(Click here for a 4-page PDF)
Workers and students of the world unite — there is no planet B!
It is now beyond rational dispute that, since the beginning of industrial revolution, only a tiny fraction of all the heat generated by humankind’s increasingly industrialised combustion of fossil fuels has dissipated (the residue is stored in earth’s imperceptibly overheated oceans), and the total size of humankind’s populations has been growing perceptibly and unsustainably at the expense of the total population sizes of all other intelligent species. It is now beyond rational dispute that the viability of earth’s ecosystem of interdependent plant and animal species has been prejudiced by irrational human activity.
Millions of pre-university students are beginning to recognise for themselves that academic institutions throughout the world are not fit for their rational purpose — teaching young people how to maintain the viability of earth’s ecosystem of interdependent plant and animal species without prejudice until earth ceases to exist. It is now beyond rational dispute that unless academic institutions throughout the world set themselves the collective task of teaching young people how to manage the viability of earth’s ecosystem without prejudice until earth ceases to exist, the natural conditions necessary for the survival of intelligent life on earth will cease to exist prematurely.
Kepler was the first person to speculate about the disintegration of earth’s solar system at the end of its natural lifecycle, but it was Newton who first proved it. Newton used newly-engineered instruments to prove for the first time what is widely known today — that every extra-terrestrial galaxy and solar system in the known universe has a lifecycle which will end with its natural predictable unpreventable disintegration, just like the lifecycle of every organism in earth’s evolving ecosystem.
Kant was the first person to speculate about the geopolitical implications of Newton’s mathematical proof of the predictable end of the lifecycle of earth’s ‘mechanical’ solar system in his 1755 thesis Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or An Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles. In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason and all his subsequent works, Kant challenged the theological orthodoxy of the supernatural patriarchal creation and eternal existence of intelligent life on earth. Wealthy Christian autocracies ignored Kant’s scientific reasoning because it challenged their inheritable right to be wealthy and wage profitable wars at other people’s expense.
Long before Darwin published his 1859 geopolitical racist thesis On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Kant published his 1784 thesis Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. In his introduction, Kant argued “Since the [scholar] cannot presuppose any [conscious] individual purpose among men in their great drama, there is no other expedient for him except to try to see if he can discover a natural purpose in this idiotic[sic] course of things human. In keeping with this purpose, it might be possible to have a history with a definite natural plan for creatures who have no plan of their own . . . . We wish to see if we can succeed in finding a clue to such a history; we leave it to Nature to produce the man capable of composing it. Thus Nature produced Kepler, who subjected, in an unexpected way, the eccentric paths of the planets to definite laws; and she produced Newton, who explained these laws by a universal natural cause.”
In his 1783 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science, Kant speculated that his ‘metaphysical’ geopolitical thesis of the mathematically-predictable ‘mechanical’ destruction of the solar system would only be accepted as ‘scientific’ when the evolutionary processes which first created human life on earth, and which subsequently created Kepler and Newton, have also created a cosmopolitan generation of people throughout the world with sufficient prescience of the inevitable natural extinction of human life on earth to be able prevent its premature occurrence.
In his 1784 essay Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Kant likened enlightenment to humankind’s adolescence — the season in the life of every highly intelligent social animal on earth when it outgrows its naïve understanding of its unending life, and realises that its enjoyment of social life until its inevitable end is conditional on socially preventing its premature occurrence without fear or favour.
In his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defined the “categorical imperative” as the natural human impulse to “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
In his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant repudiated war on any pretext:
- No treaty of peace shall be regarded as valid, if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war
- No state having an independent existence shall be acquired by another through inheritance, exchange, purchase or donation
- Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished
- No national debts shall be contracted in connection with the external affairs of the state
- No state shall use armed force to interfere with the constitution or government of another state
- 6. No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible.
Like Kant, Hegel recognised that the recreation of human life on earth until its natural extinction is predicated on eradicating the religious misconception of mankind’s original supernatural patriarchal creation. Unlike Christian professor Kant who distinguished himself from his peers by repudiating any premeditated use of violence anywhere on any pretext, liberal professor Hegel justified Napoleon’s use of violence to overthrow religious institutions because they self-serving and undemocratic.
