease to see themselves and each other first and foremost as victims of the hierarchical mass society system who have become the manipulated tools of divided political elites. The danger lies in the fact that this perspective is exactly what the respective elites who are competing for social and political control of their respective countries, need. They want people not to just make political choices but to take permanent and belligerent sides. For those who as yet fail to see how this symptom can unfold it is worth reminding ourselves of Europe in the 1930’s.

The most extreme example of this crisis-produced political phenomenon of left workers versus right workers killing each other in support of one elite or another occurred in Europe of the 1930’s. That was when working class members of the National Socialist Party, in Germany and elsewhere, under the direction of their leaders took to ferociously fighting the working class members of the Communist and Socialist Parties who were also urged by their leaders to ferociously fight back. This convoluted process eventually led to a Second World War fought out primarily between the working class members of Germany, Italy and Japan who were pitted by their elites against the working class members of Britain, France, America and Russia. The final results of this catastrophe were the victorious return in all countries in 1945 of an hierarchical socio-political elite who then governed a much depleted (six million dead) international working class. And the rest is history – as the saying goes.

C) Blaming Weapons instead of the system. .

In this latest round of victim blaming, even inanimate objects are blamed rather than the effects upon individuals of the current system of social organisation. The latest round of shooting in the USA, this time with Donald Trump as the target, has once again triggered the usual torrent of superficial media and politically led thinking. Although others can get drawn into contributing to the torrent of virtual thinking, it invariably stems from those people who prefer to blame inanimate commodities for anything negative that happens within hierarchical mass societies. This produces the phenomenon of otherwise reasonably intelligent commentators, who would never believe that a knife could leap out of a cupboard and stab a human being, or that a bottle of alcohol could leave a shelf and empty its contents down a human throat, or that cocaine in powder form could leave its container and insert itself up someones nostrils, nevertheless quickly lose their rationality.

Being against something highly destructive should not be confused with the blaming of any highly destructive commodity for how it is used by certain individuals. Yet scores of commentators and ‘influencers’ straight away start to blame the availability of knives, alcohol, drugs or high powered weapons, for what happens to turn some people in society from an everyday citizen within some human societies into a killer, a rapist or a militarily paid, dropping bombs assassin. Surely, they know that a bomb cannot remove itself from its storeroom, board a plane and release itself to drop on women and children in Gaza or in Kiev. Most people must know that there needs to be an order from Biden or Putin, actioned by other active human beings in the hierarchical chain of authority. So why do so many refuse to look at the reality of hierarchical mass society, rather than concoct some intellectually constructed virtual reality? Ban the Bomb, the Gun, the Knife, the Poison, the biological weapons, etc., in the mouths of the powerless, is just a strategy of avoiding analyzing the social mess hierarchical mass societies have created since their introduction.

In any case, for those whose mental capacity is not restricted by chemical or ideological impediments, it should be obvious that Campaigns to limit the availability of commodities that can be used as weapons, will not limit the ingenuity of those human beings whose deformed and distorted experiences of living in them, leave them determined to kill and maim members of their own or other communities and will therefore find or invent an alternative means. The real problem for humanity and the rest of life on earth, is to identify what causes some human beings to lose their essential humanity which exists at their birth and is developed during their neonate period of nurture and replaces it with varying levels of deliberate inhumanity. The cause clearly cannot be biological since it occurs among no other species of life on earth, nor among all the human species living on the planet. Therefore, logic suggests, the cause must be located within the dominant social form of human living; in other words in the socio-economic structure of hierarchical mass society living.

