critical-mass.net

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)

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)