critical-mass.net

Part 1. Exceptionalism.

When one group of people systematically kills another group of people, then some very powerful collective emotion and practical ambition is obviously driving this behaviour. Therefore, it is not very instructive to describe the phenomenon of mass killing as blindly destructive, collective madness or simply sub-conscious  racial hatred as some on the left have recently done. The lack of serious analysis of the underlying motives and the elite psychology of recent area bombing of other human communities is indicative of the intellectual weakness of the radical left in the 21st century.

Indeed, the use of such ill-defined terms actually serves to deflect or obscure the real human based rational calculations motivating the past and present perpetrators of mass crimes against humanity. Such use includes labelling the latest, most openly brazen crimes of collective punishment, inflicted upon the citizens of Gaza. It is not as if there is no alternative analysis either, for there are much clearer descriptions available. Since the early 20th century it has been usual to label such whole-sale destructive atrocities as acts of genocide, a term which includes a series of clearly defined horrific actions against peaceful populations, irrespective of their age, or gender. Moreover, it has long been known that;

“Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way.” and; “…genocidal mass murder is politically motivated violence that directly or indirectly kills a substantial proportion of a targeted population, combatants and non-combatants alike, regardless of age or gender. (‘Why not Kill Them All? D. Chirot, & C. McCauley. Introduction and chapter 1.)

However, whilst the above description covers a lot, it still does not really explain the full range of motives going on within the individual and collective mind-set of the perpetrators of systematic mass killing. Consequently, it is also useful to focus on what the collective perpetrators of genocide hope to gain from entirely destroying another section of humanity who in the perpetrators perspective just happen to be undesirable and ‘in the way’. Frequently, motives for commiting genocide, are to obtain exclusive access to land or other valuable resources, from populations who already exist and reside upon them.

Nevertheless, a rewards-based understanding of mass killing also does not complete the explanation as to why such resources could not be exchanged or shared by humanity and why total extermination is seen by the perpetrators of it as the final solution to their perceived problem with their victims existence. This is why I suggest identifying the phenomenon of exceptionalism and collective narcissitic ideologies of group (or nation) will add a further dimension to the understanding the phenomenon of genocide. In particular the anthropocentric exceptionalisms contained within the ideology of Judaic Zionism and the territorial ambitions of the nation of Israel, will reveal much about the conflict in Palestine.

“Human exceptionalism is the conviction that human beings are made in the image of god, as ensouled bodies, integrating intellectual, emotional, social, psychological and moral dimensions of human life into a flourishing whole, and are different in kind from nonhuman creatures.” (‘The Perils of Human Exceptionalism’. D.L Durst. Introduction.)

It is clear from any study of the relevant religious texts that the Abrahamic monotheistic religious versions of exceptionalism (all thinking themselves as God’s ‘favoured’ or ‘chosen’ people) already had a strong element of  exaggerated self-importance. Moreover, the histories of the practitioners of Judaism, Christianity and Islam reveals that the long running aptitude of fundamentalist Abrahamic ‘believers’ for mass  killing in the name of god or country, confirms an active immersion in the ideological expressions of exceptionalism.

Furthermore, the calls by Israeli officials to empty and level Gaza until it becomes like Nazi extermination camps such as Auschwitz, indicate how far belief in Jewish exceptionalism is prepared to go in elevating it’s own community and denying the humanity of another community standing in its way. Therefore, when additional elements of ideology, such as exceptionalism are incorporated into the collective institutions of ancient as well as modern states the phenomenon becomes exceptionally lethal as even a religiously inclined author admits.

“Violent tendencies, hatred, mistrust, arrogance and fear are always characteristic of nationalist exceptionalism.” (‘We are Great’. The Evils of Exceptionalism. G. Gowing.)

So far it is hard not to recognise that most of the characteristics outlined in the first three quotations above, closely match many past genocidal events as well as the recent Nakba 2 destruction perpetrated by the Apartheid state of Israel. Indeed, the existence of a Jews only state, (a state for a distinct ‘race‘ or ‘people‘ as advocated by T Herzl) was openly intended to be an institutional form of exceptionalism to the other multi-religious and multicultural groupings known as states and it has maintained that status ever since. Whilst the concept of exceptionalism is somewhat wider than the concept of Narcissism, there is nevertheless a continuum between the two which testifies to their common origin in the socio-economic structures of hierarchical mass societies. Thus;

“The narrowest form of exceptionalism is narcissism, the belief that “I am exceptional, I am superior, I deserve all of this, I’m owed all of this and I am going to take it or I’m going to hoard it.” The ‘I’ can be extended to ‘we’ and when it does, it becomes a more recognisable and more potent form of exceptionalism…. Exceptionalism almost always plays off fear. Yes we are are superior, but we must stick together and we must use our superiority to crush, to eliminate those lesser beings. (‘Ibid, ‘We are Great’: The Evils of Exceptionalism’.)

At this point two further aspects of hierarchical mass society exceptionalism need to be recognised. First, exceptionalism is systematically drilled into the military institutions of hierarchical mass societies, literally and metaphorically. Their esprit de cour in terms of organisation and sworn loyalty to their elite insists they are militarily superior to their own citizens and superior to the citizens and military of all other hierarchical mass societies. In the military wing of such societies narcissistic exceptionalism is consciously promoted and intensified by regulation, internal troop and battalion competition and their flag fetishisms.

Second, elite fear must always arise as a consequence of the arrogance and violence derived from the actions of self-elevated exceptionalist groups or nations, particularly when their ideologies are driven by an imaginary and exaggerated superiority. This is because in reality humanity is one species with a vast range of talents and abilities spread across all communities and nations and no one community actually has a monopoly of talent or ability in general.

Furthermore, having a particularly superior technological level of killing and using it, does not not indicate a general level of superiority at all. Far from it. Outside of any isolated institutional bubble, arrogance and superiority of state or military violence presents itself as an inferior level of social adjustment and loss of humanity. Practically everyone knows these two basic truths. Every community also knows that ‘might is not right’ and all communities know that the perpetrator of unnecessary official or unofficial violence must always – without exception – fear not only varying levels of distaste, dislike, disgust, and hatred, but even eventual revenge. 

Perpetrators of violent forms of group exceptionalism must therefore, constantly live in fear of eventual official or unofficial retaliation and this pattern of violent Israeli exceptionalism since 1948, has only increased the fear and insecurity for Israeli and non-Israeli Jews. So in late 2023, existential fear has not only increased for those Jews who live in Israel, but the lives of those living elsewhere have again become inceasingly endangered as a result of the genocide in Gaza. The ideas that violence can end violence or that wars can end wars, have long been exposed to be oxymoronic cliches, only maintained by those whose general humanity has been seriously impaired .

From the above extracts, from historical records and from our own current observations we can also conclude that the destructive results of current national and religious forms of exceptionalism are not unique to the religion of Judaism and the nation of Israel. The 1930’s Nazi Aryan aspiration of extending blood and soil agriculture eastward was motivated by a form of narcissistic exceptionalism based on the imaginary concept of a superior Germanic race entitled to expand its territorial boundaries by military conquest.

Similarly, the origin of American exceptionalism, was rooted in a mixture of exagerated religious and secular, non-aristocatic characteristics which were considered gloriously exceptional and this example also involved the genocidal elimination of indigenous north and south American tribal peoples. The latter too were considered inferior peoples and by their hunting and gathering mode of production in the plains and valleys, stood in the way of settled, small-holding agricultural communities and plantations  favoured by early European settlers in the so-called New World Americas.

Indeed, exceptionalist ideologies of superiority are manifested in practically all religions and nations to a greater or lesser degree, and the elites in nations such as Britain, America and France have on the alleged basis of past  cultural superiority not only been previous practitioners of colonialist mass genocides in Australia, Africa, India and North and South America, but are also present partners in supplying weapons and supporting the colonialist genocide of Zionist Israel in Palestine. Moreover these exceptionalist collective ideologies (and others not mentioned) have always functioned to the detriment of their own ordinary working people.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the elites of hierarchical mass societies occasionally call each other out for their respective atrocities but rarely (or never) own up to their own. (e.g. Routine oppressor of Kurds and others, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently told a packed hall in Istanbul: “Israel has carried out atrocities and massacres!!!). Similarly the elites of Iran, ISIS, the Taliban and Hamas, call out the attrocities perpetrated against them, but not the ones perpetrated by them. However, as noted earlier, since exceptionalism always contains or creates some element of narcissism, it is worth reminding ourselves of the symptom of individual narcissism before considering it further in its collectivist form.

(Part 2 Narcissism: Individual and Collective, will follow soon.)

Roy Ratcliffe (January 2024)

Every vote at the United Nations Assembly on the suspension of hostilities in Gaza  has revealed the impoverished moral condition of world’s elites in the year 2023. Particularly if it is born in mind that it took weeks of scenes of absolute devastation within Gaza to even stir elites into sitting round a table to debate whether the genocide had gone far enough  to even suggest a halt. Bear in mind also the fact that millions of ordinary citizens in the world’s states, who were allowed to demonstrate, had done so repeatedly almost since the genocidal bombing and shelling began. No loss of humanity there!

The list below is the latest example of elite infamy with regard to their absolute disregard for other human beings  in the latest high-tech destruction of the civilian population of Gaza by the Jewish Zionist elite in Israel.  The elites and their supporters in the countries listed below, have indicated they have as little concern for the systematic targeted deaths of 20, 000 men, women and children of our own species, as they do for species of insects, plants and other animals. This list should therefore also shatter the dream of those among us who think these elites are going to help save the planet from pollution, ecological destruction, climate change, and poverty among the non-elites.

A. At the UN, which countries elites, have voted against preventing further genocide in Gaza.

Israel
U.S.
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Austria
Czechia
Guatemala
Liberia
Micronesia
Nauru

B. At the UN, which countries elites have  abstained from preventing further genocide in Gaza.

Argentina
Bulgaria
Cabo Verde
Cameroon
Equatorial Guinea
Georgia
Germany
Hungary
Italy
Lithuania
Malawi
Marshall Islands
Netherlands
Palau
Panama
Romania
Slovakia
South Sudan
Togo
Tonga
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Uruguay

Roy Ratcliffe (December 2023)

Part 4. The necessity of revolutionary leadership.

For most of the 20th century, there was a dream among a minority of the worlds populations, that a revolution to overthrow the exploitative mode of production known as capitalism, was both necessary and possible providing it had the ‘correct’ leadership. The concept of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production was developed in the 19th century and was the result of two independent factors coming together during that period. The first factor resulted from the progressive industrialisation of manufacturing controlled by those who owned capital. This scaled-up development in the means of production had created a mass working class employed in large numbers in factories, mines and commercial enterprises, living in relative poverty and whose daily lives had been severed from a direct nutritional relationship with the land.

