People And Nature ☭ A review by Bob Myers of Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future!), by Roy Ratcliffe.
This book made me confront my own prejudices and dogma right from the sub-title, which is “From a Revolutionary-Humanist & Gaia-centric Perspective”. Ironic, since I met the author, Roy Ratcliffe, on-line last year, when we exchanged letters about the sectarianism and dogmatism found in many left-wing groups.
The word “Gaia”, to me, immediately conjured up images of people building straw bale houses and trying to grow vegetables, sometimes accompanied by an outlook that seemed to see human society’s survival having little importance. But Roy’s book is very definitely written by someone considering how humanity can survive in a world where our present activity is making life unbearable and unsustainable.
I had to quickly overcome my prejudice against his “Revolutionary-Humanist and Gaia-centric Perspective”, which obviously stems from not having read more widely on this subject. And I am quite happy to be corrected on any shortcomings in this review.
Roy is not an academic. Like me, he started his working life in an aircraft factory and, like me, as a young man read Marx and joined a “revolutionary party” – not such an unusual thing in the radical 1960s. Over the years he became critical of the prevailing ideologies of “revolutionary” groups, and has done a massive amount of reading and research to write this book.
It is the critical re-evaluation of historical data that makes this book so thought provoking. I read it with the growing excitement that I remember experiencing when I first started to read Marx, feeling all kinds of random, disjointed experiences and ideas fall into place, creating a new outlook on the world.
I can not completely do justice to the book in this review, there is too much there. I just want to encourage people to read it and for it to become part of the collective discussion of “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”
And isn’t that discussion badly needed? All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever.
The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly. The horrors of Gaza now fade before the new war on Iran.
I welcome anything that makes us reconsider where we are.
At the heart of the book are two interconnected threads: identifying the real place of our species within the evolution of all life, and then a critical assessment of the anthropocentric (human centred) thinking of most current anti-capitalist perspectives, mirroring human thought as a whole.
The book traces the evolution of life from the very earliest moment that inorganic matter combined in such a way that, by absorbing further matter, it could reproduce itself. Roy then goes over the development of all the millions of forms of life that evolved over vast time spans.
These different forms of life – bacteria, plants, fishes, insects, mammals etc – all share a common process, that Roy refers to as N-M-G-R +A-D: N = nourishment, M = Metabolic processing, G = growth, R = reproduction, A = ageing, D = death. From the very first forms of life right through to everything alive today, both plant and animal, this process is common to all.
Furthermore, it is this process which reveals the total interconnectedness and interdependence of all forms of life and the planet on which they live. The N (nourishment) of plants is both the energy from the sun and the inorganic matter of the earth. Plants in turn become the N for other life forms whose bodies in turn, either alive or dead, are recycled as N for other life forms.
Charles Darwin, through his scientific research, made a great contribution towards our understanding of life. However, he was very much a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite, and of his time – with Britain laying hold to a third of the world’s resources. So we get Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – a notion thoroughly in accord with an elite man in an elite nation.
Darwin saw all life forms battling to survive against all others. However, in his book, Roy outlines that the real history of the evolution of all life forms is the story of interdependence. And crucially there was always a “balance”. Even while life forms continually changed over time, there was always a balance between the nutritional intake of one life form and the rate at which the supply of that nourishment was itself reproduced.
The development of human life did not alter this balance. We often speak of early humans as “hunter gatherers” – but this is the activity of all animals. Humans, over hundreds of thousands of years, existed, or rather co-existed, within the interdependent forms of life.
Some 15,000 years ago a dramatic change took place. By processes we will probably never fully understand, human societies emerged in the Fertile Crescent of the Nile valley that no longer gained their nourishment from hunter-gathering but became settled agriculturalists – gaining nourishment from tending crops and domesticating wild animals.
Again, in ways that are only partially understood, these new agricultural societies developed hierarchies: an elite ruling class, usually a male warrior band and/or administrative class, and then an oppressed labouring class – oppressed either by brute force or slavery, or controlled by necessity, there being no other way to obtain nourishment.
