Technological development [of the forces of production] has made a leap far beyond the given socio-political and ideological structures. [...] Whilst the contradiction predominantly generated developments within the inner structure of society and focusing on the framework of a fair distribution [of generated wealth] during the classical capitalist era, in the new period the contradiction has turned into one between nature, the environment and the sum total of social administrations. The national and international ruling forces played a fundamental role in the growth of the contradiction, because they did not and indeed could not use technological progress for the sake of a better reorganisation of societies and the environment due to their individual, family or group interests. The social and political forces that are in control of the nation states and the clumsy and dysfunctional supranational institutions specifically need to be named as the forces that pose a threat to the age in which we live. Administrations that believe that the answer lies in nuclear balance and missile defence systems can still come into office, and regional problems are stirred up in order to maintain the arms race. Technologies that cause environmental damage are being silently tolerated. Sufficient resources have not been allocated for fighting the diseases spreading in proportion with technological development, for confronting the lack of education, democratically controlling the population boom, even though available technologies would make these tasks simple. Of course the old modes of production and political establishment are fundamentally responsible for the ongoing situation.

As one always encounters narrow oligarchies and tyrannies in times of crisis and collapse in any age, today, too, there is an abundance of modern oligarchies and dictatorial regimes masking themselves as democracies. Democratic criteria do truly impose themselves, but at the same time there are authoritarian oligarchic regimes that contradict the former, and these coexist with each other in a state of interdependency. A handful of stock exchange speculators that have very little to do with production tamper with the economic structure in order to extract unmerited profits, whilst petty interest groups can bring any kind of oligarchy to political power by manipulating the media.

It is obvious that there is a tremendous antagonism between the whole of humanity and the owners of the oligarchic regimes that are developing ever more intimate and closer relations. The magnitude of the potential dangers this situation poses is beyond doubt: Not only hunger, illness and deaths caused by regional wars, but also the rapid destruction of environment and climate to an extent that threatens to render the world uninhabitable and last not least an individualism unbound and on the loose. Against the background of a frightening population growth, we are thus heading towards a genuine Armageddon.

No matter how often our age may be called that of information and communication, in all the institutions of sub- and superstructure, starting from the political institutions, there are still laws and relationships prevalent that have their origins in the mythological age of slavery. At the end of our analysis of capitalist civilisation we will see that the social traditions, which the state institutions occupy the centre of, have not been changed over the last five thousand years but have been continually strengthened. This institutionalisation is essentially contradictory to science. Whilst science is carried out, it becoming the fundamental principle that determines the social system is continually obstructed. For this reason the central contradiction is between, on the one hand, the state which has ideologically been defeated in mythology, religion and idealist philosophy but continues its presence as an oppressive institution, and science, which is in a position to reform society based on scientific principles, on the other.

The age of science that is so often referred to in our days has not created the corresponding social structure. Although science itself is in constant development, an ethics of science has not been defined even on the level of principles. Therefore it is not impossible that uncontrolled science might bring forth regimes more dangerous than those of the mythological gods or the earthly representatives of the monotheistic religions.

Just as the Sumerian priests once decreed that the divine celestial order demands that slaves be buried alive along with their defunct kings, the naked logic of self-interest as a populist form of capitalism does not know any values that could not become the object of the lust and exploitation of simple self interest. The general degeneration and vulgarity that is encountered during the crisis period of systems reaches its greatest extremes in capitalism. The magnificent age of individuality has been seemingly transformed into an age where instinct-driven, treacherous big-time theft is officially acknowledged and the interests of immoral individualism protected by most sophisticated security measures.