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How Buddhism & Marxism complement Each Other By Adrian Kreutz

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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.

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No Dignity, No Rights, But Filth Forever: Manual Scavengers in Photographs By Naomi Barton

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New Delhi: “There was a lady in one of the places we visited. She cleaned the latrines in one of the dispensaries in the village. She had been cleaning them for 10 years. She had not got a single paisa in remuneration.”

“Then what was she getting?”

“Nothing. She was had the hope that one day, someone would come and recognise her work, and give her all her money – one big sum – all at once. She said, ‘Kam se kam ye toh hai mere paas, agar ye nahi tha toh mein kya karti? (At least I have this. If I didn’t have this, what would I do?

“She only had hope,” he says. “For every story, we’re desperate. We don’t know where it will go, or what it will do. We just keep doing it.”

Sudharak Olwe, with the NGO WaterAid, went to 16 locations across Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to document the state of manual scavengers today, with a particular focus on women who are still forced to be in the outlawed profession. The photographs taken during this journey were showcased at the exhibition ‘Including the Excluded‘ at the India Habitat Centre till July 4. The Wire spoke to him about the issues he saw over this time.

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The Sephardic Exodus to the Ottoman Empire How Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal transformed the region. BY ELI BARNAVI

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( Shared by Dr. Ehtisham)

Emergence of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans began to emerge as a great political and military power from the early 14th century. Uthman, founder of a dynasty, came from a small Turkish principality, which in time grew into a vast empire. The swords of his successors brought to an end the centuries‑long Greek influence in the south of the Mediterranean basin, replacing it with Muslim domination. Extending deep into the European continent, Ottoman expansion turned Vienna into an outpost of Christendom.

The Greek‑speaking Jewish communities, which the immigrants from Spain and Portugal later called “Romaniots” or “Gregos,” were all under Ottoman rule at the time of the fall of Constantinople — renamed Istanbul — in 1453. The Arabic‑speaking Jews (“Mustarabs” in the idiom of the Iberian refugees), were the other important indigenous group. They lived in “Arabistan”–countries conquered mainly during the reign of Selim I (1512‑1520) and of his son Suleiman the Magnificent (1520‑1566). For all the Jews the conquest was a salvation, as their situation in the 14th and 15th centuries under Byzantine and Mamluk rule had been extremely difficult.

Haven for Jewish Refugees from Spain and Portugal

Then, in the wake of the expulsion from Spain (1492) and the forced conversion in Portugal (1497), tens of thousands of Iberian Jews arrived in Ottoman territories. As all that was required of them was the payment of a poll‑tax and acknowledgement of’ the superiority of Islam, the empire became a haven for these refugees.

From early in the 16th century, the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire became largest in the world. Constantinople and Salonika each had a community of approximately 20,000 people. Immigration from the Iberian peninsula, arriving in several waves throughout the 16th century, also transformed the character of Ottoman Jewry. Far more numerous than the local Jews, the Spaniards and the Portuguese soon submerged the Romaniots, and the indigenous population was assimilated into the culture and community of the new immigrants.

After the conquest of Constantinople, Muhammad II, wishing to aggrandize the city and make it into a capital befitting a great empire, brought into it many people from the provinces. This migration affected the Jewish community and changed the character it had acquired during the Byzantine period.

The economic and religious situation was indeed ameliorated; but many of the older Romaniot congregations disappeared, their memory preserved only in the names of several synagogues in Istanbul. The congregations which replaced them in the capital as well as in Salonika or in Tiriya in western Anatolia, were purely Spanish.

Jewish Prosperity and Cultural Blossoming

Within the communities, the congregations were organized according to the geographic origin of their members. Grouped around synagogues, the Jewish organizations provided all the religious, legal, educational, and social services, thus creating an almost autonomous society. Until the end of the 16th century, these institutions were very flexible, allowing significant mobility within them. The geographic origin of its members soon lost its importance, and the development of the congregation was determined by power struggles between rich individuals or groups with conflicting interests.

Throughout the 16th century, the Jews in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The empire was rapidly expanding, and economic demand rose accordingly. Thus the Jewish population could easily enter into trade with Christian Europe, and into industries such as wool weaving that were only then beginning to evolve. Under the leadership of figures like Don Joseph Nasi and Solomon ibn Yaish, they could take advantage of their worldwide network of family connections and their knowledge of European affairs in order to promote the concerns of the Sublime Porte, as well as to protect their personal interests and those of their community.

This was also a time of cultural blossoming: Hebrew law was enriched by Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh (the “Prepared Table”) which was to become the authoritative code for the entire Jewish nation, while from Safed in Palestine emerged the Lurianic Kabbalah of Ha-Ari, one of the most influential trends in Jewish mysticism. It seems that these communities of exiles, suddenly liberated from the danger of extinction, could give expression to an outburst of cultural forces which had been stifled by centuries of persecution.

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The Story of Humans and Neanderthals in Europe Is Being Rewritten

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Worth reading article by Ed Yong in Atlantis.

In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be Neanderthals, or perhaps another ancient hominin. And since they were entombed together, in a block of stone no bigger than a microwave, “it was always assumed that they were the same [species] and came from the same time period,” says Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

That’s wrong. By thoroughly analyzing both skulls using modern techniques, Harvati and her colleagues have shown that they are very different, in both age and identity.

The one with the face, known as Apidima 2, is a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal—no surprises there. But the other, Apidima 1, was one of us—a 210,000-year-old modern human. And if the team is right about that, the partial skull is the oldest specimen of Homo sapiens outside Africa, handily beating the previous record holder, a jawbone from Israel’s Misliya Cave that’s about 180,000 years old. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Harvati says, “but all the analyses we conducted gave the same result.”

Until now, most researchers have focused on the more complete (but less interesting) of the two skulls. “Apidima 1 has just been ignored,” says Harvati. But its antiquity matters for three reasons. First, it pushes back the known presence of modern humans outside Africa by some 30,000 years. Second, it’s considerably older than all other Homo sapiens fossils from Europe, all of which are 40,000 years old or younger. Third, it’s older than the Neanderthal skull next to it.

Collectively, these traits mess up the standard story of Neanderthal and modern-human evolution. According to that narrative, Neanderthals slowly evolved in Europe, largely isolated from other kinds of hominins. When modern humans expanded out of Africa, their movements into Europe might have been stalled by the presence of the already successful Neanderthals. That explains why Homo sapiens stuck to a more southerly route into Asia, and why they left no European fossils until about 40,000 years ago. “The idea of Europe as ‘fortress Neanderthal’ has been gaining ground,” says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux, but identifying a 210,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull from Europe “really undermines that.”

“It suggests that early Homo sapiens groups got farther than we may have previously thought, occasionally occupying territories that later became that of Neanderthals,” adds Shara Bailey, an anthropologist at NYU. “Findings like this are very important for informing us on the evolution of our species.”

The identity of Apidima 1 could also cast doubt on other archaeological finds from Europe, such as stone tools with no accompanying fossils. Researchers had long assumed that within a certain time window, “any archaeology was all the work of Neanderthals,” says Wragg Sykes. But if modern humans also occupied this “safe range,” which species actually created those artifacts?

These interpretations depend on the dating of the Apidima skulls, which has always been difficult. They were found in an odd place—a small niche near the cave ceiling, separated from any sediments that could have been easily dated. They were also entombed in breccia, a composite rock made from fragments that have been cemented together. It seems that, as ice ages came and went and sea levels rose and fell, parts of the cave’s interior were flooded and eroded, and both skulls were dislodged from their original resting places. They fell into a cavity and got stuck.

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