In this series of articles (and some others on this blog) it has been established that ancient as well as modern, hierarchical mass societies with their divisions into socio-economic classes and into occupational specialisms, introduce into those who live within them, two fundamental forms of human alienation. First, although hierarchical mass societies gather lots of people together physically, they at the same time separate them from each other by socially constructed class distinctions, personal occupational concerns, various competitive interests and by dividing them into separate cities, states and nations. Thus at the same time as aggregating humans together, they alienate them from each other in numerous ways. By this choice of socio-economic structure, practices and ideas based upon privilege and discrimination are fundamentally built into the foundations of all hierarchical mass societies.
Because of the above, sustained social cohesion becomes practically impossible precisely because the human community is fractured into classes, special interests, religions, political factions and nations. Furthermore, ideas of discrimination and prejudice also arise from the difference – in practice – between those citizens in each class who are needed/wanted to ensure the effective functioning of the hierarchical system as a whole and those who for particular reasons are considered marginal or superfluous to that necessity. Thus any competitive prejudice and discrimination within hierarchical mass societies and between them, can choose to focus on a range of nuanced differences such as disability, long-term unemployed, skin colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender or language/accent in order to assert the marginality or superfluity of those considered as, ‘not us’ or the deviant ‘other’.
The second form of human alienation created by hierarchical mass societies is with regard to the human relationships with nature. All species of life, including humans, have evolved and adapted to the ecological and environmental conditions that nature – as a whole – has developed. Nature, directly and indirectly, provides everything needed to keep all life forms alive, in a form that constitutes the nutritional, safety and reproductive needs of each species. This intense, intimate and direct relationship between all life forms (microorganisms, plants, insects and animals – including humans) has continued for billions of years. However, with the creation of hierarchical mass societies, several thousand years ago, the direct and intimate relationship between the bulk of those humans living within them and nature was severed.
On the one hand, divisions of labour were introduced in which only a minority of the population worked directly with nature to produce and enable the consumption of sources of nourishment (N) and the bulk of humanity worked separately and only indirectly with the products of nature. The latter in the form of alteady pre-processed natural ‘raw materials’ already prepared for ‘craft’ workers to process into useful objects or items. On the other hand, the original and natural access to land, forest and rivers was wrested from the ‘whole’ human community by their exclusion from the fertile productive parts, which were then taken into the jurisdiction (eventually by legal control and ownership) of the elite. By the time of Aristotle’s lifetime in ancient Greece, a debate on ‘Politics’ took place between his and Plato/Socratic ideas, which reveals that land acquisition, its products and its control during that period had the following characteristics.
“Three cases are possible: 1) the soil may be appropriated, but the produce may be thrown for consumption into the common stock; and this is the practice of some nations. Or 2) the soil may be common, and may be cultivated in common, but the produce divided among individuals for their private use; this is a form of common property which is said to exist among certain barbarians. Or 3) the soil and the produce may be alike common.” (Aristotle. ‘Politics’ Book 2)
Aristotle then lists at least half a dozen known hierarchical forms of elite rule within them, from kingship, monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy all elite systems which have features in common. To this observation, we can now add that case (1) (as modified by how produce is “thrown” for consumption by a monetary based commercial market), was the one that eventually prevailed in the near east and Mediterranean area, before becoming fully global in the 20th century. However, in the Homeric Greek period it was still known that cases (2) and (3) persisted in other Middle Eastern city-states, Aegean areas or other ‘barbarian’ regions – as Greek authors classed peoples who were not Greek.
So in the near east, at that period, we can conclude that not all human communities had been fully integrated into Aristotle’s case (1) mass societies. In other words, like hunter-gatherer peoples globally, (until the colonial era expropriations), most humans in the world were not alienated from each other or the land and thus nature. This fact, indicates that the creation of hierarchical mass societies and these two forms of alienation, (from each other and nature), are not characteristics of humanity in general, but are particularly distinct and unique characteristics of the fully developed hierarchical mass societies of human beings.