All evidence suggests that hunter-gathers had to labour roughly two hours per day to obtain sufficient nourishment. Those who had to labour in the hierarchical agricultural society usually had to work from sunrise to sunset with a lifestyle no better, and often worse, than human hunter-gathers. The need for some form of oppression is obvious.
For the first time, one life form began to disrupt the N-M-G-R +A-D balance of interdependent life. From the earliest hierarchical societies right through to today, this form of human organisation continually tends to consume resources at a quicker rate than the environment can reproduce it.
Firstly was the elite’s own massive over-indulgence and accumulation of resources. Secondly, class societies needed all the means of coercion to enslave the mass of the population, either physically or in other ways. Armies, palaces, castles, pyramids, temples, all play a part in oppression. Thirdly, the mass hierarchical societies, controlled by an idle class, procured resources in ways that soon depleted and exhausted the local environment.
Those doing the work, who would know only too well of this, were excluded from any decision making about their activities. With failing crops and reduced yields, the masses would then be forced by the elites into wars and empire building to continue the search for resources. To feed the people of Rome the legions had to plunder vast territories.
Many of the main features of our present day society existed from the birth of class society. Capitalism simply turbocharges the process.
Roy’s book contains many quotes from ancient texts, describing the barbaric face of the rapacious elites’ military actions, the wholesale massacre of entire populations, mass rape and brutal tortures. From ancient times till present day wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, hierarchical elites show their capacity for butchery.
The book looks at this facet of class society, an activity unknown in any other species of life. Even those animals that hunt for prey only do so to eat. There is no natural equivalent of the mass murder by one form of life against any other let alone against its own kind. But over and over the book stresses that this characteristic, like much else, is not an essentially human trait, but the product of hierarchy with its particular and “unnatural” N-M-G-R +A-D process.
It is ironic that ideological supporters of class society usually designate this as “civilisation”, while non-hierarchical humans are termed “barbarians” or “savages”. The book looks extensively at the rise of class society and the effect this has on human culture.
With the development of human consciousness, of speech, of socialised culture there arose, not surprisingly, the idea that we humans are exceptional, different to every other form of life. Once hierarchical societies develop, where a section of the population no longer has to work and is free, not only to ensure the maintenance of their privileged position, but to write and philosophise, this exceptionalism becomes qualitatively different.
Pondering the nature of their existence and origins, privileged men created stories that enshrined this “exceptionalism”. The Gods looked and behaved like them, and, while the Gods had created the world and everything on it, they had done so only in order to provide the environment for humans to exist and survive.
Humans were special – there was us and then there was a subordinate “nature”. Everything else on earth was there only for the elite’s use and exploitation. Indeed the ruling classes extended this outlook to include the rest of humanity. The mass of people are, like the animals and plants, only there to be exploited.
You listen to Trump’s oil chant of “Drill baby, drill”, or his recent appeal to speed up the mining of the sea bed for rare minerals, and you wonder how does he ignore the implications of these activities, the plight of millions of people whose lives are going to be, or already are, being made impossible by climate change and the degradation of the environment?
But Trump’s “culture” is a product, not just of capitalism, but of many thousands of years of elite thinking.
In his book, Roy traces the development of this human “exceptionalist” and anthropocentric outlook, and the way that it goes hand in hand with a tendency to massively over-inflate human powers and intelligence. Billionaires think that their wealth allows them to do whatever they want, whether this is the sordid activities of Epstein and hundreds of his pals, or Elon Musk’s dream that he can escape a polluted world by living in space. In his book, Roy frequently uses the term “narcism” to describe this outlook. Both Trump and his erstwhile chum, Musk, have this in spades.
In their world of privilege there is no limit to their swaggering boastfulness and arrogance. They exist as “supermen” freed from all earthly constraints.
But they, like all of us, are bound by the real restraints of all life on earth. We need to breathe, drink and eat. Yet we, one of the most recently evolved life forms, are exhausting the resources needed for existence and changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible. The failure of this reality to make any impact on how society conducts its activities now threatens our existence.
Roy insists in his book that a future for humanity is dependent upon us understanding this past and present, and finding ways that we can organise our own N-M-G-R + A-D process in such a way that no longer sees everything as just “something for us”, but as an integrated whole of which we are part, and on which we are dependent. We have to tailor our consumption and production techniques to sustainable levels.