The dispossession of the agricultural population from private and ‘common’ land meant as workers they had no direct independent means of sustaining their lives other than being employed by the capitalist class. Unlike previous land owning ruling elites, the capitalist class engaged in productive and commercial activities for one main and overriding purpose – to increase their capital and revenue. The capitalist motive for engaging in production was (profit) and their methods of production (industrialised manufacture) created the most abhorrent employment practices and conditions of living for those they employed. Riots, sabotage, and reforms (for voting and trade union rights) seemed the only way of challenging this new form of capital-owning, elite power that had replaced the power of the landed aristocracy. When these tactics were tried and failed some people started to think about revolution.

Of course political revolutions were known to have previously ocurred, but these had only resulted in changes in the make up of the elite strata ruling the hierarchical mass societies. They spectacularly failed to improve the condition of the working classes in agriculture, manufacturing and commerce. For a considerable period of time, there were only vague ideas of how working and peasant classes might back revolutionary minded intellectuals in order to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and replace with something else. However, with the arrival of one particular individual named Karl Marx a more detailed revolutionary perspective was introduced. Among other things, Marx had made a detailed study of the Paris Commune and noted that ordinary everyday working class citizens once abandoned by the French ruling elite had organised themselves to keep the social form of the Paris commune operating in a satisfactory manner.

He was not the only middle-class observer of the Paris commune to realise this potential of the ordinary working citizens to facilitate the functioning of social affairs at that time. Indeed, in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1865, it was well known that Russian peasant agricultural communes were largely self-governing. However, Marx made an extensive study of the Paris Commune and concluded 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. Class Struggles in France. Page 76.)

Marx was also one of the very few who seriously studied the economic and social logic of the system of capitalism and to do so at a forensic level of detail. He concluded that the capitalist mode of production would lead to the destruction of all previous modes of production. It would sooner rather than later begin to fully control the international economy until it dominated the entire world. In other words, the capitalist mode of production despite its fundamental contradictions, would sooner or later economically, politically and militarily destroy all other human socio-economic forms of organisation and make global humanity subservient to the capital investment needs of the capitalist classes. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production would also result in repeated crises of relative overproduction.

“Since the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit, and since it accomplishes this purpose by methods which adapt the mass of production to the scale of production, not via versa, a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this imminent barrier.” (Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 251.)

The rift, which resulted from the mass production of commodities and services at a rate beyond the means to be profitably sold would create economic and financial crises. The resulting layoffs, bankruptcies and business failures would plunge the working classes into desperate poverty and trigger social unrest. However, in replacing indigenous modes of subsistence production during its global spread, capitalism had also create a large-scale, international working class. Consequently, due to capitalisms cycles of boom and bust, this would create extreme conditions of living which would threaten – at a global level – the existence of the very working people who it exploited in its factories, mines, farms, shops, and commercial premises. Marx reasoned, along with many others, that in order to save themselves from continual devastation (wars, unemployment, occupational diseases etc.) working people would sooner or later be forced to socialise the means of production and prevent them being used for personal greed by private capitalists.

From then on, the dream of revolution imagined that production in every country experiencing such revolutions would be used to satisfy general social need rather to satisfy particular elite private greed. This concept of a workers revolution then became a dream of a widespread liberation from want and warfare, in contrast to the pro-capitalist (bourgeois) narowly focussed dream of ever increasing profits for the few by ever increasing levels of production. It was a dream strenouously and exhaustively promoted by some 20th century middle class intellectuals, particularly Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia and Chairman Mao in China. It was eventually pursued in reality by millions of working people in Russia and China. The masses employed in factories and farms etc., were persuaded to become followers of these supposedly great, forward-looking men. Those among the Bolsheviks such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin etc., actually claimed to be guided by the detailed studies of Karl Marx.

However, instead of facilitating workers to organise economic and social affairs for themselves, they systematically organised the workers in industry and peasants in agriculture and created a top down hierarchical mass societies with themselves as a new elite in place of the previous elites. In these Bolshevik and Maoist versions of revolution,, the workers remained highly exploited wage slaves as previously (something not advocated by Marx) and the new elite ruled as ruthlessly or more ruthlessly than the previous elites had done – also not something advocated by Marx. The political complexion of the elites in control of these hierarchical mass societies had certainly changed, but socially and economically nothing had been fundamentally revolutionised. Under this form of political revolution, pollution, ecological destruction, and physical exhaustion continued and regular assassinations and concentration camp internments of rivals replaced occasional assassinations and imprisonment of rivals by previous elites. The dream of something better had become a nightmare of something worse.

Consequently, for millions of working people the dream of a revolutionary transformation of capitalism by being led by a so-called revolutionary sectarian vanguard was over. Working people in Russia, China and elsewhere had trusted their educated, middle class radical politicians of the 20th century and had been betrayed by them. In the rest of the world the working class were promised better futures under welfare state capitalism run by educated, middle class liberal or social democratic politicians, and they too were betrayed as the western hemisphere hierarchical mass society systems simply continued, but also under a different political elite. The masses there also remained highly exploited and precarious wage slaves and wars, occupational diseases and unemployment continued to blight their lives. In fact by the mid 20th century, other problems were also developing. The combined productive efforts of workers, directed by the bureaucratic elites in all hierarchical mass society countries (of whatever political, religious or secular persuasion) were producing in order to sell at a profit, which led to pollution of land, water and air as well as climate change.

By the 1970’s the dream of green and pleasant lands courtesy of private or state based capitalism was only kept alive by a few dogmatic mini groups or sects.
Although, those 20th century hastily and badly constructed day dreams of elite vanguard-led revolutions are also mostly over, the problems created by capitalism are not. In fact, the living nightmare of an alienating, war torn, ecologically destructive, patriarchal, inhuman capitalist mode of production has on many levels  become far worse and therefore, still requires overcoming. However, three crucial interconnected material and ideological factors have changed which informed the basis of 19th and 20th century day dreams of revolution. These new factors have to be understood and factored into any consideration of the contemporary contradictions which are now causing cracks in the socio-economic dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. I will argue in the remaing sections of this article that anti-capitalists and single issue reform based activists can no longer cling to the formulas, cliches and policies of previous centuries and expect to be treated as credible by citizens of modern hierarchical mass societies.

The first change is to the occupational aggregations of working people. The days of huge numbers of productive workers in daily and hourly solidarity-inducing contact in factories, mines, offices have been replaced by automation and robotic assembly lines. The dream that the intensely exploited industrial, commercial and agricultural masses would would be the workers of the world who would eventually unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains, had mostly been made redundant. Many working people had been forced to become self-employed in the advanced countries and the few remaining aggregations of workers are now in hospitals, government bureaucracies and educational establishments. The second change is to the mass consciousness of working people. Few are now in awe of the middle-classes, elite forms of authority and politicians in general. The experience of the last four or five decades has produced an almost universal distrust of politics and politicians in all countries, particularly among the younger generation. Working class consciousness has also become more focussed on individual rights and on an entitlement to conspicuous levels of consumption. Solidarity was never general and continuous, but it is now particular and specific.

The third substantial change has already been mentioned and that is the failure of past revolutions to address, reduce or end the numerous forms of exploitation, oppression and alienation endemic to hierarchical mass society forms of living. If revolutions are understood to require considerable effort and sacrifice only to deliver more of the same hierarchical alienation under a different label (Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, National Socialism in Germany and Italy etc.) then these socio-economic models now and in the future will not even be considered as a possibility, let alone as a probability in the majority of peoples minds. The above noted changes rooted as they are in reality, mean that in a severe crisis workers joining mass political parties and followng another self-appointed male vanguards is clearly extremely unlikely. Solidarity among the disparate sections of the population including the working class sections, will have to evolve from curent particular class and sectional issues into a more general humanist perspective.

With these changes in mind, we need to ask ourselves why then are some activists still operating with pre-modern categories such as nations, religions and other sectional ideologies when a global movement is not only necessary to fix the social, economic and ecological problems humanity now faces, but also desirable? And why a local sectional focus continuing now that humanity is also globally wired up? Yet in the 21st century, practically very term used to encourage collective action expresses some form of unity – but only partially and narcissistically; their group issue being  presented as the most  important. Nationalism focuses on a particular nation, Judaism on Jews, Islam on Muslims, Catholicism on Catholics, Protestantism on Protestants, Feminism on Females etc. Evangelism, Methodism, Calvanism, Marxism, Socialism, Comunism, Fascism, Sectarianism etc., are all likewise essentially narrow ingrained categories, resembling habits, which conserve the same historic superior/inferior divisions of us and them as if we are not a species; as if our problems are not universal ones. We only need to look how much social unity these ideologies have – over generations – actually destroyed within global humanity.

All these categories (and many others) seek a unity based upon a narrowly drawn set of criteria and conforming to ideas which exclude all other non-conforming categories of human being. Therefore they are all ideologically and practically reactionary however much some individuals within them wish to include others. And it gets worse. When reactionary ideological criteria align with the socio-economic dynamic of hierarchical mass societies, then the authoritarian tendencies within them can become extreme to the point of totalitarianism. In any serious crises, total internal control of hierarchical societies is exerted by their elites along with total warfare against other rival hierarchical mass societies. It is not that only some societies become fascistic, but all such societies in such situations become fascistic.

This is why in the 20th century, Stalinist Russia resembled Nazi Germany with their police states and concentration camps and draconian laws against criticism. This is why Putins authoritarian Russia in its 21st century military blitzkrieg on Ukraine also resembles Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg on Poland etc., and Putin’s crack down on dissent resembles, that of the Nazis and Stalinists on their 20th century internal critics. Incidentally, it is also why the Zionist control of Israel in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank along with it’s crack down on its own internal Jewish and Arab citizens criticism, also resembles the Nazi treatment of countries they invaded and internal dissent during their period of absolute power.

There has been a disastrous failure in Europe and the west, to recognise that the totalitarianism of 1930’s Germany and Italy, which was self-identified as fascism, was not something new or specific to Germany. It was (and is) common to all hierarchical mass societies both in their expansionary colonial stages and in their current declining stages. Concentration camps and assasinations were used by Britain in Africa way before the Nazis and Stalinists used the same strategies and tactics of social control and incarceration. British atrocities in India prior and during the period of the British Raj, toward the native peoples, were similarly racially diected as the Nazis were towards the Jews and the people of the east. The visceral brutality of North Amercan elites against the native Indian peoples and the total war inflicted by the North on the South in the American Civil war were every bit as barbaric as the Nazis against the Jews and Eastern peoples and as the British, Germans and French were during their periods of colonial possession in Africa and Asia.