It is a corollary of this obvious fact – also derived from the study of nature – that such socially created exclusions and ‘alienations’ from the elements of nature which support their existence, do not occur among any other, bacterial, plant, insect or animal form of life on earth. In this regard, these socially created characteristics within human hierarchical mass societies have represented a fundamental historical source of large-scale inter and intra-species alienation and conflict for humanity. Moreover, it has been a source that is distinctly unnatural and one with recurring economic and existential repercussions, along with periodic social upheavals and social disintegration. For as the the populations of successful hierarchical mass societies have increased, so too has the need for ever more control of land and natural resources in order to secure sufficient food and materials. Once unpopulated land has been fully appropriated by and integrated into hierarchical mass societies, and population growth continues, then already populated land becomes a secondary target for acquisition and control by the elites in control of hierarchical mass societies.
In ancient times, this growth factor led to fierce conflicts over resources – frequently in the form of savage wars and ruthless conquests. So a pattern of periodic conquest and resistance, within hierarchical mass societies, has existed from the earliest known city states, such as Babylon and has continued among all subsequent ancient city-based middle eastern empires and throughout the entire middle ages in Europe. It is also the case that European hierarchical mass society representatives, eventually met fierce resistance from the indigenous peoples, when they began to colonise North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceana. The pattern in North America invariably included ruthlessly driving the native peoples off their land and controlling them in reservations.
Controlled extermination.
The historic extermination of villages and the herding of humans into ghettos and concentration camps also began in Africa during the European ‘Scramble for Africa’. The most recent and continuing successful colonisation process began in the 20th century when Jewish Zionist elites, organised the colonisation of parts of Palestine in 1948 and sequestered even more land from 1967 on. From those dates until now, the native Palestinians have routinely been brutally driven off their land, confined within walled-off West Bank villages and penned down in Gaza city. This pattern is therefore not individually unique but symptomatic of all hierarchical mass societies and remains the case today.
So too are forms of resistance to conquest and colonisation by indigenous peoples. Soux Nation warpaths, Asian Indian rebellions, Zulu Uprisings, other Intifada’s also litter the historical record of the colonial period. Moreover, this pattern of stealing, killing and resistence, brings out the worst forms of behaviour in peoples as reciprocal revenge and hatred blots out the humanity of both conqueror and conquered and blinds both to their common species identity. Interestingly, some of those resisting incursions, conquest and bombings, as in Ukraine by Russia are cheered on as heroes and supported by western elites, whilst Palestinians resisting conquest and annexation by Israel are condemned by western elites as terrorists and consistently vilified.
So it is a matter of historical fact that, in the case land grabs, double standards and hypocrisy are the traditional as well as the contemporary hallmarks of hierarchical mass society control by elites. Furthermore, successive modern super-powers (capitalist based hierarchical mass societies included) became so populous and industrially productive in the 20th and 21st centuries that there has been a constant global need and drive by their elites to obtain and control more external resources, both for raw material inputs and markets for sales outlets.
On the basis of population increases and high-tech production methods, levels of global conflict between communities and countries for control of resources has increased since the industrial revolution in Europe took place (1760 – 1840) with its various forms of steam and electrical powered mechanized production. This increased level of production and competition for sales, along with the systematic annexation of natural resources as raw materials have once again escalated superpower conflict to crisis levels. The two 20th century world wars, along with direct and indirect (Wagner group type) wars and proxy wars instigated by the various ruling elites are once again proving unstoppable.
Moreover, when hierarchical mass societies reach a severe crisis stage and the existing internal political methods of resolving them prove ineffective, (as they have again in the 21st century) these contradictions tend to produce rival militarised fractions and political factions within each hierarchical mass society. This latter outcome was evident throughout recorded history and is now evident in many countries of the world, such as Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Indonesia etc., and is latent in the ‘advanced’ (sic) countries of the west.