For hundreds of thousands of years humans existed, including in non-hierarchical cities, as part of this interdependent process of life, without disturbing the balance of consumption and production of all other life forms.
By outlining the evolution of life on earth, and then the emergence of hierarchical societies with their increasingly destructive forms of N-M-G-R+A-D, Roy lays the basis for a discussion about how can we transcend capitalism or better, how can we transcend hierarchal societies. He looks at the emergence in the 19th century of revolutionary scenarios, but shows that their anthropocentric view of the world allowed them to see revolutionary change coming from a “top-down” process – where the “enlightened” would lead humanity to a new society.
I remember as a young, enthusiastic “Marxist”, telling people that a communist society could meet all their needs. I saw the future as a world in which all the already developed means of mass production, put in the hands of the workers, could solve all society’s ills. We could all live in a world of plenty.
But with climate change and resource depletion, can a viable future come from the producers simply taking control of present production facilities? We have to think again about what we mean by “revolution” and what world we are trying to achieve.
In the final chapter, Roy writes about the impossibility of “top down” plans for revolutionary transition, and instead advocates for relatively small scale, egalitarian, eco-sustainable communities, within existing hierarchical mass societies, who would then be the pioneers of any post-hierarchical ecologically based modes of production, before, during or after the existing system collapses.
I think this needs much more discussion, how does such activity relate to widespread opposition to class society taking many different forms.
Roy’s research and thought about the past of life on earth doesn’t make him into a fortune teller. Nor is it likely that the way forward will come from a single brain; it’s a collective, practical project needing to involve all of oppressed humanity.
Roy rightly says that the understanding of human life being an inseparable – and not superior – part of all life is an essential prerequisite for a new, sustainable future. But how most people will come to this understanding will be a complex process and one hard to plan. We have to have totally different forms of production, we have to have very different expectations of consumption.
More than anything we need “new” human beings whose brains are not filled with the shit of class society. A world in which there really are more important things in life than getting the latest brand of Nike trainers.
Yet here is the dilemma. In his book, Roy looks at the political revolution of the new, aspiring English capitalist class, led by Oliver Cromwell, against the old feudal aristocracy. But this came only at the end of a long process in which capitalists forms of production and exchange slowly developed within feudalism. These developments created and trained the embryonic new class. It had its schools, its writers, its ideologues, its morals and habits. For more than two hundred years this network of people and the production processes they controlled, slowly grew. The overthrow of the feudal monarchy came only at the end of this process, allowing the new class to take full control and their system to dominate.
How does this past reality chime with our present situation? We have no areas of socialised production, no places where people can form new relations, new cultures based on collective productive activity. Capitalism, with all the power of technology, seeks to suppress and destroy even the most marginal attempts to create other ways of living.
This is where a discussion, taking on board everything Roy has written about, is so necessary. If we look at the growing tempo at which the elites are turning to war, police oppression and the hatred of the “other” and contrast that with the intellectual and organisational preparedness of an opposition, then the future is bleak.
Despite my revolutionary “optimism”, I fear for the future of my grandchildren. We have just seen the formation of Your Party, a new British left movement. Even if such a party could take “power” and get it hands on the machinery of state – how can this stop the destruction arising from the very nature of hierarchical society?
The social disintegration taking place all around us is going to continue and accelerate. We live in a world where “politics” and “government” appear to most people as being the place where everything is decided and where change can be made, so understandably people will try to address their problems in that arena.
Against – or maybe within – this effort to alter the personnel of the elite, we have to try to find the space to begin to create the embryo of a new classless society.
How this can happen is difficult to imagine. But look at what happens anytime there is a disaster, a flood, a fire, an earthquake. Communities appear on the scene overnight to try to help one another. The “state” often doesn’t appear for days if it appears at all and then always to undermine this self help.
Can we turn this natural humanity of the oppressed into forms of permanent mutual assistance and survival in the face of social breakdown? During the Greek financial meltdown we saw little possibilities. Bankrupt factories where the workers talked to the local communities to find out how their needs could be met rather than producing commodities for private profit.
Roy’s description of who we are and where we have come from is an important element in thinking about this question.
📚 Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future!) is available from Amazon and also other online bookstores.