When historical reality is seriously considered, the self-satisfying liberal myth that totalitarianism (Fascism) is something only a few other countries descend into is shattered. More people need to wake up to 2023 reality, look around the globe and recognise that totalitarianism is a systemic tendency of all hierarchical mass society elites. But why? The thin edge of the wedge that is inserted into the social fabric of hierarchical mass societies that leads to fascism, begins with the discriminatory practices between genders, occupational activities and rival hierarchical mass societies. After distorting the basic humanity of a critical mass of the elite citizens of such societies, the hierachical mass society process leads by degrees to the violent spectacle of humanity being the only species of life on earth that systematically kills it’s own species in huge numbers and on a continually recurring basis. Its socio-economic process also leads to the spectacle of global elites who in the 21st century will only ask for a pause in, and not declare or condemn a clear case of openly perpetrated genocide, a crime against humanity when it happens in Gaza, because it may negatively effect their international business interests or their political support from an electorate whose votes for re-election they rely upon.

This model of society and its leadership form is itself nothing but an inherited contradiction based upon prejudiced elitist assumptions. In ancient as well as modern reality, no one person has any characteristic or aptitude which exceeds the collective characteristics and aptitudes of the community in which that person resides. It is nonsense to suggest and act as if it were otherwise. Even a brief familiarity with the history of hierarchical mass societies and their hierarchical-led movements of reform or revolution reveals the utter inability of any of them to reproduce anything other than replications of the existing hierarchical mass society contradictions. Worse still by adopting the leadership model copied from all previous elite based forms, the process reproduces the worst reactionary elements in those becoming leaders and those who have chosen to be followers. Considering even a potted history of the movements or trends initiated by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Blair, Bush, Biden, Macron, Popes, Bishops, Business tycoons, etc., at the top levels and those on lower local levels, demonstrates the tragedy of adhering to the logic implicit and explicit in the hierarchical mass society form.

And the effect of this socialisation process also occurs in more cases than those at state and country level. For example as recently as the post-second world war decades, Radical feminists disrespected and distanced themselves from socialist and liberal feminist, Zionist Jews turned on more humanist Jews, Islamists on more tolerant Muslims, Stalinist communists turned violently on Trotskyist communists, and each other. Trotskyists also turned on other Trotskyists. Narrowly drawn category ‘isms’ are a form of intellectual cancer, which tears away at their own structure and narrow form of unity. The leaders (and their immediate supporters) are required to pretend to an excellence which they clearly do not possess and never will posses. Their followers are required not to think and act to their own level of collective ability but to await guidance and follow orders. Put crudely those who wish to have a shepherd in charge of their lives need to be prepared to, and are expected to act like sheep. Those who wish to have a warrior king in charge of their sect or societies must act like dutiful soldiers and execute (literally as well as metaphorically) their every command to kill their fellow human beings whether innocent or guilty. Enough is enough of that, the future would benefit from a different model.

Finally, any crude dream world understanding of how revolutions occur needs to be replaced by a more accurate level of understanding. freed from the patriarchal myth of an extraordinary individual (invariably a man) stepping in to save the day. Revolutions are not identical with uprisings, which make pleas directed at elite leaders to authorise reforms which will treat them less harshly. Revolutions only occur when the politial and economic elite are viewed as the problem not the solution. The previously mentioned Paris Commune was set up by committees of ordinary citizens. In Russia, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky did not create the Soviet Committees; the workers and peasants did. Neither did the Bolshevik trio create the socio-economic crisis; the Russian elite system did. The Bolsheviks did not start up the factories after the owners had abandoned them; the workers committees did. The mistake the urban workers and rural peasants made in Russia, China (and elsewhere), when their systems collapsed and they restarted it, was letting the Bolsheviks and Maoist elites take over control of their local and regional commitees and dictate what they subsequently did and what they thought. Enough is enough of that also.

For a revolution to occur the existing elite led system (in general) has to decay and at least partially collapse and the people working at the coal face (so to speak), whether in small groups or large, have to self organise and start (or keep) the socio-economic system running and encourage other workers to do the same. Then they need to resist elites (any elites) insistence on taking back control when the workers have stabilised the socio-economic crisis. Until those two aspects, elite disintegration and citizen willingness to continue socio-economic activity favourably coincide, then talk of revolution or of exceptional individual talents are of no practical consequence. Indeed, such imagined superior abilities can be a hindrance to collective self-activity and collective learning from experience. Nevertheless the empire of capital will eventually collapse from it’s own internal contradictions and those surviving such a collapse will have the opportunity to replace hierarchical mass societies with non hierarchical societies with full knowledge of being one species which is able to cooperate when not being urged or compelled by circumstances to compete.

This does not mean doing nothing whilst awaiting the inevitable catastrophic collapse of the capitalist mode of production, small group, local non-sectarian solidarity can begin now as they have with food banks, local campaign groups that are not blinkered to the wider struggle of other human beings in foreign lands. It seems logical that if the way humanity – as a global species – is currently organised socially and economically is self-destructive and destructive of the environment and ecology upon which all life depends, then human beings – as a whole – are the agents responsible for halting and changing this destructive and self-destructive trajectory. Therefore, to consider oneself as a humanist first and foremost, is the only way to be factually consistent with our species biological identity. Humanism only needs the addition of a revolutionary perspective and enough of us, to begin the process of humanity undoing the intense alienation that hierarchical mass societies have caused by the exploitation of humanity, plus all the other species of life on earth and of course the planets limited natural resources.

Roy Ratcliffe (December 2023)

Part 3. Truth, the first casualty of war.

It has long been a cliche that the first casualty of any war is the truth. This cliche applies to much more than military wars, but certainly military and civil wars contain the worst examples. It is certainly the case that many people in all countries will be directly or indirectly aware that outside of warfare those people with power and authority will deliberately, mislead, hide evidence of their wrong doing; plant or fabricate evidence where non exists; and get away with lies and false accusations, if it assists what they wish to achieve. Dodgy documents on “weapons of mass destruction”; “there were no parties at number ten during lock down”; “I never had sex with that woman”, “…we don’t bribe people with cash for questions in parliament”; “.. we found this gun in the suspects glove box”; such examples have all been repeatedly exposed as lies.

The ones noted above are just the everyday deceitful activities of police forces, politicians and bureaucrats, practically everywhere. ‘Licensed to Lie’ is not just the title of a book exposing deceit and corruption in the US Department of Justice, but is a statement of fact for the vast majority of state institutions and their elite occupants in all countries. Because they have the power to control events and people, they can lie with impunity. When they are colonising countries they can also steal land and property as Israel has done with Palestine, the USA did with North America, Europe did with Africa and the UK did with many Egyptian and Greek monuments and artefacts.

Of particular contemporary relevance is the case of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ stolen from Greece. In November 2023 UK prime minister Sunak lied about the ownership of the stolen Elgin Marbles and that therefore they could not be given back to Greece. This is an obvious lie. Governments have unlimited powers to not only hang people never mind give back previous stolen countries, land and monuments. Clinging on to stolen property and lying about it seems to be in the DNA of powerful national elites.

Even the knight of the floundering UK realm, Sir Kier Starmer could only suggest lending the ‘Marble Frescoes’ back for a period of time. The offer, of lending back something previously stolen, would be laughable if it occurred in a local magistrates court or small claims court, but this offer by a leader of the loyal UK opposition just about sums up elite integrity. It also demonstrates the extremely narrow differences between the two wings of the cultured gangster mobs currently in political control of the hierarchical mass society of Britain. That may seem bad enough.

However, when it comes to war, the stakes are much higher and the motives and opportunities for deceit and false evidence are much greater for those elites involved. Babies being ‘bayoneted’ or ‘decapitated’, women being raped on initial contact (as if these were primary mission objectives for enemy combatants), are common fabricated tropes traceable over many centuries of organised warfare initiated by hierarchical mass society elites. Sadly men do rape in war as they do in peace time, but not all men do. So extrapolating from the relative few who do in order to smear the relative many that don’t is not only false propaganda but takes serious analytical attention away from the social and psychological factors influencing the actions of those males that do.

Lies about how bad the enemy is, are often supported by dodgy, fabricated or often no evidence, just outright assertion. In other cases, sophisticated levels of false or incriminating evidence are produced by special state departments tasked with creating such falsehoods. The ‘Protocols of Zion’; the ‘Zinoviov Letter’ are notorious examples of such practices. There are books full of such activities and their exposures. In terms of the middle east, I personally, would not trust the truth of any Israeli or Hamas claim or counter-claim against their opponents or the statements of either sides political representatives. In these days of artificial intelligence and photo-shopping, I would certainly count myself naive or stupid if I believed anything I read or saw on TV or in news photos, unless it was sufficiently confirmed by independent, trust worthy evidence and confirmed by non-partisan third parties.

I was advised long ago by one of my teachers to always keep my ‘crap detectors’ well honed because in modern societies there is a lot of crap being churned out hourly and daily. And that advice was given in the days of radio, newspapers and TV. In other words before AI and internet plarforms allowed anyone to say anything without any attempt at rationality or accuracy. My life since those days at college have provided ample evidence that most of what those in authority; government, politics, and management say should be viewed with great suspicion. Indeed, the more elevated the authority articulating any so called ‘conveniently’ manipulated facts, the more that suspicion is warranted.

It may or may not be true that Hamas has bases under schools and hospitals, but I also know that Israeli elites having claimed that this is so, if none are actually found under schools or hospitals, Israeli troops will be unable to resist ‘planting’ some ‘evidence’. As with other elites, those with power, opportunity and motive in the Israeli hierarchy are certainly able to ‘stage’ some event or fill some space with sufficient incriminating material and equipment, to fool those who wish to be fooled. Retrospectively justifying having done something nasty such as bombing, shelling and killing, teachers, doctors and patients in medical locations, has long been in the play book of black ops state actors. Furthermore, the Israeli elite have authorised and perpetrated so much killing and destruction in Gaza that they probably think that without such ‘evidence’ the global disgust they have already brought upon themselves will be even greater. If so they are correct.

