When the Dalai Lama announced his
Marxist leanings last summer in Minneapolis, the only surprise was how
surprising it was. The blogosphere was once again stirred up by this
non-revelation. Tsering Namgyal, an Indian-born Tibetan journalist who
lives and studies in the US, was tagging along when the Dalai Lama met
with 150 Chinese students for a three-hour conference in Minneapolis in
June 2011. Writing for the online magazine
Religion Dispatches,
Namgyal posted that the Dalai Lama surprised the students when he
volunteered, “as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I
consider myself a Marxist.” And he went on to clarify that he was “not a
Leninist.” Namgyal’s post reported that a student asked about the
apparent contradiction in the Dalai Lama’s economic philosophy and
Marx’s critique of religion. The Dalai Lama’s understanding was more
nuanced than most of the bloggers who jumped on the story: he suggested
that Marx was not actually against religion or religious philosophy per
se, but “against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx’s
time, with the European ruling class.” (That would be the capitalist
class.) The three-hour exchange was probably not designed for political
sound-bites.
The year before he gave a series of talks in New York at the Radio
City Music Hall. The Dalai Lama’s news office included the following
report in their summary:
His Holiness said when he was in China in 1954–55,
the Communist Party of China was really wonderful, and the Party members
were really dedicated to the service of the people. His Holiness said
he was very much impressed and told Chinese officials about his desire
to join the Party. His Holiness said he still is a Marxist (although
some of his friends ask him not to mention that) and he admired its
objective of equal distribution (“this is moral ethics”). His Holiness
however talked about the clampdown after the [1957] Hundred Flowers
Campaign in China itself and said any authoritarian system always
subdues any force that has the potential to stand up to it.
You might think he had his thoughts on the 99% and the pulse of an
emerging international indignation/indignado movement soon to be focused
on issues of inequality and wealth distribution, but the Dalai Lama has
said the same thing many times before – including in a 1999
TIME Magazine interview and this 1996 passage from
Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses in 1996:
Of all the modern economic theories, the economic
system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is
concerned with only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned
with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable
utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the
fate of the working classes – that is the majority – as well as with the
fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares
about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons
the system appeals to me, and it seems fair … The failure of the regime
in the Soviet Union was, for me not the failure of Marxism but the
failure of totalitarianism. For this reason I think of myself as
half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.
So what’s all the fuss? Marx might still be an inspirational hero for
the odd revolutionary in Peru or Nepal, but communism is generally
summarized as a failed system that crashed and burned. So why this
repeated hysteria about Marx? And why now?
While Joe McCarthy was holding Senate hearings in 1954 and fueling
fear of a threatening and subversive communist underground that never
really materialized, the Dalai Lama was studying Marx with Mao. Before
actually studying Marx, the Dalai Lama was also taught to fear
“communists” and representations of communism, with little knowledge of
Marx or how China’s communist movement related to Marx’s theories. In
the 1999
TIME interview, the Dalai Lama reflects on these nuanced differences and possibilities of a “genuine communist movement” in Tibet:
I was very young when I first heard the word
communist. The 13th Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had left a testament that I
read. Also, some of the monks who were helping my studies had been in
monasteries with Mongolians. They had talked about the destruction that
had taken place since the communists came to Mongolia. We did not know
anything about Marxist ideology. But we all feared destruction and
thought of communists with terror. It was only when I went to China in
1954–55 that I actually studied Marxist ideology and learned the history
of the Chinese revolution. Once I understood Marxism, my attitude
changed completely. I was so attracted to Marxism, I even expressed my
wish to become a Communist Party member. Tibet at that time was very,
very backward. The ruling class did not seem to care, and there was much
inequality. Marxism talked about an equal and just distribution of
wealth. I was very much in favor of this. Then there was the concept of
self-creation. Marxism talked about self-reliance, without depending on a
creator or a God. That was very attractive. I had tried to do some
things for my people, but I did not have enough time. I still think that
if a genuine communist movement had come to Tibet, there would have
been much benefit to the people.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about Marx, communism, or
capitalism (and sometimes a strong opinion), but whenever I have been
able to have a sustained conversation about Marxism with friends or
students they usually admit how little they know about Marx’s thought,
while falling back on the view that Marx was an advocate of communism
(true), and Marxism – understood as “communism” – represents a
discredited and disgraced economic paradigm (sort of not quite true). In
the unlikely event that a friend or student had actually read Marx, it
was usually Marx and Engels’ very slim thirty-page treatise,
The Communist Manifesto. Buddhists in this late stage of global capital might want to get up to speed on Marx.