It is currently impossible to imagine that enough people will emerge in the short term from the general victimhood of bourgeois ideological forms of thinking and who can therefore rise out of Marx’s “Muck of Ages’ analogy and therefore become “fit to found society anew”. I write these pessimistic words with considerable sadness because even most of the self-declared ‘Marxists’ and ‘ecologists’ have contributed, and are still contributing, their own layers of detritus to that mound of accumulating intellectual and material anthropocentric ‘muck of ages’. It is this 20th and 21st century mixture of elite led, top-down, now well absorbed mixture of ignorance and arrogance which stifles debate, non-dogmatic discussion and restricts non-sectarian activism. The practical and ideological competition at the heart of all hierarchical mass society systems – as now turbo-charged by the capitalist mode of production – has like a virus, infected even those thinkers and activists who are otherwise wishing to attempt to reform the system but currently remain trapped  within the anthropocentric parameters of current hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregation .

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)

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GLOBAL PRODUCTION & DESTRUCTION. (Part 3)

Posted on July 11, 2024 by stutteringsteps

In the final part of this series, I suggest it is important to fully recognise that a significant part of the destruction taking place under the auspices of the now almost universal hierarchical mass society systems is in the realm of emotions. It is not just the external inorganic and organic material of the planet, which is being destroyed by production for profit, but also the socio-psychological essence of the human species. At its fundamental bio-chemical and evolutionary foundational levels, the human species has evolved into a social species par excellence. The existence of each individual human organism not only depends upon the extended contributions of their biological parents and their nurturing support, as many other animal species do, but also upon the support of many other significant social individuals making up the complex divisions of labour spread across our communities. Our individual lives or our social systems could not function as they do without these thousands of other men and women who ensure that the delivery of some aspect of mass society living is kept constantly in motion.

Furthermore, these complex human social systems are also absolutely dependent upon the contributions of millions of other complex, bio-chemical organic species in nature that initially provide the oxygenated air we breath, the clean water we drink and the material basis of the essential organic food chains that we obtain from the life-cycle of plants, insects and animals. Even a partial understanding of this network of species and inter-species dependence and interdependence of life on earth, gives rise in the human species to particularly strong forms of emotional attachment to parents and significant others in the form known as various types of love and affection. Thus forms of emotional attachments already exist between family and friends as well as among close associates within the wider community. However, a more comprehensive understanding of this close knit web of inter-connected life can give rise to an affection for and love of life and nature in general.

The problem for humanity and the rest of life on earth is that the social form of hierarchical mass society structures, are such that for most human individuals even the above noted partial understandings of their absolute dependence and inter-dependence upon life on earth, is truncated, distorted and frequently eroded or obscured by the enforced competition created by these societies. Hence, the phenomenon in hierarchical mass societies of extreme forms of indifference and even antipathy to the welfare of other human, plant, insect and animal life forms, that all human beings depend upon to exist and survive. Furthermore, the competition within these societies is frequently so intense that the alienation and estrangement from ‘life on earth’ in general and from other human beings in particular is so severe that it results in hatred and fear between individuals and communities. Murder, extreme physical violence, war and genocide, are not ‘natural’ symptoms for they are completely absent from the interactions of the millions of other species of life on earth, yet are now commonplace among many human beings who become socialised within hierarchical mass societies.

Moreover, this tendency resulting in hatred, war and genocide is still not universal among the human members of hierarchical mass societies. It remains a minority aberration among a relative few members who are deeply traumatised and/or socialised by hierarchical society structural alienations and estrangements. However, this problem of hatred, war and genocide becomes exponentially dangerous and exacerbated when the minority who are so affected by the structural alienation and estrangement become concentrated in the hierarchical elite power structures of such societies. It is these elites at the head of political power structures in war cabinets, financial cabals, industrial monopolies, and government beaurocracies who can enforce the practical results of their own accumulated alienation, indifference, competition and hatred upon the majority of their citizens. Therefore, in considering any future form of human societies the emotional biological essence of humanity needs to be seriously considered, understood and nurtured, because this also expresses – in human form –  the more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the unique inter-dependent essence of life on earth.