![]() |
| 27-March-2026 |
The word “Gaia”, to me, immediately conjured up images of people building straw bale houses and trying to grow vegetables, sometimes accompanied by an outlook that seemed to see human society’s survival having little importance. But Roy’s book is very definitely written by someone considering how humanity can survive in a world where our present activity is making life unbearable and unsustainable.
![]() |
| Protest against the Gaza genocide in August 2024. Photo by Cary Bass-Deschênes / Creative Commons |
I had to quickly overcome my prejudice against his “Revolutionary-Humanist and Gaia-centric Perspective”, which obviously stems from not having read more widely on this subject. And I am quite happy to be corrected on any shortcomings in this review.
Roy is not an academic. Like me, he started his working life in an aircraft factory and, like me, as a young man read Marx and joined a “revolutionary party” – not such an unusual thing in the radical 1960s. Over the years he became critical of the prevailing ideologies of “revolutionary” groups, and has done a massive amount of reading and research to write this book.
It is the critical re-evaluation of historical data that makes this book so thought provoking. I read it with the growing excitement that I remember experiencing when I first started to read Marx, feeling all kinds of random, disjointed experiences and ideas fall into place, creating a new outlook on the world.
I can not completely do justice to the book in this review, there is too much there. I just want to encourage people to read it and for it to become part of the collective discussion of “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”
And isn’t that discussion badly needed? All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever.
The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly. The horrors of Gaza now fade before the new war on Iran.
I welcome anything that makes us reconsider where we are.
At the heart of the book are two interconnected threads: identifying the real place of our species within the evolution of all life, and then a critical assessment of the anthropocentric (human centred) thinking of most current anti-capitalist perspectives, mirroring human thought as a whole.
The book traces the evolution of life from the very earliest moment that inorganic matter combined in such a way that, by absorbing further matter, it could reproduce itself. Roy then goes over the development of all the millions of forms of life that evolved over vast time spans.
These different forms of life – bacteria, plants, fishes, insects, mammals etc – all share a common process, that Roy refers to as N-M-G-R +A-D: N = nourishment, M = Metabolic processing, G = growth, R = reproduction, A = ageing, D = death. From the very first forms of life right through to everything alive today, both plant and animal, this process is common to all.
Furthermore, it is this process which reveals the total interconnectedness and interdependence of all forms of life and the planet on which they live. The N (nourishment) of plants is both the energy from the sun and the inorganic matter of the earth. Plants in turn become the N for other life forms whose bodies in turn, either alive or dead, are recycled as N for other life forms.
Charles Darwin, through his scientific research, made a great contribution towards our understanding of life. However, he was very much a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite, and of his time – with Britain laying hold to a third of the world’s resources. So we get Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – a notion thoroughly in accord with an elite man in an elite nation.
Darwin saw all life forms battling to survive against all others. However, in his book, Roy outlines that the real history of the evolution of all life forms is the story of interdependence. And crucially there was always a “balance”. Even while life forms continually changed over time, there was always a balance between the nutritional intake of one life form and the rate at which the supply of that nourishment was itself reproduced.
The development of human life did not alter this balance. We often speak of early humans as “hunter gatherers” – but this is the activity of all animals. Humans, over hundreds of thousands of years, existed, or rather co-existed, within the interdependent forms of life.
Some 15,000 years ago a dramatic change took place. By processes we will probably never fully understand, human societies emerged in the Fertile Crescent of the Nile valley that no longer gained their nourishment from hunter-gathering but became settled agriculturalists – gaining nourishment from tending crops and domesticating wild animals.
Again, in ways that are only partially understood, these new agricultural societies developed hierarchies: an elite ruling class, usually a male warrior band and/or administrative class, and then an oppressed labouring class – oppressed either by brute force or slavery, or controlled by necessity, there being no other way to obtain nourishment.
All evidence suggests that hunter-gathers had to labour roughly two hours per day to obtain sufficient nourishment. Those who had to labour in the hierarchical agricultural society usually had to work from sunrise to sunset with a lifestyle no better, and often worse, than human hunter-gathers. The need for some form of oppression is obvious.