Marx’s most important contribution was not a revolutionary labor
movement, but his monumental 18-year study of the capitalist economic
system eventually published in three volumes as
Capital (
Das Kapital).
Anyone interested in working through the text should start young – the
three volumes weigh in at about 2,500 pages. Most people know the ending
anyway: Marx was less than optimistic about capitalism’s long-term
prospects, but how he gets there is why scholars and writers of all
stripes have continually returned to his dense, difficult, logical,
detached analysis of the world’s dominant economic system. What is
perhaps most surprising in the text is the discovery that Marx’s cool
and methodical deconstruction of capitalism is almost entirely void of
moral argumentation or appeals to conscience. And readers hoping to
understand or critique the communist mode that will finally appear when
capitalism reaches its conclusion will also find a remarkable absence of
detailed discussion about our future world beyond capitalism.
There have been few silver linings to the Great Recession and
America’s own “jobless” recovery, but Marx’s return is certainly one of
them. Marxists are stepping out of the academic closet in greater
numbers, and new life is being breathed into his ideas. Capital is a
dish best served cold.
Getting to Know TINA
It was either Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Žižek (nobody seems totally
clear on the point) who first suggested that it’s easier for people to
imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of
capitalism. It was definitely Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of
Britain who insisted that the world needed to realize that THERE IS NO
ALTERNATIVE (TINA) to capitalism.
The current version of Marxist amnesia stems partly from the sudden
demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the remarkable transformation of
the economic culture in China. As the Soviet Union was collapsing,
Margaret Thatcher repeatedly declared that liberal democracy and
capitalism had triumphed over communism and the historical struggle
between the two political systems was over –capitalism, as the last man
standing, was the only viable ideology.
But the declared death of Marxism and communism – and the eternal
triumph of capital – was perhaps just a wee bit premature. Those who
nodded passively to Tina’s declarations (Thatcher was actually referred
to as “Tina” by members of her staff and cabinet – but not to her face!)
were not unlike the young Dalai Lama before his Marxist tutorials in
Beijing. Today the Dalai Lama distinguishes Marx from forms of
communism. There are many ways to critique the failed regimes of the
USSR and China, but the main Marxist critique simply observes that
neither of those historical situations actually fulfilled the conditions
of a capitalist phase in which a bourgeois class established its power
and control. Some identify the USSR as a brutal form of socialism, while
both states seem to be what Marx described as forms of “crude
communism.”
Tina was ahead of herself. The world didn’t need the Great Recession
to see that structural problems in the economy were becoming more
evident, but it didn’t hurt: countries like Spain are currently at about
25 percent unemployment (with youth unemployment at a terrifying 50.5
percent!) Still, the misery generated by the collapse is impressive and
continues to unfold, the most dramatic and desperate response being the
significant increase in suicides in Europe. For those who have read
Marx, the conditions of collapse are a predictable precondition for the
cyclical crises that capitalism creates and depends on. But that matters
little to those who are left behind. As Marx wrote in
Capital (Vol. 1):
In every stockjobbing swindle everyone knows that
some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may
fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower
of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword
of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is
reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under
compulsion from society.
A World Without Work: Nirvana or a Nervous Breakdown?
I recently asked students in one of my classes if any of them had
worked in cubicles and if so, how many hours they’d worked on an average
day. The results weren’t surprising: First, there was a little guilt
and unease about making public confessions – after all, this is America,
the most work-centric country in the world. Then, one bright,
industrious, and cheerfully determined student reported that the first
few days of her job she proudly reported to her supervisor that she had
finished all of her work before lunch and asked for more. After a few
days she realized that her supervisor was far from pleased with her
efficiency and that she was putting her supervisor in an awkward
position, forcing her to find more work when there already wasn’t enough
to go around. The student scaled back and fell in line with her peers,
working about two hours (or 25 percent of an 8-hour business day); the
rest was spent on the internet or reading novels. All was well and
everyone understood the drill.