Moreover, planting evidence to justify a crime pre-supposes a knowledge that what has been done is morally wrong and that planting evidence is also legally wrong. Technically getting away with such crimes does not mean they did not happen.
However, I suggest that even if it were true that every school, hospital, public building and apartment block obliterated in Gaza had one or more Hamas operatives hiding there, this would still not lessen the injustice and crimes against humanity of killing tens of thousands of men, women and children who were not perpetrators of crimes against Jews or Christian’s in Israel or elsewhere.

Is it not a fact that even enemy combatants in most previous wars, ancient and modern – once trapped and surrounded by superior numbers – were taken prisoners and became prisoners of war, not obliterated along with non combatants by remotely collapsing buildings on them and leaving them to die of injuries or starvation? Such obviously unnecessary callous cruelty and inhuman indifference to members of their own species, by the Israeli military is a phenomena previously restricted to the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Argentinian Junta and Plantation slave owners.

Furthermore, the enormous, vindictive cruelty inflicted by the armed forces of Israel on Gaza and the West Bank, plus those of Russia against Ukrainian villages and towns, together with the enormous indifference and silent consent of the global elites everywhere to this latest example of genocide against the Palestinian working classes, should also act as a wakeup call to the working classes of the entire world. The wake up call is that in 2023 the charade of elites being against crimes against humanity is unequivocally over; that elite nationalism and elite capitalism is yet again engaged in a full-on war with collective humanity, albeit one or two national communities at a time.

This ongoing spectacle is so horrific that at a superficial level of thinking, what is happening in the 21st century world can appear to be, (and has been said to be) a form of madness by elites. However, using such terms provides no ‘explanation’ at all, for there is method to such apparent ‘madness’. The hierarchical mass society system has run out of new resources to exploit and so it is in a protracted period of decline, economically, ecologically, intellectually and morally. Consequently, in order to retain their privileged positions, its elites are turning in upon each other and upon their own citizens. What is occuring in response to ordinary Palestinian resistance to their oppression by the militarised hierarchical mass society elites of Israel, is also happening elsewhere in the world and this universal elite response to their system in crisis, prefigures what will happen to all forms of working class resistance to their oppression by hierarchical mass society elites.

Whether future uprisings occur in Asia, America, Africa or Europe, unless the hierarchical system collapses before hand, the available might of a militarised state or combinations of them, will be used to suppress any concerted resistance, uprisings or revolutions by ordinary citizens. Evidence? It has already happened in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Myanmar, etc. Movements aiming at radically changing the current system and its latest mode of production will be ruthlessly stamped upon by elite self interest. In such cases all ordinary human beings resisting oppression have effectively become, or will effectively become the equivalent of Palestinians in their own geographical versions of Gaza or the West Bank.

Nevertheless, in contrast to this ‘reactionary’ development among the global elites, mass popular demonstrations world wide, over issues of oppression have long illustrated where the remaining sources of humanity reside. This is so even though they failed to prevent the war against Iraq, motivated as it was, by the false weapons of mass destruction claims by Blair, Bush and their national and global cronies. They just went ahead anyway, with silence or complicity of most other global elites. Mass popular demonstrations world wide in support of Palestinian people again demonstrated in 2023 where the source of humanity still resides and this too has failed to halt the blitzkrieg war against the masses in Gaza and the West Bank.

This latter case is also a war motivated by false claims – this time the false claim of occupational legitimacy! These events strongly suggest that on a more global and ecological scale, saving humanity and the planets climate and ecology as a whole, is not going to be spearheaded by an elite who have so little in common with humanity at its ordinary everyday level, and so little in common with life on earth in all its myriad species forms. Resolutely turning their backs on what is really important is a result of a life-long elite reflex of turning their attention exclusively toward their own selfish self-interests.

What is really important to humanity is actually achieving peace, justice and sustainability, not just hoping for it. The dream of almost effortless transitions to better times are over. The dream that popular elections can make the lives of national communities better; that trade union strikes can bring improved results for everyone; that at least a core of politicians are in politics to help others, not just to help themselves; that modern hierarchical mass societies are a source of civilised behaviour; that people under this hierarchical mass society system have the right to self-determination; that the elite can eventually be persuaded by rational argument, to stop polluting the planet and killing the myriads of species which support all life on earth. In actual fact, the historic and contemporary reality is both dark and stark. It is a reality of  elite governed hierarchical mass societies  versus humanity and the rest of the life on earth species.

So the future of global humanity and the general life support system of integrated and inter-dependent species evolution, will of necessity have to be decided and constructed by the ordinary working people of planet earth. Like life itself, the humanity of the human species, is reborn with each generation and if humane characteristics are not socialised out of individuals by them becoming part of the self-indulgent elite, these humane characteristics are overwhelmingly retained within the majority of ordinary people. Their humanism may not be fully thought out,  considerably hindered by the dominant dualist framework of western thinking and not yet revolutionary, but it is there nonetheless.

They are the only section of humanity that has little or no vested interest in continuing to labour in the equivalent of a 24/7 socio-economic treadmill of production that rewards an elite, while impoverishing the many and damages the atmosphere, the water quality, the fertility of land and the ecological balance of life on earth. This undoubted fact means there is still a need for the ordinary people of the world to overcome any less important differences and unite, because as difficult as that may be, there is an amazing world of variety and species interdependence to lose if we do not.

However, there is another warning that arises from documented history as well as being illuminated and confirmed by contemporary events. As long as the hierarchical mass society form is accepted as a legitimate form of socio-economic organisation, little else matters. It will matter not whether the hierarchical elite chosen to lead them are of left, right, centre, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Atheist, Socialist, Communist or Fascist persuasions. The socio-economic logic and the material conditions of hierarchical mass societies, at the very best determine what transpires within them, and at their worst dictates what must be done by elites to maintain and sustain these systems. Thinking that a different ruling elite can solve the problems endemic under all previous ruling elites is an intellectual product of cultural and ideological entrapment by the form and content of one dominant but disfunctional type of social organisation.

To realise a really revolutionary transformation of how all life on earth is treated, any future popular uprising needs to include the intention to achieve a revolutionay transformation of human social and economic forms of organisation. Human societies will need to cease to be socially hierarchical, economically unequal and anthropocentric. One or even two of these transformations would be insufficient, all three are essential for social stability and ecological sustainability. Finally, it is important to remind ourselves of the well known unreliability of statements and claims by all nation state elites in their military wars of possession or annexation or also in their internal civil wars undertaken to maintain their domination. Truth is still the first casualty of war and; in 2023 the ‘Dream of Bourgeois Progress’ is clearly over.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)

Part 2. Elite interest quickly dissolves elite integrity.

That sordid reality mentioned at the end of Part 1, is the fact that elite, self-interested commitment to having a share in the available and potential profitable resources of the globe is placed higher, much higher, than the interests of humanity. Calling for and achieving a short pause would only allow a trickle of aid to enter Gaza, and give the appearance of humanitarian concern, before the continual crimes against humanity would be allowed to start up again. Everybody not willing to delude themselves about peaceful outcomes know this. Thus the prime concern that the middle eastern profitable resources are kept within the western sphere of influence by the presence of a militarily strong Israel will be pursued.

Such negotiated pauses, past, present and future are not intended to allow a solution for Palestinians. They are tacit acknowledgements that brief intervals before the Israeli national elite continue what they have started do have some PR value. What it had re-started in early October 2023, has been revealed not only as reflex tactic of terrible revenge, but as a renewal of the final stages in the long drawn out solution to what the Zionist Jews consider to be their Arab problem. European and Western elites support this strategy by Israel because, as previously noted, it counters any threats to their profit sources from changes to the middle eastern autocracies they have heavily invested in.

This latest episode in the Zionist program of being a base for protecting US, UK and European based capital from competitors, is also one of a privileged section of the human species (the Israeli elites) removing another less privileged section of the human species (the Palestinian elites) from life itself and from the land of Palestine. The means employed is courtesy of the latest batch of advanced armaments profitably supplied by Israel’s elite friends in US, UK and Europe. Nevertheless, destroying most of the remaining Palestinians and all they possess by a massive bombing and shelling campaign within the territory of Gaza and the West Bank has introduced a new generation of global citizens to the practice of settler colonisation and the horrors of ‘total war’.

Total war is when people are killed by every means possible, not just by guns, bombs and missiles. Total war includes systematically depriving the enemies non-combattants of food, water, shelter and medical attention. Using disease outbreaks  as a biological weapon of mass destruction therefore kills those that have dodged the guns and bombs. Despite the daily visual horror of this mass destruction of human life and buildings this spectre is still not outrageous enough to alter the unwillingness of any other national elites singly or collectively to openly condemn it or seriously attempt to reign it in. This is because this massacre of the innocents along with the guilty by Israel is not an outrageous global anomaly as many naive media commentators seem to think.

It is something the Israeli elites share with all elites in authority over hierarchical mass societies, and is fully in line with the past actions of all national elites. Massacres of those resisting colonisation is as old colonisation itself, but not everybody knows that. Our more recent generations of global human beings, were unborn when the U.S. military dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and on other areas occupied by ISIS or Da’esh, so most will probably be unaware of regular massacres. Furthermore, some of the youth of today may also be unaware that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001.

Likewise, the ugly history of Western and European mass killing in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, has long been kept out of (or relegated to the margins of) news media, whilst the public have been provided with a constant euphoric monologue extolling the benefits of western ‘civilisation’. All these examples of western imperialist type, gun-ship diplomacy and armed skirmishes along with Western military outposts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, are not undertaken to provide soldiers, sailors and airmen with exotic off-duty experiences. They are there to protect profitable resources.

Moreover, in 2023 a new generation of global human beings have now, by means of the internet and alternative media, been able to witness first hand the mask of civility and humanitarian concern slip from the faces of modern hierarchical mass society elites, to reveal the underlying unmoved expressions of self interested greed. If so many global elites can show so little compassion or concern to prevent the wholesale killing and dismembering of members of their own species in Gaza, and the West Bank, etc., then it should come as no surprise why most of them show no compassion for the poverty and homelessness they create for their own lower valued citizens.

If in doubt of this assertion, just consider who gets killed most by bombs, bullets and poverty! Death by the weapons used in these latest wars between Hamas elites and Israeli elites, and Russian elites and Ukrainian elites, has been greatest among unprotected civilians. If ranks of dead babies in bombed and shelled hospitals do not move global elites to compassion and action, then people who in their elite eyes are only homeless (as a life-style choice!), queuing at food banks, or unemployed (also considered as being by their own choice!), or living next to swollen rivers, (presumed to be their own choice!) will be shown no compassion or serious action.