For the first time, one life form began to disrupt the N-M-G-R +A-D balance of interdependent life. From the earliest hierarchical societies right through to today, this form of human organisation continually tends to consume resources at a quicker rate than the environment can reproduce it.
Firstly was the elite’s own massive over-indulgence and accumulation of resources. Secondly, class societies needed all the means of coercion to enslave the mass of the population, either physically or in other ways. Armies, palaces, castles, pyramids, temples, all play a part in oppression. Thirdly, the mass hierarchical societies, controlled by an idle class, procured resources in ways that soon depleted and exhausted the local environment.
Those doing the work, who would know only too well of this, were excluded from any decision making about their activities. With failing crops and reduced yields, the masses would then be forced by the elites into wars and empire building to continue the search for resources. To feed the people of Rome the legions had to plunder vast territories.
Many of the main features of our present day society existed from the birth of class society. Capitalism simply turbocharges the process.
Roy’s book contains many quotes from ancient texts, describing the barbaric face of the rapacious elites’ military actions, the wholesale massacre of entire populations, mass rape and brutal tortures. From ancient times till present day wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, hierarchical elites show their capacity for butchery.
The book looks at this facet of class society, an activity unknown in any other species of life. Even those animals that hunt for prey only do so to eat. There is no natural equivalent of the mass murder by one form of life against any other let alone against its own kind. But over and over the book stresses that this characteristic, like much else, is not an essentially human trait, but the product of hierarchy with its particular and “unnatural” N-M-G-R +A-D process.
It is ironic that ideological supporters of class society usually designate this as “civilisation”, while non-hierarchical humans are termed “barbarians” or “savages”. The book looks extensively at the rise of class society and the effect this has on human culture.
![]() |
| Roman soldiers advancing, as imagined by the early 18th century painter Aureliano Milani |
With the development of human consciousness, of speech, of socialised culture there arose, not surprisingly, the idea that we humans are exceptional, different to every other form of life. Once hierarchical societies develop, where a section of the population no longer has to work and is free, not only to ensure the maintenance of their privileged position, but to write and philosophise, this exceptionalism becomes qualitatively different.
Pondering the nature of their existence and origins, privileged men created stories that enshrined this “exceptionalism”. The Gods looked and behaved like them, and, while the Gods had created the world and everything on it, they had done so only in order to provide the environment for humans to exist and survive.
Humans were special – there was us and then there was a subordinate “nature”. Everything else on earth was there only for the elite’s use and exploitation. Indeed the ruling classes extended this outlook to include the rest of humanity. The mass of people are, like the animals and plants, only there to be exploited.
You listen to Trump’s oil chant of “Drill baby, drill”, or his recent appeal to speed up the mining of the sea bed for rare minerals, and you wonder how does he ignore the implications of these activities, the plight of millions of people whose lives are going to be, or already are, being made impossible by climate change and the degradation of the environment?
But Trump’s “culture” is a product, not just of capitalism, but of many thousands of years of elite thinking.
In his book, Roy traces the development of this human “exceptionalist” and anthropocentric outlook, and the way that it goes hand in hand with a tendency to massively over-inflate human powers and intelligence. Billionaires think that their wealth allows them to do whatever they want, whether this is the sordid activities of Epstein and hundreds of his pals, or Elon Musk’s dream that he can escape a polluted world by living in space. In his book, Roy frequently uses the term “narcism” to describe this outlook. Both Trump and his erstwhile chum, Musk, have this in spades.
In their world of privilege there is no limit to their swaggering boastfulness and arrogance. They exist as “supermen” freed from all earthly constraints.
But they, like all of us, are bound by the real restraints of all life on earth. We need to breathe, drink and eat. Yet we, one of the most recently evolved life forms, are exhausting the resources needed for existence and changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible. The failure of this reality to make any impact on how society conducts its activities now threatens our existence.
Roy insists in his book that a future for humanity is dependent upon us understanding this past and present, and finding ways that we can organise our own N-M-G-R + A-D process in such a way that no longer sees everything as just “something for us”, but as an integrated whole of which we are part, and on which we are dependent. We have to tailor our consumption and production techniques to sustainable levels.