Therefore, in order to build upon and maintain social cohesion, within future human communities, there will need to be close positive personal interactive and intellectual relationships as well as wider cultural ones. But close interactive relationships for humans are only possible by frequent close and egalitarian proximity. Other life forms such as birds, insects and ruminant animals can associate in extremely large flocks, swarms and herds, of multiple thousands, but as mature organisms these are their own gatherers and individual consumers of essential nutrition, resting and nesting. Consequently, apart from reproductive activity, (and with a few exceptions) long term close intimate relationships in these collective species are almost entirely missing. An individual wildebeest, bat, swallow or bee, does not seem to feel lonely by the lack of such close interactive relationships in a herd, flock or swarm, but humans are different in this regard.  Humans can feel desperately lonely even among  large numbers.  Extreme loneliness (a compounded form of alienation and estrangement) within cities of millions is already a massive debilitating and ‘unnatural’ contradiction of the essence of human evolution. It is a condition which has been socially introduced and consolidated by the hierarchical mass society form.

So in order to counter this unnatural existence in future, the human species needs to aggregate within a smaller egalitarian unit within any larger aggregation. In this socio-economic regard, it has become clear that hierarchical mass societies produce more practical problems than they solve and these problems have become existential for all forms of life on earth, but that is not all. In fact the emotional problems these social forms create for humanity are also existential, as murder, war, genocide and even suicide indicate. This suggests that a transition away from such social forms has become essential on the basis of multiple considerations. However, it is unlikely that a future alternative form of human society will emerge by directly transitioning from existing capitalist based alienated hierarchical mass societies to non-capitalist based mass societies, as some on the left in the past and present have imagined.

A direct transition from one social form  to another by gradual reform or political revolution has proven impossible throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The altered circumstances created by neo-liberal capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has made it even more unlikely by the altered scale and altered relative proportions of the classes and sub-classes within hierarchical mass societies. This extended and differentiated class composition, makes it highly unlikely that one class will ever become united enough to be able to implement transitional reforms or sufficiently united to actually carry out succesful revolutions. In fact Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator, had already come to that same conclusion way back in the 19th century. He noted that;

“All revolutions up to the present day have resulted in the displacement of one definite class rule by another….One ruling minority was thus overthrown; another minority seized the helm of state in its stead and refashioned the state institutions to suit it’s own interests…..Even when the majority took part, it did so – whether wittingly or not – only in the service of the minority….”

Is that not exactly what happened in the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949? The masses became the much slaughtered cannon fodder in a series of battles, the results of which simply enabled a new elite regime of ‘communists’ to replace an old regime of ‘elite’ capitalists or aristocrats. Engels continues rather hopefully;

“….but the proletariat grown wise by experience had to become the decisive factor – was there not every prospect then of turning the revolution of a minority into a revolution of the majority? History has proved us, and all who thought like us wrong. An insurrection in which all sections of the people sympathise will hardly occur; in the class struggle all the middle strata will probably never group themselves around the proletariat so exclusively that in comparison the party of reaction gathered around the bourgeoisie will nigh well disappear.” (Engels. ‘The Two Tactics of Social Democracy.’)

Note that Engels asks himself and the reader a rhetorical question “was there not every prospect then of turning the revolution of a minority into a revolution of the majority?” but he asks it without fully answering it. No matter: history has provided the emphatic answer to that rhetorical question raised by Engels in the 19th century. It came in the form of what transpired within a very short period of time in the cases of the 20th century revolutions in Russia and China. The masses who took part in these politically orientated civic ‘revolutions’ were disarmed and ordered back to an alienating form of producing as much raw and finished material production as could be designed and completed. That return to high levels of industrial production ‘as usual’ was implemented while the new Bolshevik or Chinese communist elites got down to the business of ruling with an iron fist and attempting to encourage the workers in other countries to follow the Russian and Chinese 20th century examples.