We should not overlook the fact that the above symptoms of global austerity and infrastructure neglect are the results of political and economic choices by national elites and  IMF  elites and that the resources expended by war armaments production will result in further austerity and high prices for those at the bottom of the hierarchical mass society system. The only thing protecting the old age pensioners in the UK and Europe from a similar severe level of callous indifference by advanced nation political elites is that fact that many pensioners continue to vote to elect the elites into positions of power, privilege and ample remuneration. In this case the elite hope by being less harsh on the old folk than the younger their chances of being voted into continued milking of the system will be better.

A further characteristic that elites in authority the world over have revealed they have in common is the their loose intellectual hold on logic. This also applies to the news media personnel that are employed to pass on the chosen narratives of the elite. The recent claim by Israel’s political elite that Israel has a right to defend itself – repeated by practically every one of the thousands of experts, politicians and officials, whether of left right or centre or United Nation persuasions – highlights this global intellectual disability. It is public knowledge that scores of UN resolutions, accepted after long heart-felt (?) discussions, have declared, time and time again that according to Internationally agreed law, Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal.

The logic of the Israeli elites claim to have the right to defend itself by any means, therefore, amounts to claiming the that it has the right to defend by any means, it’s illegal possession of Palestinian territory. The UN staff know the occupation is illegal as do Politicians of all tendencies in the UK, US and Europe, so when they repeatedly preface their remarks by repeating the mantra  “Israel has the right to defend itself”, they have merely publicly  contradicted themselves. There is no legal right to defend an illegal act or to defend the continued possession of stolen property. According to agreed international law Israel has no legal right to defend it’s illegal possession of Palestinian land and property stolen since 1948.

In effect, the elites in the UK, the US, European nations and assorted others are collectively endorsing an illegal act which their own representatives have previously repeatedly condemned. The parroting of this same contradictory formula of a right to defend an illegal act or actions in this illegal occupation by media pundits everywhere, exposes their own shallow grasp of knowledge and an even less firm grasp on logic. Now I am certainly not going to defend either the right of Israeli elites to order the bombing of Gaza into the stone age, and its genocidal killing of the ordinary Palestinian masses, nor am I going to defend the right of Hamas elites to fire rockets or kill Israeli civilians in other ways.

Irrespective of legal rights, or in one case their complete absence, both sets of elites (and their elite supporters elsewhere) are merely personifying the immoral policy of killing innocents as part of their political agendas to gain absolute control over terrirory and resources, in this case the territory of former Ottoman Palestine.  Both elites (and their supporters)  should therefore be openly condemned as crimes against humanity.  Moreover, by such self-contradictory convenient distortions, all such elites, established ones or ones wishing to replace them, are overwhelmingly trapped by the socio-economic logic of elite controlled, hierarchical mass society dynamics. Under hierarchical elite systems, economics determines politics. Thus elite self interest, continually corrodes elite integrity.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023.)

Part 1. Nationalism versus Humanity.

For most working people, the dream of a benign nationhood has long been over. It now also looks as if it is over for the people of Palestine. The abstraction ‘nation‘ has always hidden far more than it has revealed and given that the modern world is entirely made up of nations, that has often been a problem. The term ‘nation’ reveals nothing of the socio-economic divisions within them or how the elites within them use this social form to oppress and exploit the non-elite human beings within them. However, in 2023, the reality hidden behind the term nation has been clearly exposed.

A nation is a hierarchical mass society form of living in which the hierarchy determine practically everything of importance, even if their decisions (such as on Covid) are seriously detrimental to the rest of the human beings living within them or living outside them. When it is also understood that the modern hierarchical mass societies operate on the economic basis of dependence upon the profits of capital investments, their apparent hypocrisy over decisions which harm working people start to make an elite kind of  sense. The capitalist mode of production can only be successful for capitalists, if it continually grows their capital and thus the economy. That is the reason its elites strive for ever more land and resources to exploit.

So the apparent brutal madness of elite determined bombing and shelling of Ukraine by the Russian elite and the similar vindictive madness of bombing and shelling Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli elite, both have an economic motive and purpose behind them. At it’s most fundamental, the purpose is to obtain extra land and profitable resources. Likewise, elite access to profitable resources in the near and middle east, also explains the complicity of the UK, US and European elites in their long term support for Israel’s genocidal strategy of getting rid of Palestinians. The Israeli elite wish to get hold of the whole territory of Palestine and the middle east has long been a lucrative resource for US, UK and European capital investment, particularly since the change from coal to oil as an energy  resource to power European industry and commerce.

Consequently, the fact that further exploitable resources of the middle east might be taken away by unfriendly governments as it was in Egypt, Afghanistan and Iran during the 20th century, is a capitalist class’s worst nightmare. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how inter-dependently fragile the capitalist system had become, therefore, any significant disturbance – anywhere – could cause a domino type financial, economic or social collapse. As the multi-faceted global crisis of capitalism deepens and if the Arab masses become more discontent with their situation under their Euopean and American created middle east puppet regimes, west friendly governments may fall.

The Arab Spring indicated the depth of Arab discontent with their governments and western capitalist elites are anxious to preempt any additional Arab uprisings. Anything which may take the gulf state puppet regimes out of the wests spheres of economic and financial interest, is of immense concern to the wheelers and dealers of global capital. The existence of a successful Islamic Palestinian state sharing the land of Palestine with Israel, would not only weaken the wests client state of Israel, but also may just trigger a domino effect of further middle east popular uprisings, bringing down puppet gulf states and much else. The success of the Taliban in regaining control of Afghanistan, has demonstrated yet again just how easily and quickly mineral and agricultural wealth (and lucrative sales outlets) can be taken out of US, UK’s and Europes economic and financial control.

For this reason, (among others), from the Israeli elite perspective, and their ‘backers’ the Palestinian dream of a successful state must be shattered at all costs. The costs being, on the one hand, the almost complete annihilation of the people and infrastructure of Palestinian Gaza and the West Bank; and on the other; the complete loss of what remains of the prestige and integrity for Jewish Zionism among Jews themselves and the even greater cost of an ever more intense hatred of them by the Arab people. It never happens in the imagination and ambition of aggressors, (Israeli or otherwise) but actually in the real world even winners can become losers. It’s called a Pyrrhic victory and Israel (and the West) has kept clocking up such victories since 1948; often gaining territory and assets but losing credibility and their humanity.

Also the Israeli elite know a smaller Israeli state would create it’s own internal destabilisation process accompanied by civil unrest. From the US, UK’s and Europe’s slightly different perspective, a Palestinian state, if granted, must be small, US friendly and strongly controlled. In other words, the west would like Gaza as a small Palestinian state without Hamas and populated by a docile community available as a source of cheap and reliable labour. However, the Palestinians will not accept that and the Isaeli pro-Zionist elite will not grant it no matter how many reams of paper are consumed or hot air exhaled, producing  two-state feasibility studies. This particular strip of land just isn’t resource rich enough to accommodate two modern states. Indeed, the land of Palestine as whole is not resource rich enough for one modern state based upon the capitalist mode of production.

To exist, successful small states, need particularly rare advantages in the modern era. A monopoly of banking as in Switzerland, a monopoly of oil as in small gulf states, and a monopoly of religious authority as in Papal Rome. Palestine, as variedly beautiful as it is, has nothing comparable. Split into two states each would have even less. Even if the coming economic, social, ecological and climate crisis does not cause a wholesale collapse of most hierarchical mass societies, a victorious Israel within a generation, if it remains as it is, would need further land to colonise, leading inevitably to further wars. Leaving long-term guessing aside, the intended plan for Israel, as it is presently governed, (negotiated pauses or not), is that the war against Gaza and the West Bank must continue until the idea of Palestine is just a distant memory, like the former great Sioux tribal confederacy on the Great Plains of North America. However, the Palestinians will also not go willingly into any future ‘reservations’ devoid of their basic human rights.

The west’s opposition to Putins land-grab of parts of Ukraine is also fundamentally economic and not personal. Russia was once wrestled out of western capitalist financial control by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and this control was never fully regained evennafter the eventual collapse of the Communist regime. The alternative Russian elite having peronally absorbed all the state owned assets in Russia and banked their surplus cash into European property, also needed and wanted to get hold of profitable resources in Ukraine. Led by the USA, that particular Putin-led resource grab just had to be stopped by western, Anglo-Saxon elite controlled capitalism. Hence, expensive high end equipment was rushed out by them to Ukraine from US, UK and Europe, whilst penny pinching austerity was doled out to their own citizens.

Helping Ukraine resist Russia was the wests way that significant parts of those resource rich, Great Northern European Plains of Ukraine, might remain accessible to US, UK and European profit-making enterprises. Backing the resistance of Ukraine to Russia and opposing the resistance of Palestine to Israel may seem hypocritical and it is, but it is also capitalist business as usual. And of course strong and persistent capitalist economic motives also give rise to more than hypocrisy and inhumanity. However, the full extent of the inhuman symptoms and hidden motives of Nationalists and Capitalists are not usually advertised publicly by those high up in the hierarchy, but George Orwell did. Of the views of nationlists, he wrote;

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no outrage – torture, the use of of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians…” “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not hearing of them…..(George Orwell. ‘Notes on Nationalism.)

Orwell did not include the economic concept of capitalism in his thoughts on the nationalist mind set, but the same essential thinking applies to the ‘capitalist’ as it does to the ‘nationalist – anything goes to protect or enhance the investment portfolio’s of those focused on the bottom line. Those who are lost for words to describe what is happening currently (2023) in these two macabre theatres of war and are puzzled as to how it is being reported by media and governments, George Orwell’s two sentences above may assist in understanding it. Furthermore, in mid 2023, the diplomatic mask of United Nations moral integrity dramatically slipped and the Janus faces of most nationalist elites have been revealed as something completely different.

UN, Peace-keeping has rarely been about keeping peace. That term has always been a rhetorical cover for what has actually been resource protection and the stabilisation of regimes friendly to capital. The refusal of UK, US and European national elites to demand cessation of the genocidal bombing and shelling of other human beings in Gaza by Israel and now the West Bank, was blatant enough. However, the best that the rest of the UN affiliated national elites could do was make the failed inadequate call for a short humanitarian pause. A pause  between a continuation of  24/7 genocidal bombing and shelling – really! This too revealed the sordid reality lurking behind the official charade of United Nations humanitarian concern.