What superficially appears as a form of human madness, when elites periodically fund and direct the armed forces of largely obediant, ‘socialised,’ national communities to mass produce swords, guns and now bombs, missiles and drones etc., and use these to kill rival hierarchical mass society populations, is actually something more systemic and invidious. The apparent madness over mass killing to control global resources and markets, is actually the rational collective result of the internal and external economic logic operating upon hierarchical mass society elites.
As a class, they are motivated by trying to either save or expand their own particular elite form of control over production, distribution and consumption. Under the present fully global system this shoring up or expanding of business as usual can now only be done by eliminating or subordinating actual or potential rival hierarchical mass societies. This historic pattern established through successive generations of empires (Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, French, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon etc.) continued throughout the 20th century (in Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) and again in 2023, as the case of the Russian oligarchal inspired invasion of Ukraine under Putin’s leadership demonstrates.
Moreover, because these symptoms are not random idiosyncratic mental aberrations, such patterns of systemic conflict will continue until the hierarchical mass society forms are completely changed. Meanwhile, as long as these practical divisions, conflicts and antagonisms remain the foundational forms of hierarchical mass societies, then irrespective of wars or peace, techniques, theories and practices of partial, moderate or total social control and brutality will also continue to be essential to ruling elites. This is because as long as hierarchical mass societies continue to exist, these built in tensions and antagonisms cannot be allowed to interfere or impede the intricate and widespread functioning of the whole socio-economic system.
In a practical and intellectual sense the system controls the people, not the people controlling the system. The bourgeois socio-economic system of obtaining (N-M-G-R + A-D), via the pro-capitalist elites social control, still also controls the people, rather than the people controlling the socio-economic system. Consequently, the full recognition that hierarchical mass societies are actually the systemic problem for humanity and the rest of life on earth – and not a solution – will be a necessary step in humanities intellectual evolution. Sadly, this is a breakthrough that has yet to be embraced by sufficient numbers to achieve a critical mass.
Failures on the left.
The almost absolute failure to recognise that alienation and hyper-exploitation of the major section of humanity are the socio-economic bases of all hierarchical mass societies, has led to theoretical confusion and practical errors in understanding the latest iteration of the hierarchical mass society form – the capitalist mode of production. A serious study of history reveals that the socio-economic system of capitalism – as divisive and destructive as it is – did not introduce rigid divisions of labour, classes, alienation, discrimination, ruthless destruction of nature and savage oppression within and between human communities.
Yet many contemporary left commentators regularly conclude that is only the domination of the capitalist mode of production, which is the essential problem that humanity and life on earth in general faces. But, to provide a further example, capitalism did not originate the political ideology of ethnic, racial or gender prejudice. Systemic misogyny is as old as patriarchy and both are codified and justified in the monotheistic religious ideologies reproduced in ancient as well as contemporary religious scriptures.
Even the extreme 20th century examples of militarised totalitarian control and extreme discrimination, known as Fascism and Communism, were not entirely new forms of hierarchical mass society characteristics. They existed in embryo or as prototypes in ancient Sparta, Athens, Crete and elsewhere during the period of hierarchical mass society formations. Totalitarian tendencies were also clearly evident during the pre-bourgeois Aristocratic and Theocratically dominated Middle Ages, and also during the French Revolutionary anti-aristocratic period of control by guillotine and terror under Robespierre’s Jacobin and Montagne colleagues.
We should not neglect to include in this abbreviated list the 16th and 17th century, totalitarian colonial regimes established by European countries in, South and North America, Africa and India, where whole communities of humans were systematically destroyed by the military agents of elite controlled hierarchical mass societies.
Nor did capitalism introduce the need for a special, separate section of the community to monitor or control social production and social tensions. All suggestions otherwise (and I have read many recently) indicate a lack of rigour and patience to delve into and root out the historical and evolutionary origins of generic phenomena reappearing within modern hierarchical mass societies dominated by a form of wealth known as capital.
Most of the above noted totalitarian symptoms pre-date capitalism by several thousand years. Therefore merely ending the capitalist mode of production (or its 20th century Fascistic and Bolshevik state-capitalist political forms) will not of itself end the above-noted socio-economic symptoms. Nor did these so-called ‘socialist’ alternatives to individually owned bourgeois means of production, end the ultra-exploitation of nature and all its inter-dependent life forms.