In the same article, Engels further notes that by that 19th century stage the industrialised production of efficient weapons of mass destruction in the hands of professionally trained armies was such that it would be foolish for working people to line up against the military forces of modern states behind barracades, with bricks, stones and assorted home-made weapons or guns meant purely for sport. These informal weapons would prove useless against well trained armies equipped with the latest form of automatic (now computer designed and guided) weapons. This realisation led Engels to consider and suggest the alternative of a Parliamentary road and a reformist transition to a post-capitalist form of mass society. Yet this was a proposal which has repeatedly been proven to be sterile. Interestingly, it is at that point that another firm principle established by Marx was abandoned by Engels and by subsequent self-appointed followers of Marx who declared themselves to be ‘Marxists’. Marx on behalf of himself, Engels and others who previously thought like him, had repeatedly written;

“The emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves. We cannot therefore cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes.” (Marx/Engels. Selected Correspondence. Progress page 307.)

It seems very few people have stopped to consider why this was a firm principle adopted by Marx and not just some throw away patronising deference to the then largely uneducated masses he and Engels were in contact with. He had already reasoned in a series of writings known as ‘The German Ideology’ that a change in the mass consciousness was necessary in order to go beyond hierarchical mass society systems and secure an alternative mode of production. He reasoned that this could only be achieved by the direct pactical involvement and experience of the masses themselves. After a long section on the ‘Real Bases of Ideology’ in that particular document, Marx ended the section with the following;

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this Communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a ‘revolution’ ; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” (Marx. ‘The German Ideology. Section D)

Leaving aside the Victorian use of the male term for humanity as well as the fact that the form of community controlled living espoused by many during Marx’s lifetime was not what transpired in Bolshevik controlled Russia or Maoist controlled China (or elsewhere) I suggest it is important to register that Marx really meant. He not only consistently refers to a socio-economic revolution in how society functions in securing it’s natural (N-M-G-R + A-D) biological and social processes, but also to a need for a revolution in human consciousness of that process. And that these revolutionary transitions are not going to be achieved by theoretical or intellectual means. Philosophical debates or training courses focussing on thinking things through are not the main means of revolutionary changes to how people live and produce.

Such revolutionay changes only occur on the basis of pactical steps worked out and consistently implemented in practice. Any implementation and ownership of new modes of living and producing will only be achieved by the process of people persistently creating them in their technical and social practices and not by means of  a process of elites producing documents and others reading or analysing them. Life on earth is primarily a practical process, not a theoretical or ideological one. The insightful opinion on working class self-activity expressed by Marx in 1846 was not altered by his later analysis of the Paris Commune in 1848 in which he noted that;

“…plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their ‘natural superiors’ and under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously and efficiently..” (Marx. Struggles in France. Page 76.)

Yet by 1917, Lenin, the self-declared (and often naively hero worshipped) ‘Marxist’ was already successfully convincing a majority of his Bolshevik Party members that;

“…the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class…It can only be exercised by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class…..The dictatorship of the proletariat does not fear any resort to compulsion and to the most severe , decisive and ruthless forms of coercion by the state.” (Lenin Collected Works. Volume 31 p 421 and Volume 32 p 21.)

The firmly held position of Marx on the emancipation of the part of humanity forced into slavery and wage (or salary) slavery, being by their own practical efforts had been reversed by the ‘Marxist’ Lenin (and his subsequent imitators) into working people being forcibly led by and ruthlessly coerced into, industrial production by an authoritarian state elite into performing activities determined by that elite. To my knowledge, no Bolsheviks or ‘Marxists’ then (or since) have argued against that Leninist reversal of Marx’s clearly and repeatedly espoused Revolutionary-Humanist principles. In considering the other 20th century tendency which still lingers on in the nostalgic memories of uncritical followers of that 20th century vanguad tradition we can read the assertions of the supposedly ‘Marxist’ Leon Trotsky who around the same period as the Lenin quotation above, declared;

“…we can have no way to socialism except by authoritative regulation of the economic forces and the resources of the country, and in the centralised distribution of labour power in harmony with the state plan. The labour state considers itself empowered to send every worker to the place where his work is necessary. And not one serious socialist will begin to deny to the labour state the right to lay its hand on the worker who refuses to execute his labour duty. (Trotsky. ‘Terrorism and Communism.’ Page 153.)