Part 2. Elite interest quickly dissolves elite integrity, is to follow.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)

Two events in Ukraine and Palestine have come to dominate the year 2023, in the form of invasions of territory by powerful armed forces. Both have contained numerous instances of what can be defined as crimes against humanity. Both these invasive military operations, caused huge losses of life and created scenes of enormous infrastructure destruction. Both of the two armed invading forces, who were employed by the hierarchical mass society elites of Russia and Israel, showed no moral concern for the destruction of combatants and non-combatant men, women and children. To the elites authorising and commanding these territorial invasions and the individuals conducting them, the lives of members of their own species had no intrinsic value and their bodies could be legitimately blasted into hundreds of shredded pieces and left lying around on pavements or amid the rubble of demolished houses and public buildings.

Moreover, these two mind boggling examples of mass crimes against humanity and genocidal levels of human and infrastructure destruction took place within a global context of 55 other 21st century concurrent wars and armed killing sprees. In 2023, significant sections of humanity were again trying to annihilate other sections of humanity – and not for the first time. A previous industrial level of mass destruction (with over six million dead human beings) had also occurred in the two 20th century world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45. Since no other species of life on earth, throughout the whole of earths billion year evolutionary history, has ever turned – on-mass – to kill and harm others of it’s own species, these recurring events raise the following question. What has happened during the evolution of the human species to account for such a unique phenomena of intra-species self destruction?

Never before, in the billion years of evolutionary life on planet earth has there been so much self-inflicted species death and destruction as there has been in the last 109 years. Although enough evidence has been uncovered to establish the fact that life on earth has previously faced many devastations and even mass extinctions these occurrences have always been caused by external or internal planetary events. No evidence exists that any species of life on earth, throughout their millions of years of evolutionary existence, has found it necessary to kill members of it’s own species in large numbers or on a constantly recurring basis. Even those carnivorous animals whose evolutionary trajectory has produced specific means of killing prey, such as poisons, fangs, talons, killer jaws and massive strength, have only ever killed in single digit numbers either in defence or to obtain a source of nutrition.

Previously, life on earth everywhere, has simply attempted to survive. Life, in all its millions of species forms, has sought and obtained Nutrition (N) and reproduced itself by internal Metabolic means (M) and then Reproduced (R) a further generation of the species. Furthermore, all surviving species have previously found sufficient nutrition and shelter to survive over countless generations – without mass destroying it’s own species or any other. So when and why did humanity start to be so self-destructive? Fortunately, in attempting to understand what has gone uniquely wrong with the human species, there is an abundance of evidence that points in a certain direction. The first is the observation that the recurring type of mass human-on-human deadly violence – displayed during organised warfare – only began comparatively recently in the evolutionary history of the human species. Mass armies assembled facing each other with the human combatants intent on killing each other, presupposes mass societies with a previously socialised cultural disposition to fight to the death and also kill non combattants.

Interestingly, such societies only began to exist approximately six or seven thousand years ago and only in certain regions. Outside of those certain regions, human life more or less replicated the life of all animals of the mammalian type. Surveying the available evidence from early European history and the general pre-history of life on earth suggests that during the period of transition from nomadic human bands to settled hierarchical mass human societies, that the something ‘unique’ occurred to those sections of the human species who became permanently sedentary. The human species, which then began to be regularly at war with itself over land and resouces, became unique among all species of life on earth. Of course correlation does not necessarily equal causation. However, by examining the hiearchical mass society form, we shall see that the clue to understanding the source of the recurring savage conflicts between modern human hierachical mass societies, lies in the unique social adjustments made during that historic transition, from a nomadic existence to a settled one.

Clearly, this change in social living reveals that the main purpose continued to be to secure sufficient food, water and shelter, but now for permanently larger numbers of people. The form the change mostly took was settled, organised farming communities, with divisions of labour created in order to produce the necessary nutritional and other essentials for the survival and reproduction of new members of the society. Securing enough nourishment to survive was not unique to humans, because every living thing, from the smallest single cell bacteria to the largest multi-cellular animal on land or in sea, has had to secure and pass through the following six stages or phases of existence. Obtaining Nutrition, (N) which must then be internally Metabolised (M) which then produces the bio-chemical substances to enable Growth (G), and then when sufficient, also allows for Reproduction (R). This cycle of ‘living’ then leading to Ageing (A) and eventually Death (D). Therefore, the phases of life on earth – in all its multifarious forms and modes of production – can be symbolically represented by the expression (N-M-G-R + A -D).

All sources of Nutrition, (N) for all living things are ultimately derived from the creation of organic and inorganic material via photosynthesis by land and water based plants or chemosynthesis by deep sea plants. This synthesis of inorganic and organic material occurs due to the evolution of specialised plant cells harnessing the energy of the sun or from hot thermal vents, via similar specialised cells and these render the material Metabolisable (M) for other living things to utilise as Nutrition (N) whose cells then also further Metabolise it (M) for their Growth (G) and for Reproduction (R). Therefore, fertile, microorganism rich soil-topped land and sediment bottomed sea, which are the mediums which support all the basic and essential plant-based food chains of all life on earth, are crucial to all forms of life on earth, and not just to humans. Land, sea, fresh water and clean air produced by the photo-synthetic plants are therefore absolute essentials for the survival of all forms of life on earth.

Furthermore, for multiple millions of years, land, sea, fresh air and water were freely available to all forms of life on earth as they associated and evolved. If enough organisms could reach or locate themselves in the path of, the inorganic and organic material they needed to survive, then they did and obviously most of them did. This was also true for humanity, when it evolved from within the mammal species hundreds of thousands of years ago up until the advent of hierarchical mass societies some five or six thousand years ago. We can say this with a great deal of certainty, because for most of the planet’s humans these were still freely nomadic on every continent and sizable island on the planet, until the onset of the 17th and 18th century colonial era. Freely moving about here and there, gathering and hunting, is how humans and animals (and insects) eventually populated the entire globe from whichever geographical location they started.

Therefore, it is obvious that there is a crucial difference between access to the land and water based sources of nourishment (N), before the existence hierarchical social structures, and those after their full development. Nomadic peoples just move on when local resources become insufficient. Settled people don’t intend to move. The latter invariably grow their own plant based nourishment or raise, coral (or herd) their meat based nourishment. In such cases of transition the relationship between humans, land, sea and food changes. Not in its main content, for land and sea still produce the food, but in the form the land and sea is used. Settled land is cultivated and its production collected and humanly distributed. It is at this settlement stage in the social evolution of humanity that the quantitative change in human community living produced a first level, of qualitative transformation.

This transformation effected all life within a definite radius of settled mass society living. From that moment on, permanent and exclusive control of land, water and resources became necessary for settled communities, where it was not so for nomadic peoples. Permanent control of land, water and other resources of course can be exercised collectively in egalitarian societies and undoubtedly this was the case in certain places. However, permanent control can also be exercised by an elite in hierarchical societies, and this was the form of social control that began to intentionally dominate all such societies. Nevertheless, whatever, form this permanent control took, a new social dynamic had been set in place. This is because any settled community which grew in numbers of members, would eventually need to extend its exclusive control over more land, water and resouces.

An egalitarian community would invariably decide this democratically, whilst a hiearchical society (with an elite ruling class) the decisions would be made undemocratically. However, as soon as the means of nourishment (or the means of obtaining it) were not controlled by the community, but controlled exclusively by some elite individual or elite class, then a second level, qualitative transformation had taken place. Within hierarchical mass societies, obtaining Nourishment (N) was no longer a direct human relationship between individual or collective humans and nature, but via an indirect relationship with the elite. Henceforth, most people began to obtain nutrition (N) by courtesy of, or permission of, the elite – who were predominantly men. Thus, within hierarchical societies, obtaining food, water, shelter and safety meant ‘working for the man’ in one capacity or another. This then became the new socio-economic norm. This new norm also meant that the ellite effectively determined much of the social life within these new settled forms of mass social living.

From then on, where people worked, when they worked, how hard they worked and how the product of that work was distributed was not determined individually or collectively but by decisions of the elite. The introduction of the personal slavery of women to patriarchal men and the absolute economic slavery of captives of both genders in the ancient near and middle east, introduced further socio-economic divisions and inequalities within settled human societies of this kind. This influence and control exercised by the hierarchical elite in the developing economic sphere producing Nourishment (N) was extended to social sphere and where people lived, how they lived, who they could marry and associate with became subject to elite influence or even direct elite control. Decisions on when and how territory was used or extended – as the hierarchical mass society grew – were taken by the elite but the decisions how (colonies or annexations) were imposed upon all the members of each society, whether these decisions were welcomed by everyone or not. The following quotation provides a snap shot example, of such developments, preserved in the Jewish religious literature of that ancient period.

Numbers chapter 31 informs us that God and Moses instruct the tribe of Israel to go to war with the Midianites to obtain some or all of their land and resources. The narrative records that they did this and slayed all the men and took the women captives. However when the victorious troops returned to Moses;

“Moses was wroth with the officers of the army, the commanders of the thousands and…said to them. Why have you let all the women live? ….Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him…But all the female children who have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourself. ” (Numbers 31 verses 14 to 18.)

Note that the elite religious leader (Moses) of this ancient tribal, but semi-settled herding community was already comfortable with not only killing every male, of another human community, but also every male child and every female little one who had already been introduced (!) to adult sexual activity. Whilst all religious scriptures are a mixture of half remembered factual based oral traditions and multiple mystical fictions, they often do provide a glimpse of fragments of historical reality. Indeed, there are literally dozens of such preserved glimpses, in the Judaic Torah and Tanakh. For example there are 20 other references to gaining land, killing and securing captives in Genesis alone. In Exodus, there are 13 references to death and killing and 15 concerning captives. In Leviticus 7 instances of killing and 4 on obtaining land by conquest.

Numbers has 10 references to killing and 7 to conquests of land and captives. This amounts to 70 such references in the first fourteen books of this book of supposedly sacred revelations. In the case of this Jewish Torah based scripture (accepted by Christianity as the Old Testament) these types of genocidal actions were not necessarily all invented camp fire related, tall-tale, myths. It is possible to reach that conclusion because non-scriptural literature of the period also confirms the general genocidal nature of ancient hierarchical mass societies. Thus in a sense confirming that wholesale slaughter of innocents is in the DNA of all hierarchical mass society elites, Herodotus writes in his histories, with regard to Greek colonisers;

“…. those of them who set forth to their settlements from the City Hall of Athens and who esteem themselves the most noble by descent of the Ionians, these I say, brought no women with them to their settlement, but took Carina women, whose parents they slew..” “Now when the king (of the Scythians) puts anyone to death, he does not leave alive their sons either, but puts to death all the males..” (Herodotus, Histories book 1 section 146 and Book 4 section 69.)