For hundreds of thousands of years humans existed, including in non-hierarchical cities, as part of this interdependent process of life, without disturbing the balance of consumption and production of all other life forms.
By outlining the evolution of life on earth, and then the emergence of hierarchical societies with their increasingly destructive forms of N-M-G-R+A-D, Roy lays the basis for a discussion about how can we transcend capitalism or better, how can we transcend hierarchal societies. He looks at the emergence in the 19th century of revolutionary scenarios, but shows that their anthropocentric view of the world allowed them to see revolutionary change coming from a “top-down” process – where the “enlightened” would lead humanity to a new society.
I remember as a young, enthusiastic “Marxist”, telling people that a communist society could meet all their needs. I saw the future as a world in which all the already developed means of mass production, put in the hands of the workers, could solve all society’s ills. We could all live in a world of plenty.
But with climate change and resource depletion, can a viable future come from the producers simply taking control of present production facilities? We have to think again about what we mean by “revolution” and what world we are trying to achieve.
In the final chapter, Roy writes about the impossibility of “top down” plans for revolutionary transition, and instead advocates for relatively small scale, egalitarian, eco-sustainable communities, within existing hierarchical mass societies, who would then be the pioneers of any post-hierarchical ecologically based modes of production, before, during or after the existing system collapses.
I think this needs much more discussion, how does such activity relate to widespread opposition to class society taking many different forms.
Roy’s research and thought about the past of life on earth doesn’t make him into a fortune teller. Nor is it likely that the way forward will come from a single brain; it’s a collective, practical project needing to involve all of oppressed humanity.
Roy rightly says that the understanding of human life being an inseparable – and not superior – part of all life is an essential prerequisite for a new, sustainable future. But how most people will come to this understanding will be a complex process and one hard to plan. We have to have totally different forms of production, we have to have very different expectations of consumption.
More than anything we need “new” human beings whose brains are not filled with the shit of class society. A world in which there really are more important things in life than getting the latest brand of Nike trainers.
Yet here is the dilemma. In his book, Roy looks at the political revolution of the new, aspiring English capitalist class, led by Oliver Cromwell, against the old feudal aristocracy. But this came only at the end of a long process in which capitalists forms of production and exchange slowly developed within feudalism. These developments created and trained the embryonic new class. It had its schools, its writers, its ideologues, its morals and habits. For more than two hundred years this network of people and the production processes they controlled, slowly grew. The overthrow of the feudal monarchy came only at the end of this process, allowing the new class to take full control and their system to dominate.
How does this past reality chime with our present situation? We have no areas of socialised production, no places where people can form new relations, new cultures based on collective productive activity. Capitalism, with all the power of technology, seeks to suppress and destroy even the most marginal attempts to create other ways of living.
This is where a discussion, taking on board everything Roy has written about, is so necessary. If we look at the growing tempo at which the elites are turning to war, police oppression and the hatred of the “other” and contrast that with the intellectual and organisational preparedness of an opposition, then the future is bleak.
Despite my revolutionary “optimism”, I fear for the future of my grandchildren. We have just seen the formation of Your Party, a new British left movement. Even if such a party could take “power” and get it hands on the machinery of state – how can this stop the destruction arising from the very nature of hierarchical society?
The social disintegration taking place all around us is going to continue and accelerate. We live in a world where “politics” and “government” appear to most people as being the place where everything is decided and where change can be made, so understandably people will try to address their problems in that arena.
Against – or maybe within – this effort to alter the personnel of the elite, we have to try to find the space to begin to create the embryo of a new classless society.
How this can happen is difficult to imagine. But look at what happens anytime there is a disaster, a flood, a fire, an earthquake. Communities appear on the scene overnight to try to help one another. The “state” often doesn’t appear for days if it appears at all and then always to undermine this self help.
Can we turn this natural humanity of the oppressed into forms of permanent mutual assistance and survival in the face of social breakdown? During the Greek financial meltdown we saw little possibilities. Bankrupt factories where the workers talked to the local communities to find out how their needs could be met rather than producing commodities for private profit.
Roy’s description of who we are and where we have come from is an important element in thinking about this question.
📚 Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future!) is available from Amazon and also other online bookstores.






