Something structural seems to be happening around the problem of work
and unemployment that is not necessarily cyclical. Capital is all about
leaner and meaner efficiency, and the one area where profit is reliably
extracted is through “increased productivity” – producing more with
less (labor). So why has corporate capital allowed these inefficiencies
to continue? A completely untestable theory might argue that this
irrational activity might be the subconscious wisdom of “the Market.”
Imagine if 75 percent of cubicle workers were laid off. (I know this is
an exaggerated premise, but I’m trying to make a simple point.) What
would they do? Would they be passively herded into unemployment lines?
Would they wait their turn to be re-schooled in order to be more
efficient workers in a new role?
No, I don’t think so. Regardless of the mechanisms behind the action,
if too many more people become unemployed, underemployed, and
unemployable, some might begin to wonder if they were just unlucky or if
the system is actually flawed, if the promise of capitalism and the
free market is a rigged game. The secret might get out: capitalism
certainly creates jobs, but it also creates unemployment, and in its
late stages capitalism produces the unemployed as a new class.
One of the important points made by Marx was that we have every
reason to believe that capitalism will succeed in one of its most
important goals: lowering labor costs. Capitalism has made extraordinary
gains in technology and has applied new technological advances to the
means of production. When the media reports that there has been a rise
in “productivity” and stock markets cheer the success, one should
understand that it basically means that more work has been done by fewer
workers, that more profit will be extracted by reducing labor costs –
usually by eliminating jobs or driving down labor costs in various ways.
Marx imagined that there would come a time when productivity would
reach a point that our needs could be met with much less labor. One
aspect of the crisis of capital was to imagine how we would live in a
world without work, how would we occupy ourselves when society had
advanced beyond the most pressing economic needs.
John Maynard Keynes (no Marxist himself) made much the same point
about 80 years after Marx. In an essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren,” written in 1930 at the time of the Great Depression,
Keynes tried to imagine the world of his grandchildren in 2030. He drew
the startling conclusion, “assuming no important wars and no important
increase in population,” that the struggle for subsistence would be
solved by economic development, and what had been thought to be
humankind’s permanent problem would disappear.
This wasn’t a necessarily happy event, for he speculated that the
“psychological threat of a world without work” would deprive most people
of their traditional sense of purpose:
I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits
and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless
generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. To
use the language of today – must we not expect a general “nervous
breakdown?”
To ease the transition Keynes recommended that we spread the
remaining work around, so that everybody might have 20 hours work per
week and that way maintain some sense of our traditional purpose as
workers as we adjust to the new world and try to deal with our freedom.
One truth that history right up to the Great Recession has made clear
is how utterly wrong Adam Smith was when he speculated that if the
markets were allowed to operate freely and unregulated, then
capitalism’s “invisible hand” would take care of everything and most
everyone would be happy. As one of my colleagues observed, when there is
a hole in your theory, the tendency is to fill it with “God” or some
other vague and unproven helper, such as Smith’s “invisible hand of the
market.”
Nirvana or nervous breakdown, we’re headed to a world without work,
and the capitalist system doesn’t have a solution to the growing number
of unneeded workers.
Waking Up to Capital: Buddhist Insurrection
What do Marx and the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring and the
indignados in Spain and the suffering surplus poor and the unemployed
and the debt-ridden college graduates living at home and the
consolidation of wealth and the destruction of middle class wealth and
the subprime collapse and bail-out of banks “too big to fail” and the
working conditions at the Fox Con Apple factory in China have to do with
BUDDHISM?
In my classes, at conferences, and in conversation with friends, we
have tried to imagine a world without capitalism. We are all swimming in
the world of capital. Capitalism is not just an economic system, it is
the dominant world culture. Buddhism, then, lives in the culture of
capital too.