Like Kant but unlike Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach recognised that, throughout the existence of universities, liberal professors have found some pretext to justify private wealth and public violence. In his 1843 Principles of Philosophy of the Future, Christian professor Feuerbach predicted that so long as liberal professors justify private wealth and profitable wars, there will be no global justice or peace until everybody in the world recognises that their enjoyment of life on earth until its unpreventable end is predicated on repudiating private wealth and preventing any collective use of violence anywhere on any pretext.
In a collection of essays written in 1846 but not published until 1932 under the title The German Ideology, Marx and Engels analysed the ramifications of most German university professors justifying the use of military force in the cause of German democracy. In 1848 Marx and Engels published their geopolitical Communist Manifesto based on their analysis of the German university-educated intelligentsia’s support for the use of military force in the cause of German national democracy.
After the 1848 liberal revolutions, outspoken critics of private wealth and profitable wars in the cause of national democracies risked imprisonment or worse. Feuerbach retreated into obscurity. Marx joined Engels in Britain, where he became history’s most trenchant critic of all profiteering, collective injustice and the use of military force, putting himself and his family at risk of legal physical abuse by agents of the British monarchy determined to perpetuate its self-aggrandising university-validated increasingly-industrialised global military seizure of the means to sustain its imperial self, in defiance of all moral, rational and scientific reason.
Unlike scientifically enlightened students of Kepler, Newton and Kant, self-serving liberal students of Darwin argued that white regimes are entitled to use military force to survive as defenders of the ‘fittest’ human race. In 1861, white American slave owners declared war to defend their right to own black people with the same racist self-righteousness that justified the slaughter of 100 million indigenous Americans with impunity.
Trade unions emerged in Britain at the beginning of the industrial revolution when only property-owning men could vote in parliamentary elections. Marx and Engels recognised the geopolitical significance of the democratic egalitarian nature of trade unions compared with the injustice of national parliamentary systems which only represent the common interests of property owning men.
In 1864, they founded the International Workingmen’s Association (commonly called the First International). Its purpose was to develop the recognition in the newly-formed trade unions in the most industrialised nations of the world that the enjoyment of human life on earth until its natural end is predicated on them repudiating all social injustice and preventing any use of use of industrialised military force not only against themselves, but against anybody anywhere on any pretext.
The Paris Commune in 1871 was the only attempt to form a government guided by Marx. It failed to win enough support and was brutally crushed by the French National Guard — 20,000 men, women and children were slaughtered with impunity. Bakunin convinced most First International members to support workers’ use of armed force in their struggle against their armed oppressors. Marx argued that the Commune failed to win support because too few people trusted its leaders to govern without violence. Marx wound up the First International in 1876 rather than leave it in the hands of Bakunin and his philosophically misguided followers.
By the time of Marx’s death in 1883, the leaders of the 1880 Socialist International (commonly called the Second International) had capitulated to liberal demands for colonial wars ‘in the national interest’ whilst calling themselves Marxists. By then, Engels had already repudiated their self-serving misrepresentation of the anti-racist inclusive philosophy of Marx in his 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In this, Engels noted “As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.”
In February1884, the colonial Scramble for Africa culminated in the Berlin conference. As Feuerbach, Marx and Engels had anticipated, the pretentious right of mutually hostile ‘enlightened’ liberal nations states to wage profitable racist wars over the finite means necessary to sustain all life on earth until its predictable natural end was unrepudiated by any international organisation of university professors or their protégés or people calling themselves Marxists.
Later that year, using unpublished manuscripts left by Marx, Engels explained in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that institutionalised poverty, prostitution and profitable wars persist because state institutions staffed by self-serving protégés of the world’s oldest universities continue to justify the patriarchal accumulation of private wealth and military conflict in the cause of liberal enlightenment, in defiance of all moral, rational and scientific reason.
In his 1886 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels reiterated his rational condemnation of Second International leaders’ irrational capitulation to demands for profitable colonial wars ‘in the national interest’ whilst calling themselves Marxists.
Engels did not join the Second International. After Marx’s death, he worked with Eleanor Marx on completing the four-volume Das Kapital and founding the 1885 internationalist Socialist League with William Morris. Engels criticised Morris for failing to understand that what Engels called ‘scientific socialism’ is not an idealist aspiration or an authoritarian ideology, but the scientifically-enlightened collaborative method for consciously governing the planned recreation of convivial intelligent species on earth until their predictable collective unconditional natural extinction.