Hierarchical mass societies were being aggressively created and/or extended practically everywhere in the near and middle east during that ancient period. Another celebrated middle eastern ruler, Ashurnacirpal, (approx 860 BCE) even openly and publicly boasted on a Stele of his brutality in the subjugation of those who had rebelled against him after having been previously conquered. Thus it reads;

“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.)

So in essence what has been done to parts of Ukraine by Russia and by Israel to Gaza and the West Bank was being done with different weapons in ancient history, prior to and apparently during the later Roman Empire period. For example, the Roman legions managed to break into one city and the author, Appien informs his readers that;

“Sulla ordered an indiscriminate massacre, not sparing women or children. He was angry that they had so suddenly joined the barbarians without cause, and had displayed such violent animosity to himself.” (‘The Foreign Wars’; the ‘The Mithridatic Wars’. Appien. Chapter 6.)

Again, there are just too many such examples in the secular literature of ancient Persia, Greece, Egypt and Rome to conclude that the above instances were isolated cases of displaying utter contempt and disregard for people already living in the space that another hierarchical mass society elite was intent on annexing. Modern hierarchical elites everywhere would like people to believe that elite conduct then and in modern times, does not behave in anything but a ‘civilised’ way. However, what is described above is the civilised way of hierarchical mass societies. The weight of historical and contemporary evidence is just too overwhelming once it is studied to conclude otherwise. Elites everywhere rely absolutely on the mass of people being in almost complete ignorance of that history or they rely upon the fact that most people prefer to ignore it until it impinges directly on their own lives.

Another point I should make in this article is with regard to the current confusion being circulated by the mass media. It arises because of the media’s inability to distinguish between ordinary people and the elites dominating their lives. They constantly refer to the country as a whole as being responsible for the actions and policies of its elites. The recent references to Britain, France and the USA as supporting the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians, when recent huge demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights by the ordinary people of England, France and the US, indicates otherwise.

Reality indicates that the people and the elite are not always of the same mind and are increasingly of different opinions and desires. The failure by the popular media to recognise that the barbaric genocidal actions perpetrated by the IDF are being authorised by just three people in the Israeli war cabinet, and implemented by a system relying on strict obedience to authority, fails to distinguish fact from fiction. Although many Jewish people may be gullible enough to agree with the decisions of those three personifications of the banality of evil in the Israeli war cabinet, this gullibility and fascistic mentality does not apply to all Jews.

A similar situation has recently occurred with regard to a summit of 57 Arab and Islamic state elites, who have condemned Israel’s crimes against humanity and the West’s support for them. Yet many of the Arab and Islamic elite voting that way are themselves consistently guilty of crimes against humanity against their own and other citizens. Some of them exceptionally so. Some of the 57 at that summit have had their critics bodies chopped up and their parts disposed of, or had them publicly decapitated, others have had civilian populations barrel bombed and committed numerous horrendous crimes against their own populations.

One academic on TV recently expressed his surprise and confusion at this exhibition of pan-calling-the-kettle for not being clean enough. The confusion is not confusing when it is remembered that the elites currently in control of hierarchical mass societies, whether they are, Arab, American, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or Christian, represent only their own particular vested interests and these are frequently radically different than their citizens who they actively exploit and oppress. The vast majority of the ordinary global citizens who are willing and able to, have demonstrated against the indiscriminate bombing and shelling of Gaza and the West Bank, whilst their elites are only trying to pacify their angry citizens by hypocritically saying they are against such violence.

The real give away, is that the 57 Arab and Islamic elites have done nothing practical. Whilst their ordinary citizens have marched considerable distances and braved police violence, these elites have flown here and there in luxury, sat, eat and drank whilst producing little more than hot air and rhetoric. The same goes for the Christian elites, who in full knowledge of the inhumanity perpetrated by the highly armed and amply supplied Israeli military forces upon the ordinary, underfed and under supplied men, women, children, doctors, teachers and reporters in Gaza, cannot bring themselves to condemn it. Instead, they parrot the Israeli elite and try to ‘blame the victims’ of Israeli violence by the tired old patriarchal, and discredited tactic of insinuating that ordinary Palestinians have brought the violence on themselves.

That same type of patriarchal meme was used in the west by some male rapists and wife beaters, during the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, who tried to suggest that young women wearing short skirts ‘were asking for it’ or in the second example, that their wives ‘drove them to it’. It has long been known that when their violent deeds are exposed, bullies, military or not have a tendency to try to avoid guilt and condemnation by blaming their victims. In the past, military cases of crimes of inhumanity have been countered with; “I was only following orders!”; whilst in past civilian cases of crimes of inhumanity have often been met with the perpetrator exclaiming, “Look what you made me do!”! It is to be hoped, that if modern elites try this blaming the victim tactic, in any future war crimes trials as a result of the events in 2023, that the overwhelming response of ordinary people will be a resounding No!

Many extremely pertinent observations of totalitarian propaganda and fact distortion were made by the Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism. Two of them are worth quoting in concluding this article. The first was that;

“….the Nazis have proved that one can lead a whole people into war with the slogan ‘or else we shall go down.”. (‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ . Hannah Arendt. Chapter 11)

The second that;

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely upon the power of man who can fabricate it.” (ibid)

Modern examples of these two symptoms are not hard to locate.

Finally: Crimes against humanity are not inevitable or natural; they are simply the product of an unnatural system of hierarchical mass society living created when elite humanity thought what it was doing was best for them and not overly problematic for everything else. That was long before humanity had the knowledge and wisdom to understand how amazing and inter-dependent the evolution of life on earth had become. Elite humanity now has the knowledge of how life on earth functions inter-dependently and without hierarchy, but as usual puts it’s own self-interest first and avoids  popularising  this understanding. The collective wisdom to dispense with the hierarchical form will have to come from elsewhere.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)

Part 3. Stuck-in-the-box solutions.

Unfortunately, a degree of intellectual confusion and even bankruptcy extends to the left in most of its reformist and anti-capitalist shades. The best solution to the Israel Palestine problem that can be suggested by those on the modern centre and left who genuinely care about the problem is to propose a one or two state solution. The fact that in the 21st century every existing state – advanced capitalist or not – is in the midst of a series of existential crises of decay and oppression is studiously being overlooked. Even when they are not in crisis, military and police states everywhere have become the means for an elite to get obscenely wealthy whilst controlling the actions and thoughts of their increasingly impoverished citizens. Even the right to protest is being denied by the left, right and centre elites in control of modern states. These obvious facts are also not being considered as a present or future problem created by state elites now in power, or those budding new ones currently manoeuvring to replace them. The further fact that many states in crisis are becoming increasingly ruled by their ruthless military establishments seems not to be registering as a problem.

The other and arguably more crucially important 21st century factor being ignored by those advocating the continuance of a single state or the creation of a two-state solutions to the existing problems for Palestinian and Jewish (and the rest ) humanity, as well as life on earth in general, is the following. That all known or imagined types of elite directed states are creating, consuming, and disposing of so much production that the very essential inorganic and organic elements of the life on earth support systems, are corroding away and collapsing. The existing state design and function everywhere, is supporting and subsidising an elite strata to overproduce, over consume and over pollute land, air and sea. This has already led to large areas of ecological degradation, whole regions of climate change, huge pockets of ill health and continuous rounds of armed warfare.  Even a tentative acknowledgement of the protracted six symptom (economic, financial, social, ecological, climate change, pollution) death agony of the hierarchical mass society system is almost entirely missing, from all but a minute radical left consciousness.

So what people in Gaza and the West Bank are being urged to consider by their own Islamic elite, by Christian elites and by some Jewish elites, is to embrace their own form of outmoded, highly competitive, mass production-based, hierarchically-fragmented mass societies. This same type of advice was given to the masses and was followed during the Arab Spring uprisings when US and European left social democrats persuaded, Egyptians, Tunisians, Lybians, and assorted others that if they created a democratically chosen form of hierarchical mass society that all would be good for the Arab Street. Their own Arab elites (Islamic or not) of course agreed, because being in charge of a state-controlled, lucrative gravy train is exactly what they wanted and some of them have now obtained.

It is true, that when people are in dire straits, this bourgeois democratic ‘idea’ in theory seems better than any previous or existing circumstances, but theories based upon the same flawed model do not always turn out to be anything different. Proof? Just look at what the Arab working classes all over the Middle East have actually got out of the Participatory Politics social activist model they were persuaded to adopt! In Egypt, Tunisia, Lybia, Syria, it is just more of the previous same with a slightly different form of male headgear being worn in some regimes. Islamic elites, Jewish elites, Christian elites and secular hierarchical elites are all treating their men and women workers no better than slaves or precarious wage slaves of a system already in an advanced stage of collapse.

So for a paragaph or two let’s just consider in a little more detail the current enlightened (!) suggestions by the intellectual bourgeoisie who recieve huge salaries and pensions for advising the international political elite on such matters – the two-state solution with the two age-old hiearchical constructs – the Abrahamic god and hierarchical mass society, still being the foundations of each state. As noted, over many thousands of years these two constructs have been used to set sections of humanity at war with each other – over what? Over increased land and resources – why? Because what ever resources a growing hierarchical mass society has already got is never enough for the hierarchy! And yet the socio-economic results of these societies have been claimed by its elites to be the best of all possible worlds.

The historic and contemporary reality, however, for the ordinary working people of both Jewish and Islamic (and later Constantine inspired Christian) hierarchical mass society forms and belief systems, has been consistently brutal and catastrophic, within those societies and between such societies. It is a verifiable fact that these three ideologically or nationally identified sections of the (Abrahamic monotheistic) human family, despite a passage of four or five thousand years have never achieved peace, justice and equality for the majority by adhering to these two elite-centred constructs. Quite the opposite!

Anyone with the time and resources can confirm that the history of the ordinary Jewish, Islamic and Christian masses has been one of generation after generation being exploited, oppressed and controlled by their own secular and religious elites, before being periodically urged or commanded by their respective totalitarian and sectarian elites to go to war against the masses of other hierarchical mass societies – for more land and resources! As noted earlier, a two-state resolution to the competition between the Jewish elites and the Islamic elites for enough land to rule and tax their populations in the former Ottoman near and middle east, is not going to happen. Moreover, if by some means it did, it would be of no advantage to either of their working populations.

Therefore, should class conscious anti-capitalists and revolutionary humanist activists really be advocating or supporting a one or two state solution on the territory of historic Palestine? Futhermore, would a Hamas or Fatah-led state be any different for the ordinary working people of Palestine than the Islamic-led Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey or Iran? Already the Arab street in all these countries, particularly the female half, is groaning under the brutal sectarian domination of a ruling patriarchal Islamist elite who savagely control their populations and incarcerate, beat, torture and eliminate any opposition – however headscarf mild – whether they are men, women or children.