This is because these ancient and modern (Aral Sea and Plantation Monoculture) symptoms of ecological exhaustion are the direct result of hierarchical mass society exploitation and the elite control of the main means of production. Consequently, whoever continues to advocate divisions of labour and hierarchical forms within future social forms (wittingly or unwittingly) advocates oligarchy and totalitarian forms of control. It matters little, therefore, however eloquently and convincingly such advocates suggest that their preferred aristocratic, autocratic, theocratic, social-democratic, communist or even anarchist political structures are best suited to dominate hierarchical mass societies.
Whatever their naively intended purposes, political structures and forms of organisation and their human agents are already informally or formally a hierarchical, self-selected discriminatory form of association. They are already more than half-way to becoming oligarchies with irresistable totalitarian tendencies. Placing any of these ism personifications in control of hierarchical mass societies is simply a way to create more of the same alienating, divisive tendencies.
Therefore, advocating official forms of democracy alongside hierarchical social divisions of labour for a future form of human society will not prevent the continuance (or emergence) of layers of working class subordination and alienation nor end male dominated oligarchies from forming and consolidating themselves. Something more is needed.
Indeed, all organised forms of politics and democracy are themselves oligarchal symptoms flowing directly from the divisions of labour within hierarchical mass societies. They are so firmly embodied in the underlying organisational form and ideological assumptions dominating hierarchical mass societies that they are replicated in every sub-section, or sub-group of such mass societies. The symptoms emerge within local, national and international organisations, (even village book clubs; walking groups; community centres) whether set up by the state or those set up by civil society volunteers.
The oligarchal and totalitarian symptom is so embedded and pervasive in hierarchical mass society oppositional thinking that even the post-war Trotskyist anti-capitalist micro-sects, within Europe and North America, spawned their own variants of it. Often numbering less than 50 persons, these so-called ‘revolutionary’ anti-capitalist sects established their own divisions of labour and like underground fungi sprouted elite type surface-budding, oligarchal central committees and even smaller leadership cliques. I know from personal experience, that a few ‘leading comrades’ (charismatic or otherwise) dominated them for decades and perpetuated their sectarian domination by all the physical and intellectual means they managed to borrow from the bourgeois oligarchal or earlier Machiavellian play books. This included the practice of physically threatening and organisationally expelling any sect members who questioned or challenged their ideological and practical domination of the sect.
Democracy begets Oligarchy.
Interestingly, the sociological link between organisation and oppressive, oligarchal outcomes had been thoroughly examined in the early to late 20th century by Michels, Weber, Mills, Selznick, Burnham, Djilas and Lipset among many others, but this critical sociological research was not sufficiently taken up those in the mainstream anti-capitalist tradition. This early critical thoroughness was counter-balanced on the left by a thorough neglect of any form of self-critical reflection. Leading Bolsheviks apparently were aware of Michel’s research, but decided against seriously considering or addressing its diagnosis or prognosis. The link between oligarchy and democracy has therefore remained a neglected issue on the left ever since. For the purposes of this short article I shall restrict myself to quoting from the author Robert Michels.
“By a universally applicable social law, every organ of the collectivist, brought into existence through the need for the division of labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated, interests peculiar to itself. The existence of these special interests involves a necessary conflict with the interests of the collectivist.” (R. Michels. Political Parties. ‘A sociological study of the Oligarchal Tendencies of Modern Democracy’. Introduction.)
We need to be wary of previous generations of bourgeois and petite-bourgeois intellects assuming universally applicable laws which were in actual fact only tendencies specific to the existing socio-economic form – as gathered by prejudiced or confirmation biased observations. When studying complexity it is all too easy for the researcher to ‘discover’ what they were consciously or semi-consciously looking for or hoping to find. Confirmation bias is a consistent problem – even within the experimental sciences that know it is a serious problem.