Fascist levels of state orchestrated oppression in order to increase levels of production and consumption are more than hinted at in this assertion of what was necessary in Trotsky’s understanding for creating a post capitalist mode of production. Fascist levels of authoritarian oppression and exploitation were openly put into practice by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and the majority of their Bolshevik supporters. There are many other such examples of past middle-class left revolutionary intellectuals and politicians departing from the revolutionary-humanist and pro-feminist principles and practices adopted by Karl Marx and those who adhered to his revolutionary-humanist ideas. Sadly it is those departures which have lived on in the inadequate political and historiographical legacy of these particular anti-capitalist trends and are being reproduced and replicated again in the 21st century. However, for those interested in understanding this inadequacy further, I have documented a great deal of these authoritarian and inhumane departures and sectarian dogmatic posturings in the free download section in the previously mentioned banner below the blog picture heading.

Yet the vanguardist trend still continues to pop up every so often in different guises. Here are a couple of extracts from a 2024 anti-capitalist manifesto – this one advocating a concept of eco-socialism.

“Ecosocialism replaces profit with measurable social and environmental needs, for instance human happiness and aligning human society within planetary boundaries again. We start from what is sustainable and necessary for a good life for every human on the planet. This means guarantees on quality of life for every single human – and we build a global economy that can sustain that. For instance we could aim for a global energy usage of 3.5 kilowatt per person, powered by renewables and geothermal.”

This group of anti-capitalists and self-claimed ‘marxists’ seem to have directly copied the Bolsheviks and also ignored Marx on the question of the necessity of workers emancipating themselves and of the working class ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” In this ‘manifesto’ Marx’s proposal of ordinary working citizens practically implementing a new form of living by their own collective decisions has been abandoned by a second generation of so-called ‘Marxists’. These modern elites – in waiting – have already anthropocentrically (and generally patriarchally) decided that the criteria for deciding on future global human production should be the abstract formulation ‘human happiness’. They even propose, without knowing what that future holds, that a 3.5 kilowatt allocation of electricity per person should be provided for each individual!

Note  that they consider that the global economic activity of humanity should be built on the basis of sustaining that anthropocentic abstraction human ‘happiness’. Their primary concern is not with raising their own or other peoples consciousness of the ecological necessity of sustaining life on earth as a whole – without which nothing beneficial is possible in future. This formulation is reminiscent of Lenin’s boastful disclosure in 1921 of the state commisions abstract calculation of how just many pairs of workers shoes (two pairs each!) would be necessary to produce in the following five year plan. Whilst during the same 1919-1921 period Lenin was also threatening to severely punish working people and even shoot them if they failed to obey state orders, a policy his successor Stalin enthusiastically continued. This 2024 manifesto is also full of the earlier noted abstractions and thus it implies similar socialistic central planning and state enforcement procedures.

Note also in the above extract the all inclusive use of ‘we’ is not defined as the working classes collectively deciding ‘what is to be done’, because like Lenin’s ‘what is to be done’ this has already been decided upon in this manifesto by a modern restricted planning group from within a current ‘marxist’ vanguard group. They are already fulfilling and practicing their own self-elected role to explain to ‘uneducated’ working people what needs to be done and confidently assuming that their own particular reasons why will be shared by future generations. This particular 21st century left manifesto, therefore, represents another mixed regurgitation of past abstract formulas together with an idealised wish list compiled by members of a self-selected political sect. Moreover, the fundamental class orientation of this wishful thinking self-indulgence becomes blatantly obvious from the following extract.

“Transport is not just about getting around. Being able to move, stay connected, and access different parts of the world is a fundamental part of our humanity and we reject its commodification for profit.”

