As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in 1955: ‘Marxism and Buddhism are doing the same thing, but at different levels.’
At least since Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, commented on his Marxist inclination in 1993, it is evident that Buddhism and Marxism have something in common:
Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability … The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.
And Marx himself knew something of Buddhism. In a letter to a friend, written in 1866, he described his own meditation practice:
I have become myself a sort of walking stick, running up and down the whole day, and keeping my mind in that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss.
So do Marxism and Buddhism really complement each other? How?
Central to both philosophies is a schema of ‘diagnosis and treatment’. They share a diagnosis: life is essentially suffering. For Marx, the chief catalyst of suffering is capitalism. Capitalism creates more suffering for the working class, whereas the bourgeoisie and the capitalists are comparatively well-off – but that doesn’t mean that capitalism does not create suffering on the side of the winners too, as I shall soon point out. For the Buddha, the transient and fleeting nature of life makes suffering inescapable. In modern Japanese, the gentle sadness associated with nature’s state of flux is called mono no aware. The Indo-Tibetan Buddhist term for the effects of the impermanence of nature is duḥkha, which might be translated as suffering, but sometimes pain, frustration, sorrow, misery or dissatisfaction is more applicable. Duḥkha is the first of the Four Noble Truths that the original Buddha propounded right after his experience of enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree.
It is not difficult to see what is behind the concept of duḥkha: life is full of suffering – mental and physical – and in many cases there is little we can do about it. We get older and lose our physical and mental esprit, we lose the people we love, and the possessions we dearly hold on to will one day no longer be ours. All this is inevitable since the world is a world of impermanence and transience – anitya is the Buddhist term. We are plagued by anxiety caused by the fear of becoming ill, losing our job, losing a loved one, losing money, losing fame. The reality of suffering is an incontestable, ubiquitous truth.
This gets us to the second of the Noble Truths, which is trṣṇa, often translated as thirst, but perhaps better thought of as attachment. We are attached to our job, our family, our possessions and our selves. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it strengthens human relations and self-care, but it also causes suffering when paired with the impermanence of everything that we are attached to. So the cause of our suffering is not the nature of reality itself, but our attitude towards it. We cling to the erroneous idea that good things will go on forever and bad things will either never happen or, if they do, we will soon return to the good place.
According to Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), there is more to duḥkha than the impermanent nature of reality. There is this socioeconomic system that fosters a mechanism of competition between individuals in the quest for accumulated wealth to which the people that produce it have only limited access or no access at all. Through this process, the majority of people are abused, controlled and mistreated, alienated from their human essence – not to mention the exploitation of nature and its resources. Marx saw that capitalism generates an extra amount of unnecessary duḥkha: it keeps people in poverty (relative to the value of their labour), it keeps people unemployed (to nurture competition and to tie the workers to the capitalist), it plays with the health of people (by forcing them to work under harmful circumstances, having to fear pecuniary injury when medical care is necessary) and, above all, it alienates people from the essence of their human existence (by the division of labour and long working hours). Social inequality and horrendous living conditions lead to crime, violence and hatred – this is no surprise. Crime, poverty, alienation and exploitation cause suffering, but not exclusively on the side of the exploited workers. Capitalists live in constant fear of losing their status and their money, so they have to work hard to protect it – what you own, in the end, owns you.
App-based mindfulness practice has become the newest balm for the stressed-out capitalist
For Buddhists, the source of suffering lies in a conflict between how we take reality to be and how reality really is. To get rid of suffering, then, is to apprehend reality as it really is – this is being in the mode of enlightenment. According to Marx, there is an extra source of suffering in the mode of production. So, for him, the point is to change this awful mode of production to something better. But as with enlightenment, it is hard to see the problem in the first place, and the capitalist system does everything to hide its malevolence behind the welcoming curtains of consumer culture.
From a Buddhist perspective, the capitalist motor is fuelled by humankind’s deepest vice: its trṣṇa. Marx understood that the whole economic system is based on consumption, and marketing agencies know how to push trṣṇa to the realms of utter perversion, thereby warranting a continuum of consumption and labour. The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness.
posted by f. sheikh