History has provided numerous examples of political, economic and
cultural collapse, including many societies that were in denial about
what was happening during the shift. In 1932 the 13th Dalai Lama made a
political prediction that proved fairly accurate:
Fighting and conflict have become part of the very
fabric of human society. If we do not make preparations to defend
ourselves from the overflow of violence, we will have very little chance
of survival.
In particular, we must guard ourselves against the barbaric red
communists who carry terror and destruction with them wherever they go.
They are the worst of the worst. Already they have consumed much of
Mongolia, where they have outlawed the search for the reincarnation of
Jetsun Dampa, the incarnate head of the country. They have robbed and
destroyed monasteries, forcing the monks to join their armies or else
killing them outright. They have destroyed religion wherever they’ve
encountered it …
While the power to do something about the situation is still in our
hands, we should make every effort to safeguard ourselves against this
impending disaster. Use peaceful methods where they are appropriate; but
where they are not appropriate, do not hesitate to resort to more
forceful means. Work diligently now, while there is still time. Then
there will be no regrets.
We are beginning to live between two worlds, in an intermediate
cultural state. And the point should be made that we need to start
imagining a new world, thinking of alternatives to this world, or we
will very likely end up with something “very unpleasant”: An alliance of
police, military and security interests with the 1% in possession of
consolidated wealth. Unholy alliances, like when JPMorgan Chase
contributed $4.6 million to the New York Police Department to
“strengthen security” in New York just months before the Occupy Movement
targeted 1 Chase Plaza as the site for occupation might be
foreshadowing our future. No surprise, then, when NYPD protected and
fenced off Chase Plaza just days before the occupation. For some reason,
NYPD could accept millions from JPMorgan Chase, but not donuts from the
OWS protestors.
Income inequality and the consolidation of wealth is also the
consolidation of power, and the threat of violence against the people
when the people don’t obey. The consolidation of economic power
displayed in capitalism is not necessarily a benign event. The
“invisible hand” of the market hasn’t benefitted all peoples.
Capital,
according to Marx, has replaced organic and traditional relations
between people with “naked self-interest,” with “naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation.” And the people doing the exploiting don’t
seem much better off than the exploited. In the 70s Lobsang Lhalungpa (a
scholar and translator whose father was the State Oracle of Tibet)
stopped mid-conversation while walking with people in San Francisco’s
financial district. He surveyed the busy lunchtime scene, looking up,
then down California Street, and finally observed: “I don’t see any
humans here.” Roaming the streets of the financial districts, it is
sometimes hard to escape the feeling that we live in a land of
well-dressed hungry ghosts.
My favorite image of Buddhism’s modern challenge as a revolutionary
force appears somewhere in Choygam Trungpa’s autobiography when he
recounts an important lesson about the subtle seduction of the force of
materialism that he received from his guru, Khenpo Gangshar. Escaping
Tibet following the Chinese invasion in the 1950s, Trungpa was about to
climb into the back of a truck – his first experience with a motorized
vehicle – when Gangshar grabbed him and warned, “You know how strong
material forces are: Now you are having one of your first direct
encounters with them. Study what you are; don’t lose yourself. If you
simply get excited about the journey, you will never find out what we
are really up against.”
What are we really up against? Cars and trucks are nothing now;
faxing is an antique operation. What is the speed and seductive force of
a Chinese truck bouncing along a dirt road at 15 miles an hour compared
to the internet, smartphones, and the LCD TV? Many teachers and adepts
have exposed some of the cultural overlays of imported Buddhism and
simultaneously unearthed aspects of the essential teachings. But we need
to ask the same questions about Western culture if we wish to “see
beyond cultures.” In many respects it is easier for us to see the
Tibetan or Japanese cultural components of Buddhism than it is to see
the American capitalist realities at work.
No Regrets
Some of the Dalai Lama’s friends asked him not to mention that he is a Marxist.
Why?
Regardless of the answer, there is something threatening and
potentially discomforting about mixing Buddhism with discussions of
money and politics. For some Buddhists the conversation is too profane,
while others think it is impolite: They would prefer not to, borrowing
the phrase from Melville’s Bartleby. They would prefer not to talk about
property, income inequality, structural poverty, permanent unemployment
and the structural weaknesses of capital.