I suggest that in this extract, modern anthropocentric middle class obsessions with foreign ‘enlightenment’ (read ‘self-indulgent’) travel are being considered by this vanguard planning group as fundamental parts of humanities future ‘entitlement’. When in actual fact the two superficial aspects; staying in contact and access to different parts of the world’, have become a fundamental part of capitalist; Facebook, Tik Tok technology and Airline and Cruise ship profit making and is not a fundamental part of basic humanity. In the current ecological context, does not ‘access to different parts of the world’, now represent a part of Marx’s “muck of ages” which needs to be got rid of?

Indeed, humanity by the billions can hardly feed themselves, find a decent home or afford decent health care, let alone “access different parts of the world” except by the dangerous life threatening means of small boats across dangerous channels and seas. Furthermore, even without the profit motive, any form of future mass travel in terms of the production, maintenance and propulsive energy required for mass transport vehicles and the infrastructure they require, would be a massive drain on the earths resources. De-coupling mass transport from the tentacles of capital investments, would still mean it would also represent a substantial element of the production, extraction, pollution and material destruction of the environment, therefore, of its climatic stability and of its essential life forms.

Air, sea and land transport in whatever form of vehicle or propulsive energy used already constitutes one of most environmentally unfriendly and costly of the non-essential activities of modern hierarchical mass society living. The desire to frequently exit the local community for enjoyment and stimulation rather stay within it to produce social integration, enrichment and the mental well being of young, old and infirm, is not a fundamental part of humanity, but a product of the existing hierarchical mass society system harnessed to the capitalist mode of production. But in any case for genuine revolutionary-humanists now, what in future is considered ‘fundamental parts of humanity’ should be decided by those future working citizens. They will be the ones constructing any post-capitalist future. They are the ones who will be left with the ashes and ruins of the current elite profit-driven economic system and they are the ones who will have to do the best they can with what is available and intelligently decide what is sustainable and not.

If there was even an ounce of humility and understanding of what is necessary, something would become clear to these “philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes.” – of all political persuasions, currently sat at their laptops formulating ‘blue’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ or ‘red’ manifestos explaining what future working citizens should all be implementing. It would become clear that imaginatively constructing a future for others to follow – is not their affair!
I further suggest that the task of contemporary revolutionary-humanists is to sum up as diligently, accurately and honestly as possible what mistakes have happened in the past and what is really happening to all life on earth in the present period. Or as Marx once suggested to his collaborators, and I consider this advice is still relevant almost 200 years later;

“We do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world, through criticism of the old one. ….But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair; it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists..…We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it doesn’t want to”. (Letter from Marx to Ruge in 1843. Emphasis added, RR)

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)

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AGREEMENT FOR LIFE!

Posted on July 9, 2024 by stutteringsteps
A call from the Amazon to build an Agreement for Life in the face of climate and ecological collapse
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LEFT LEG IN; RIGHT LEG OUT!

Posted on July 7, 2024 by stutteringsteps

(You do the Hokey Cokey and shake it all about)

So members of his Majesty’ Loyal Opposition (the Labour Party) are claiming an astounding victory in the latest UK General Election – yes! However, this only reveals that their grip on reality is blinded by their euphoria at now getting their feet to dangle in the trough of high salaries and privileges, paid for by courtesy of the tax payer legally shackled to the hierarchical mass society system in the UK. The reality is that the citizens of the UK have distanced themselves from both the right wing leg of the British State (the Conservatives) and the left wing leg of the British State system (the Labour Party). In fact in the latest General Election, the citizens of the UK have distanced themselves the greatest from the Tories and even some of the Labour voters voted tactically in order to keep the number of Tory MP’s down to the minimum. Despite the unprecedented crisis for working people in the UK neither political wing of the British Establishment actually gained votes.