By 1914, most university-educated people accepted the need for “a war to end all wars” including most people who called themselves Marxists. With cynical hypocrisy, most leaders who identified themselves Christians or Marxists claimed that since ‘right’ was on ‘their’ side, the planned slaughter of millions of people on the ‘other’ side was righteous and necessary.
“The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was more than 38 million: there were over 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.“.
In 1917 the Bolsheviks ended the Tsar’s military oppression of a tenth of the world’s mainly agricultural populations. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were the leading socialist critics of Second International leaders’ support for war to end war; they helped organise the 1919 revolt against the allied victors’ collective punishment of German men, women and children, but they were both assassinated in the chaos.
Lenin formed the 1919 Communist International (commonly called the Third International) to rally support from workers’ organisations throughout the world. However, because of the confusion caused by the hostility of the Second International leaders, the military crushing of the Irish and German revolts and the self-righteous ‘survival of the richest’ nationalism broadcast by public institutions and privately-owned media staffed by university-educated economically-advantaged men, most trade unionists carried on ‘business as usual’ in the rest of the world. The League of Nations was formed in 1920 to oppose the Third International.Lenin denounced it as a “thieves’ kitchen” because it validated British, French, Japanese and US military incursions into the USSR. It also entrenched European racism by dividing German African colonies amongst the richest European states.
The creeping corruption in the egalitarian multi-cultural USSR was dwarfed by the state-enforced racism and media popularised sexism and anti-trade union gang violence for profit in the USA. The 1929 Wall Street banking collapse plunged all industrialised countries into crisis. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin began ordering the assassination of their opponents with impunity. Regimes which had slaughtered millions of an earlier generation in a ‘war to end all wars’ began planning the industrialised annihilation of millions and millions of their children with the overwhelming approval of the world’s university-educated people, including most people who called themselves Marxists.
The 1929 Wall Street banking collapse plunged all industrialised countries into crisis. Regimes which had slaughtered millions of an earlier generation in a ‘war to end all wars’ began planning the industrialised annihilation of millions and millions of their children, with the overwhelming approval of the world’s university-educated people” including most people who called themselves Marxists.
“Over 60 million people were killed in World War II, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population.”
Trotsky risked his life by warning of the global catastrophic consequences of the corruption of the self-serving Soviet hierarchy. He founded the Fourth International in 1938 with a few dozen co-thinkers under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, since Stalin was by then organising the killing of his most outspoken socialist critics anywhere in the world whilst calling himself a Marxist. After many attempts, Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 by an agent of Stalin in Mexico.
Although white people won the right to vote throughout the US in 1920, black people were denied it until 1964. After the 2 million deaths in the racist Biafran oil war and a further 2 million deaths preceding the previously-inconceivable defeat of US forces in the racist Vietnam war, oil-exporting states began challenging US hegemony. In 1972 Nixon was forced to cancel the Bretton Woods system of global fiscal management, depriving the US of its UN-approved militarily-enforced debt collection revenues, and depriving all the banks and corporations in the world of any rational basis for evaluating the equity of any inter-currency forecasts, plans or transactions.
In 1973, the previously-inconceivable military overthrow of a democratically-elected white government opposed to US hegemony was contrived in Chile, paving the way to the previously-inconceivable publicly acclaimed and funded CIA efforts to undermine any democratically elected government opposed to US hegemony.
Just as Kant and Feuerbach warned, the self-aggrandising self-righteous self-serving university-educated white liberal intelligentsia has continued to find some pretext to justify private wealth and profitable wars, and the world is suffering the consequences. Just as Engels wanted, the proliferation of self-serving mutually-hostile national ‘Marxist’ organisations that began before Marx died has been prejudicing the geopolitical education of trade unionists ever since.
Whether the UN or some other yet-to-be-created coherent multi-national compassionate organisation will be able to mobilise enough scientifically enlightened students and organised workers throughout the world to prevent the premature extinction of intelligent life on earth remains to be seen.
Political activists who don’t know their Kant from their Hegel need to brush up their Feuerbach.