For a long time now Wall Street, politicians, and the media have
preferred not to talk about these issues. But that wall seems to be
breaking down. Republican presidential candidates were especially
anxious during the last primary cycle to label any discussion of wealth
inequality as “class warfare,” thinking people would drop the issue. But
it didn’t work. Even Warren Buffett famously declared: “There’s class
warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making
war, and we’re winning.”
The Dalai Lama’s friends would prefer he didn’t, but year after year
he reminds us of his Marxist leanings and his apprehensions about
capitalism. Buddhists seem to have preferred not to hear him.
Like the Dalai Lama, Occupy’s refusal represents the true spirit of
Melville’s Wall Street scribe, Bartleby: Inexplicably, they refuse to do
what they are told, they refuse to go away, but appear again and again
to the frustration of Wall Street and the mayors and police who
represent the non-rocking boat of the status quo.
Americans and Buddhists might want to think about capitalism. It’s
difficult, to be sure, and gets very emotional for some. It might seem
scary to think about its future, but that’s probably a good reason we
should look at it: Why is it scary to think about capitalism? It is as
if Occupy has taken on the role of society’s collective therapist,
patiently waiting and witnessing the tortured machinations of a society
that tries to finally come to grips with its own state of denial.
The movement of the real, the self-liberation of society towards a
revealing ideal, presents one option for synthesizing Marxism and
Buddhism to realize resistance. The movement of the real appears in the
emerging sangha, a secret movement of eros and unification that can only
appear in the action of the collective. The action of the collective is
to be collected, to come together and deal with whatever arises from
this being together. The potential of the collective has always been
more mysterious and difficult. Liberty and equality still hold a more
central place in France and the United States than fraternity, and the
individualism of western Buddhism is a reflection of that reality.
Buddhist insurgency might look like a shift to a new leaderless sangha,
or a new type of leader and teacher who discovers and understands the
vast unrecognized potential of the collective movement of the real. And
if the movement of the real lives, it must constantly escape the known,
the easily reproduced form:
A general uprising, as we see it, should be nebulous
and elusive; its resistance should never materialize as a concrete body,
otherwise the enemy can direct sufficient force at its core, crush it,
and take many prisoners. When that happens, the people will lose heart
and, believing that the issue has been decided and further efforts would
be useless … On the other hand, there must be some concentration at
certain points: The fog must thicken and form a dark and menacing cloud
out of which a bolt of lightning will may strike at any time.
(Clausewitz, On War).
This is an image of Buddhist insurgency, of the future sangha. The
bolt of en-lightning energy, the sincerity of search for the real, could
appear at any moment and from anyone, not just a sanctioned or
authorized leader. The dark and menacing cloud is only menacing to the
old order, to ignorance and forces of manipulation. The awakening energy
of the lightning bolt is nearly invisible in its decent, but becomes
visible on the uprising as what is called the “return stroke”: Lightning
strikes from the ground up. The thickening collective of the group is
the ground for the movement of the real. The new sangha will be nebulous
and elusive, but it will appear in moments when the movement of the
real is especially concentrated in an individual; at that moment the
group will know the presence of the real.
The Dalai Lama lamented that there had not been enough time for a
transition to genuine communism. Maybe the time has come to ask him what
he thinks genuine communism looks like. Events are happening now that
signal, for some, the end of capitalism as we know it. Several critics
have suggested that we need to start thinking now about what
alternatives we might work toward. We need to remember Khenpo Gangshar’s
warning him: Study what you are, don’t lose yourself. The challenge is
probably greater than we think. We are facing the same challenge today,
even more intensely: We need to study ourselves, and not lose ourselves
in the rebellious excitement of capitalism’s undoing.
Wall Street wasn’t built in a day, and its undoing won’t happen in a
day either. But as the 13th Dalai Lama recommended in his own period of
radical transition, we should make every effort we can “while the power
to do something about the situation is still in our hands”:
Work diligently now, while there is still time. Then there will be no regrets.
Stuart Smithers is chair of the Religion
Department at the University of Puget Sound where he teaches Buddhism
and cultural studies. He also directs the Smoke Farm Summer Institute,
an art and culture collective in the North Cascades. A version of this
article also appeared in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