From the 19th century on it became something of an obsession to extend the assertion of eternal ‘truths’, derived ultimately from religiously inspired bias, to areas beyond the Bible and Qu’ran. So-called universal laws were sought and imposed upon the various realms of scientific discovery. Michels was clearly operating within that general tradition, but nonetheless despite this limitation he correctly identified the ‘division of labour’ as the origin of ‘special interests’ coming into conflict with the interests of the collective. Much later in the book, after reviewing detailed evidence drawn from European trade unions and various political parties, he concluded that;
“Generated to overthrow the centralised power of the state, starting from the idea that the working class need merely secure a sufficiently vast and solid organisation in order to triumph over the organisation of the state, the party of the workers has ended by acquiring a vigorous centralisation of it’s own, based upon the same cardinal principles of authority and discipline which characterise the organisation of the state.” (ibid page 335)
The question of whether this replication of the hierarchical form from within a working class opposition to the hierarchical form of mass societies, is simply a socialised copying type of phenomenon or something more intrinsic is left unanswered, but Michels writing in 1915, two years before the Russian Revolution of 1917, concluded that;
“The revolutionary party is a state within a state, pursuing the avowed aim of destroying the existing state in order to substitute for it a social order of a fundamentally different character.” (ibid page 335.)
With the benefit of hindsight within historical research, we can correct the above partially correct assumption and note that the revolutionary party of the Bolsheviks under Lenin indeed was a minature state (ie. a politburo) within a state (as justified in Lenin’s ‘What is to be Done’) before actually becoming from October 1917 onward, a social order of a fundamentally similar character to all previous hierarchical mass societies. The Bolshevik leadership and their successors possessed the institutions of the state as their own property and used them as such. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union became comprised of the basic hierarchical mass society structure of a) an exclusive elite class, b) a bureaucratic/managerial class, and c) a mass industrial and agricultural working class.
The collective works of Lenin and Stalin illustrate exactly how the ‘special interests’ of ‘the Party elite’ constantly conflicted with and took precedence over the interests of the numerous committees (soviets) of workers and why the workers committees were first controlled by – and then dissolved by – the ‘Party’. Under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin the ‘socialist’ Soviet Union became almost a mirror image of the National Socialist regime of Hitler and his particular political variation of such nuevo populist cliques. In Russia, a red Czar relaced a white Czar and Communist Party officials became the equivalent of aristocrats or petite-Fuhrer, while the workers and peasants returned to being the industrial wage-slaves and tied rural cottagers of only a slightly modified form of hierarchical mass society.
This was no accident. Both ‘isms’ reflected the essence of the hierarchical mass society form, albeit ostentatiously adorned with different uniforms and flags. Control and surveillance under Bolshevik elite rule (from Lenin, through Trotsky, to Stalin) exceeded the efforts of the previous Czarist secret police and local priesthood and constabulary and under the domination of the Party and the Cheka/KGB in Russia became the ruthless, erratic and vindictive torture and assassination system fictionalised by George Orwell in 1984 as ‘Big Brother is Watching You’. Or as Orwell further parodied it;
“Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’…’.Reality control’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink'”. (1984. Chapter 3.)
Controlling reality through ideology, is indeed the common denominator of all hierarchical mass society elites. Of course Orwell being primarily an intellectual dealt mostly with the authoritarian control of thinking, writing and speaking via the authoritarian dictact of being required to only express ‘politically correct’ opinions. That is to say, only those opinions authorised by the leading authorities. Infringement of politically correct utterances were deemed ‘thought crimes’, and the citizen uttering them was fictionalised by Orwell as an UNPERSON and outlawed by the Party and its loyal members.
Oligarchy begets Totalitarianism.
However, control was also exercised practically and economically as well as intellectually. The working classes were controlled physically by where they were directed (allowed) to work, how long they worked and how hard they were expected to work in order to conform to the fundamental pre–requisites of modern industrialised hierarchical mass societies. As a convinced advocate of Taylorism according to Lenin these pre-requisites were;
“…the principle of discipline, organisation, harmonious cooperation on the basis of modern machine industry, and strict accounting and control…There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals….unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry” (Lenin. ‘Complete Works. Volume 27 pages 163, 268 and 269.)