The knock on results of this result is almost the reverse of the last election in which large numbers of the traditional Labour voters switched to the Tories to show their disgust at the New Labour Parties track record since Tony Blair and his right -wing support group shunted the Labour Party away from its electoral roots among the British working class. The Blairite Coup ended the post war facade of the Labour Party being against the established British Ruling elite and being for the working men and women of the UK and the working class desertion to the Tories was the result of that betrayal. That pre-Blairite facade had been created by the Labour Party being in a coalition parliament during the 1939 to 1945 War with Germany led by Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party. The war against Germany was in order to save substantial parts of the British Empire from a second attempt by the German ruling elites to take them over.

The first attempt by the German hierarchical mass society to obtain land and resources controlled by the British Empire had resulted in the First World War. The second attempt by Germany resulted in the Second World War. A further boost to the facade by the Labour Party came with the post war reconstruction of the UK and Europe in which reforms to the hierarchical system in the UK introduced free health services, free further education, social housing provision, social security and pension provisions paid for by National Insurance Contributions. Since these reforms mostly benefited the working classes, and since a post-war Labour Government was the government to fully implement them, the myth or facade of the Labour Party being the party of the working class was established. That facade was eroded under other post-war Labour governments by incomes policies and attacks upon the British trade union movements, until the last tattered remnants of the facade were stripped away by Tony Blair and his cronies.

Since that time the Labour Party and its leadership have reinforced the Blarite tendency of emphasising a one-nation Labourite ideology to counter balance the Conservative one-nation Tory ideology. The one-nation ideology is an ideology that is fully committed to maintaining and preserving the three class system of hierarchical mass society living based upon the neo-liberal phase of capitalist development. That is to say it is based upon; a ruling class; a middle class; and a working class, all working and administrating the socio-economic system to maximise the profits (and interest) of those who own and/or control large amounts of money in the form of investment capital. In effect, the Labour Party and the Tory Party are the two political legs which hold the socio-economic body of the UK upright and able to manoeuvre within the global system to the benefit of its ruling, political, economic, financial and bureaucratic elites. This is why Tony Blair and other Senior Labour Party members have been able to enrich themselves out of office and why Boris Johnson and other senior Conservative Party members have been able to do the same or in most cases much better.

The Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet members went so far in order to reassure their British Establishment masters of their loyalty to the hierarchical mass society system in the UK, that they could not condemn the horrific genocide taking place in Gaza. Nor did they risk their future stipends by a call for a halt to the UK supply of material, information, advice and encouragement to the genocide perpetrators in the government of Israel. Thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children were allowed to be slaughtered during the months these individuals sat tight lipped on the opposition benches in the highest seat of governance in the UK. Silent, except when they were caucusing to plan and prepare for their ascent into higher places of UK office and privilege than the ones they held at the time. That silence and inaction during the most vicious concentrated attack upon defenceless civilian men, women and children, since the Second World War tells you practically everything you need to know, about them. It tells you just who they are prepared to sacrifice in order to not spoil their chances of obtaining high Office. This silence also explains why so many people in the UK could not in all conscience turn out to vote for them even to get rid of the much hated Tories.

Nevertheless, the election of the Sir Keir Starmer led Labour Party, despite having less than hoped for electoral support, means they do have enough Members of Parliament to push through many reforms to the hierarchical mass society of Britain. However, given that Starmer and his associates have marginalised the few remaining left of centre Labour Party members and MP’s it is unlikely that anything of substantial benefit to the working classes of the UK will be enacted by them. The likelihood of anything of substantial to benefit infrastructure or to prevent further pollution of air, sea, water or offset climate change, ecological destruction and essential species loss, is unlikely. This is because they will first and foremost be dedicated to maintaining the entitlement rights and privileges of those making up the three classes of UK society. Since the hierarchical mass society system is controlled by the elites and the elites are dedicated to protecting their own entitlement rights and privileges before all else, then the future of the UK in their hands is fairly predictable. Any few remaining hope’s and illusions in Sir Keir and his knights around the Number Ten labourite top table, are almost sure to be dashed.

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)

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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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