Are the ordinary Jewish working people any less alienated from the rest of humanity by being controlled by a sectarian, Zionist elite who exploit them and perpetuate and prepare a warmongering present and future for them and their children – irrespective of whether the Jewish street agrees with that or not? Is there any guarantee that since hierarchical mass societies following the capitalist model need Capital, Labour, Raw Material Resources to produce and Markets to sell production, that the proposed solution of one or two states would not involve a continuation of war against their own citizens and war with each other over resources – anyway?  The only guarantee is that war and killing for land and resources would continue.

And given the impotence of the United Nations who would stop them from tearing into each other as is currently occuring in many parts of Africa, South America and the Middle East? Considering the condition of the world’s hierachical mass societies and their constant competitive human species self-harming against their own citizens (in Europe, America, Syria, Iran, Russia, Saudi, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen etc.) and each other (as in the Iran/Iraq war; and the current Russia/Ukraine war; etc.). I suggest it is utterly naive to think that a Islamic and Jewish state on the territory of Palestine would magically solve the needs of the masses of Jewish, Islamic or Christian influenced working people within them. Nor would this solution lead to an alternative to the continuance of the pro-capitalist consumer entitlement based war against nature for water, land, labour and essential raw materials.

It is equally naive (or intellectually lazy) to imagine that a Jewish pro-Zionist elite who are prepared to bomb everyone in Gaza into oblivion in order (they say) to kill off those Palestinions still loyal to Hamas, would even allow a second state – of any kind – on what they imaginatively consider is ‘their’ God-given territory. Furthermore, the oxymoronic idea by the Zionist elites that you can kill a widespread idea of resistance to oppression and exploitation by killing some of the people who feel that way is equally information-deprived thinking. Resistence to exploitation and oppression is as old as the phenomenon of exploitation and oppression. The fascistic and surreal idea that you can classify members of the human species as animals in order to justify killing them in thousands and then be considered intelligent and rational, demonstrates how severely hierarchical mass society living has almost totally destroyed the humanity and intellectual profundity of some of its citizens.

Throughout history the same pattern has been true of those hierarchical mass societies dominated by the Christian elites since the days of ancient Rome, whose working people have been treated in the same fascistic way. They too are suppressed, exploited and forced to pay taxes for military so-called ‘defence’ which is a form of obfuscation because armies, navies and airforces are designed to attack and/or invade anyone they deem to be interfering with their economic or financial wellbeing. Even after the colonial era, the western Christian sectarian elites have brutally bombed and invaded Vietnam, Korea, Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan in attempts to set up puppet regimes favourable to themselves.

As noted earlier, the hierarchical mass society system having set much of humanity at war with itself over several thousand years has over the last 200 years been engaged in a savage war of one way extraction from nature. Wood, Coal, Oil, Minerals have been ripped up and its residue dumped. Land and sea animals hunted to extinction. The very existence of the hierarchical mass society system by its endless pollution and resource extraction is undermining the very ecological foundations of not only the human species, but the key soil microorganisms and photosynthetic plant species essential for all life on earth.

And it is these non-human species which the elites exploit every bit as as ruthlessly and thoughtlessly as their own citizens which provide the food, air, water and soil fertility that life on earth – as a whole – needs to survive and reproduce. The taken for granted 20th century perspective that each branch of humanity needs to create and mould it’s own benign form of hierarchical mass society in order for there to be peace, justice and wellbeing on earth for everyone, is patently wrong. It is no longer tenable and is clearly ecologically unsustainable.

Throughout history, working people of different religious beliefs, in different geographical locations and over successive generations have laboured to keep themselves alive whilst the additional wealth they have worked to create has been appropriated by the elites who dominate their societies. Each countries working people have all been periodically persuaded (or forced) by their respective sectarian, monotheistic religious elites, to go to war against the ordinary working people of another mass society until one side forces the other to surrender. That pattern is still recurring and possibly increasing. One recent study found that globally there were 55 active conflicts in 2022, with the average one lasting about eight to 11 years.
Does that not tell us ever so much about the present and the future – if we find the time to stop to think about it?

To work and die in order to support an elite totalitarian prone system which exploits them mercilessly whilst treating them as slaves and wage slaves, is hardly something worth the working masses to kill and die for. Yet this is still occuring in the 21st century and not only in Israel and Palestine, but in Russia and Ukraine and elsewhere. But now there is also the additional doom laden twist due to the petro-chemical fueled capitalist mode of production. It is becoming so over productive that its productive agents are polluting and exhausting the planets organic and inorganic resources.

This continuing failure of the multi-ethnic hierarchical mass society model to fulfil the basic needs of a majority of their citizens, led in the 20th century to many of those experiencing and most conscious of this failure, to fall back upon earlier forms of identity and solidarity, such as religion or ethnicity. Shunning the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious hierarchical mass society capitalist forms,  many  hoped to find ways to rectify the pofoundly felt insufficiency of food, water, shelter, peace, fairness and justice.  Zionism, in the form of Israel was an attempt at creating a capitalist tribal form of hierarchical mass society or nationalism, as were the various Islamic Monarchies and Republics, such Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Soudi Arabia, Qatar etc.

Predictably, these forms of religious based capitalist hierarchical nationalisms have also overwhelmingly failed to deliver the full range of six essentials to all and all have failed to deliver, peace, fairness and justice – even if some have supplied adequate food, water and shelter.  Just as the ordinary working masses of most multi-ethnic hierarchical mass society capitalisms have been failed by their hierarchical mass society systems, those working masses of single religion or ethnicity led hierarchical mass societies have also been failed by their systems, even as the systems have enriched a few among their elites and middle ranks.

Given the power and influence that the elites are able to exercise over the intellectual understandings and responses to this continuing failure of the elite preferred model of social living, confusion dominates practically every elite discourse which is searching for future moderation. Technological solutions dominate elite thinking just as technological conflict dominates every practical measure taken by national elites. Below the elite strata, many  working people know the system is in crisis, yet something crucial has yet to dawn on the masses of working people and be effectively understood by them. It is that the entire hierarchical mass society form of living needs changing, not this or that capitalist aspect of it or the people in charge of it.

The reason the lives of the working and non-working poor are still deficient in food, water, shelter, peace, fairness and justice, is not because this situation is inevitable, or because it is impossible or unnatural. Nor is it because no one has yet discovered the magic solution to making a hierarchical system functionally acceptable to all its members. Such rationalisations are delusional. The fundamental reasons are hiding in plain sight. It is because no hierarchical mass society system, whoever controls it, can deliver enough to everybody while it is delivering the excess amounts demanded and exacted by the ruling elites and their supporters in the middle ranks. Hierarchical control and influence is what is unnatural, unsustainable and is what ultimately needs changing. The egalitarian dream of old has become an existential necessity for a sustainable future.

The entire hierarchical mass society history of the human species has been primarily conducted within the boxed off sub categories of tribes, classes, cities, nations, religions, ethnicities, and genders, with only intermittant positive connections between them. Human Identity has been experienced concretely at individual, and local level and only intellectually, vaguely and abstractly at a universal species level. Moreover, humanity has only lived for the shortest amount of its long evolutionary existence, primarily as an individual Jew, Muslim or Christian first; and a Palestinian, Israeli, English, French, American a close second; and as a species human being only indistinctly and always trailing third and last. In evolutionary terms these counter-productive identity affectations are recent and dangerous.

Furthermore, it is only for an even shorter period of its evolutionary development that humanity has had the technological and scientific ability to mass kill it’s own species and other key species as well as mass pollute air, sea and land. These relatively modern ‘abilities’ (sic) now constitute a considerable part of what Marx classed as ‘the muck of ages’, which he sensibly argued humanity needed to be rid of. Although often plagerised and frequently misunderstood and distorted by the various self-proclaimed sectarian ‘Marxists’, Marx, the revolutionary-humanist saw the significance of our species and its alienation from itself and nature and suggested that;

“Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself, the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being – has become a species being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation….only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”(Marx. Collected Works Volume 3, page 168.)

Let me attempt to  reproduce the essence of the above extract by Marx, but minus its 20th century gender biased language and with due regard to a 21st century biological understanding of life on earth.

“Only when individual human beings consistently think and act as species beings in their everyday life (in their work and leisure) and organise their energies and skills in a genuinely, voluntary collective way, will humanity have realised its evolutionary potential.” (RR)

Humanities really amazing evolutionary achievement lies not in its technology of production and destruction, but in its becoming a highly developed social species in which – only as a functioning collective – can humanity out perform each individuals ability. Only when a critical mass of individual humans begin to see themselves as members of a species of life on earth first; and all other categorical definitions second or third and act consistently as a species, will humanity begin to really fulfill its potential. Letting go of the muck of ages (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, nationalism, religious and political sectarianism) is a necessary prerequisite to saving the planet and it’s amazing variety of inter-dependent species.

Only when individuals and groups of individual human beings finally view themselves as (and act as) inter-dependent species beings first and location based collectives second or third, will humanity cease to be self destructive. Only then will humanity be able to not only continue to do amazingly powerful things collectively, but more importantly also to decide collectively to refrain from doing things which intentionally or unintentionally undermine life on earth in general or certain species in particular. Consciously not doing things which are possible to do, but counter-productive, requires reflective wisdom, whereas doing self-indulgent things which are possible to do – irrespective of their effects – just requires a childlike impatience and curiosity.

Until the above realisations dawn generally upon a sufficiently large critical mass of humanity, it is still possible to campaign for and support people in struggles against oppression and exploitation such as Palestinians, women and Gay rights etc. However, the ever present danger of reinforcing any pro-capitalist illusions or delusions they have been fed by their elites and the elites professional enablers in the wider community, should be avoided. So rather than encouraging working people to continue to sacrifice their lives and energy in attempting to defend a crumbling system or in some devastated places to ‘new build’ an outmoded and self-destructive hierarchical mode of social living, we revolutionary-humanists and anti-capitalists should argue for a clear alternative.

We should be encouraging people, whilst supporting them, to dare to think out of the box, to become consistently critical of all current systems and ideologies and to discard outmoded reactionary identities. To begin at least to think about constructing small scale non-hierarchical social forms of living which are neither at war with each other nor at war with the rest of life on earth, as something to welcome not as temporary therapeutic releases from hierarchical mass society alienation, but as precursors of a new phase of responsible human living on the planet we call earth. Forming local groups to consider how this might be done and sustained would be a welcome start.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)