What should be immediately obvious is that the main points made (repeatedly) by Lenin apply to all hierarchical mass societies – whatever the technological level or type of class control of the mode of production. Harmonious cooperation, strict accounting and control, along with unquestioning obedience to dictatorial powers was necessary in the frequently slave-based hierarchical mass societies of ancient Egypt in order to fill the granaries and build the pyramids etc., whilst awaiting the soil enriching Nile floods.
Likewise, the Greek City alliances, Persian and Roman Empires and the landed estates of the European middle ages all had their own social and technological means of monitoring and controlling the subservient producers and production, distribution and consumption. Some elements are unique to each successive mode of production, but some are essential to all modes of production precisely because they are essential to the bio-chemical Nutritional, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction plus Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes necessary to and for all forms of life on earth.
The industrial and scientific technologies developed after the bourgeois revolutions which allowed the full expansion of the capitalist mode of production, introduced many unique features into the hierarchical model of mass societies, such as 24/7 shift working Taylorism, time and motion controls, eventually automation, and computer controlled work stations, but these innovations did not change the fundamental essence of class-based control, occupational divisions of labour and disproportionate allocation of remuneration and resources.
Indeed, the complexity and uniqueness of the capitalist mode of mass production has had a similar effect to the popular saying of; ‘failing to see the wood, because of the trees’. Many critics of the capitalist mode of production have confused the difference between what is essential (and specific) to capitalism, such as strict time keeping and quantifying relative production value (as exchange-value), what is essential to all hierarchical mass societies and what is essential to life on earth.
Time and exchange value fetishism.
For life on earth to evolve and continue over billions of years, and for what are classed as the multi-cellular higher forms of life to then further evolve over millions of years, the exact calculation and prediction of the apparent passage of the sun around the earth was immaterial as long as it continued to radiate sufficient energy for photosynthesis. Similarly exactly how long it took to secure a sufficient amount of nourishment, providing it was secured, had little effect on the individual lives seeking it. For millions of years, how valuable something was depended on how useful it was, not how long it took to find it or make it.
For example, the law of value underlying the capitalist mode of production, forensically examined by Karl Marx and the political economists of the bourgeois era, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc., therefore, is not a universal value form, as many people have incorrectly concluded. It is merely one such specific and unique value form operating within the specific capitalist and commodity dominated hierarchical mode of production. The terms constant capital (c) plus variable capital (v) plus surplus value (s) equals commodity value (V) or (c+v+s = V) as Marx identifies them in Das Kapital, are specific only to a mode of production based upon money and capital which are the current means to own/control the main means of production.
Similarly, the incremental measurement of movement, (ie time) based upon sub-divisions of the circuit of the earth around the sun is not a universal value, it is specific to the movement of a particular planet – the earth – within what we currently classify as the solar system. Other solar system planets spin and orbit at different rates, other such distant orbiting systems and galaxies likewise. Sub dividing those other galactic movements would provide a plethora of different ‘time’ values. Life on earth does not regulate its existence by time but by bio-chemical movement/change. Outside of human measurement ‘time’ does not exist – only movement and change.
Increasingly accurate time and production value only become important in human societies where an unproductive elite need to be supported 24/7, in the manner they wish, by a workforce lacking their own means of securing (N-M-G-R + A-D). Accurate time and value only become important and crucial where everything useful/essential has become an urgent necessity for those not producing it for themselves. Or, in the case of capitalism where practically everything has become a commodity to be competively sold at a calculated value plus profit – within a sell-by or use-by date – by the owners/controllers of a particular means of production.
Only some self-absorbed humans judge their own or others worth by how many seconds it takes to fulfil some useful or useless task. Outside of the capitalist production paradigm it matters not a jot if one person takes twice as long to learn or make something useful or beautiful as someone else. Outside of the current capitalist dynamics, the use value (practical or aesthetic) of objects and the human value of reciprocal human relationships is the real evolutionary value-form for all forms of life – human or animal.
Obsession with minute intervals of time (such as in competitive sports) is derived from the process of industrial production harnessed to the specifics of the capitalist mode of production. Winning a race by a hundredth of a second or by a few centimetres distance has no natural or evolutionary value. Yet this obsession with minute increments of time and competitive sport within capitalist hierarchical mass societies is being allowed to confuse and distort human excellence into ‘winners and losers’ of gold, silver and bronze discriminations – and then to create and articulate an insistance that this form of obsessive discrimination is something natural and even desirable. It is neither.
It represents an Anthropocene level of human confusion over what is essential to life on earth and what is ultimately important to humanity and how and why the two realms (nature and humanity) are intimately linked. Furthermore, within modern hierarchical mass societies, additional layers of confusion abound almost everywhere. For example, the confusion caused by not understanding the similarity and difference between all hierachical mass society forms and capitalism comes in all forms and guises. I recently came across the following in a ‘left’ article focussed on artificial intelligence – AI.
“In an economy based on worker coops, employees would collectively be their own employers. Capitalism’s core structure of enterprises—the employer versus employee system—would no longer prevail. Implementing technology would then be a collective decision democratically arrived at. With the absence of capitalism’s employer versus employee division, the decision about when, where, and how to use AI, for example, would become the task and responsibility of the employees as a collective whole. They might consider the profitability of the enterprise among their goals for using AI, but they would certainly also consider the gain in leisure that this makes possible. Worker coops make decisions that differ from those of capitalist enterprises. Different economic systems affect and shape the societies in which they operate differently.”
Note a crude conceptual confusion over employers and employees as well as other confused abstractions. The terms used identify completely separate categories. By definition employees cannot employ themselves, they would be self-employed, not employees. Note also that in the imaginary/fictionalised and decidely conservative social future envisioned by the above author, mass production, distribution and consumption, using technological means has been conserved and is imagined to be still in full swing. Not only that but some form of democratic (oligarchal) system has also been imaginatively conserved.
In the above noted article, there is no mention of the need to eliminate divisions of labour, or solve the mass society tendencies of centralisation, overproduction nor of preventing the emergence of oligarchal authority, discipline and organisational control. The author imagines (and presumably wishes for) future workers to also be still wedded to the idea of being members of large-scale enterprises and envisions them studiously considering the profitability of their enterprise. Since profits are the monetised results of the sale of surplus production derived from capital investments, it appears that the capitalist mode of production has also been preserved in this authors imaginary socialistic future.
The whole complexity of the existing hierarchical mass society model under the domination of the capitalist mode of production, is reduced by the author to the simplistic dualistic contradiction between the employer and employee and is then supposedly resolved by the linguistic confusion of employees employing themselves. The author suggests all this without recognising or pointing out that this particular capitalistic employee/employer form is a symptom of capitalism and is not common to all hierarchical mass societies in general or particular.
Democracy requires Dictatorship.
Under Bolshevik managed socio-economic cooperation, in Soviet Russia, for example, the authoritarian employer was nor a person, but the state and the dictatorial manager, who was a person could be the trade union leader or local working class communist party member – but the exploitation, alienation and exhaustion of workers not only continued but intensified under that hierarchical mass society regime. This and many such other examples of current left confusion illustrates that the lessons of the 20th century experimental variations in hierarchical mass society forms, such as Fascism, Bolshevism, Maoism and Welfare State Socialism have not been subjected to any form of rigorous analysis and too often all that has been offered in its stead is a few superficially understood characteristics and various stereotyped platitudes.
Note also a similar absent point with regard to the earlier quote from volume 27 of Lenin’s collected works, concerning discipline, organisation and harmonious cooperation. Frequently missing from such intelletual abstractions is the question of even if and when it is required, how is discipline and organisation and harmonious cooperation to be established – and who is to decide when they have been successfully established. Lenin at least was clear that dictatorial powers by the party and state, backed up by physical intimidation, arrest, punishment, imprisonment and even assassination, would be the means of enforcing these characteristics of socialistic mass production in Russia. But then it is merely subterfuge to declare that it would be harmonious cooperation – in’t it?
Lenin having gained control of a form of absolute power in the so-called Soviet Socialist Democracy in Russia felt able to instruct his subordinate party members to ensure harmonious cooperation by making examples of those who disagreed, in the following manner;
“…half a dozen workers who shirk their work…will be put in prison. In another they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with yellow tickets after they have served their time…In a fourth place one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot.” (Lenin. Complete Works. Volume 26 page 414.)
If some people wonder where Stalin got his ideas and practices from when he took over ‘leadership’ from Lenin, had his rivals physically eliminated and cranked up the red terror, then this suggests they have insufficiently studied Lenin’s complete works. The above quotes (and dozens of others) make it absolutely clear that in the name of liberating working people from the shackles of capitalist dominated hierarchical mass society exploitation, Lenin and his loyal followers and imitators, forcibly shackled workers to an alternative form of hierarchical mass society and Gulag’ed them or shot them on the spot if they didn’t comply with the dictatorial commands of the new elite. And for those readers who may be persuaded by the earlier noted suggestion of future democratic controls within future socialist type hierarchical mass societies, I include Lenin’s logical extension of many a middle-class, petite-bourgeois view of the underlying reality of all democratic organisational forms, within all hierarchical mass societies.
“There is is therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals.” (Lenin Vol 27 page 268.)
The above hierarchical rationalisation of dictatorship being an essential component part of ancient and modern democratic forms could have been uttered by any leader of the so-called current free world, particularly during times of war, peace or recent pandemic. So to read the earlier assurances of democratic controls in the future from someone on the left discussing AI, together with those I earlier identified in the series ‘Misunderstanding Marx’, on this blog site, is effectively misleading anyone who has not had the time or the means to fact check the assertions and critically examine their conclusions. The intellectual level of historical knowledge concerning the origins and evolution of hierarchical mass societies and the level of understanding of the capitalist mode of production or life on earth in general, is currently woefully inadequate. The tasks facing humanity and the improvement of our current relationships to each other and to the rest of life on earth (nature) are not to be accomplished or even understood on that intellectually confused basis.
Of course Marx was not always right. Who is? In the hope that industrial levels of technology, relative overproduction and socio-economic crisis, would be both the trigger and the means of enabling workers to organise a revolutionary transition of industrial production to egalitarian non-hierarchical social structures, I suggest he, (along with others) were being somewhat too optimistic. Industrial levels of science and technology have not only aided totalitarian forms of organisation and control by elites, but by the promotion of profit-led overproduction and over-consumption, have simultaneously undermined the very natural and ecological, microbiological basis of animal and human existence. However, in defence of Marx, I further suggest, that in his detailed economic analysis of capitalism along with his revolutionary-humanist perspective on life within hierarchical mass societies, he remains entirely relevant as the following extract indicates, particularly when bearing in mind the current background of world events.
“The community from which the worker is isolated by his own labour is ‘life’ itself, physical and mental life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature…The disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal, more intolerable, more dreadful, more contradictory than isolation from the political community…Hence too the abolition of this isolation… an uprising against it…” (Marx. Critical Marginal Notes. Collective Works. Volume 3, page 205.)
In order to exist, reproduce and evolve, life forms in general have only ‘worked’ (and consumed) as much as is necessary to fulfil the (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes relevant to their species. However, in hierarchical mass society forms of organisation, this decision has been reversed for a class of the human species who now only exist in order to work as much as is deemed necessary by an elite governed political community. Not forgetting all the above noted problems that this overwork (or under-work for the unemployed) entails. Hence to the need of a form of activism by a sufficiently large critical-mass, that identifies the necessity for an uprising against the entire unjust and unsustainable system – not just the tweaking of some particular parts of it.
Roy Ratcliffe (October 2023)
critical-mass.net 