In Occupy Buddhism, or Why the Dalai Lama is a Marxist, over at the Tricycle Magazine website, Stuart Smithers contemplates a confluence of Marxism and Buddhism, encouraging engaged Buddhists to consider becoming conversant with Capital and Finance in theory and practice in order to inform their Buddhism and better engage with "the real."
I think it is important to say that Zizek and cultural critics increasingly see differences between East and West dramatically diminished as Asia has been absorbed by global capitalism. Asia might be the geographic origin of Buddhism, but the distinction is of little importance as the world becomes modern, Westernized, and the hegemony of global capitalism has become total, worldwide. So it is not surprising that Zizek would maintain that Buddhism globally is becoming Western Buddhism—and increasingly functions as a fetish that ultimately enables the status quo to maintain its continuing control, dominance, and expansion.
If Buddhism is finally about liberation from ignorance and errant views, both individually and collectively, then we might consider studying not only what we are but also the culture that invisibly influences and dominates us. Quite apart from advocating any alternative to the current system, we may discover sources of suffering and new patterns of desire and ignorance that are embedded in our actions. The study of capital would quickly become the study of suffering and false consciousness. The study of capital and the revelation of the conditions for what we might call an “emergent communism” could supplement our contemplative approaches as the movement of the real.
In The Red and the Black, over at the Jacobin Magazine, Seth Ackerman actually does envision something postcapitalistically transformative: the socialization of finance.
The lesson here is that the transformation to a different system does not have to be catastrophic. Of course, the situation I’m describing would be a revolutionary one — but it wouldn’t have to involve the total collapse of the old society and the Promethean conjuring of something entirely unrecognizable in its place.
At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.
I find myself arguing with aspects of the former article (and many of the commenters thereon), or with some of the arguments of others which Smithers presents and addresses, and sort of hopefully struggling to actually grasp the structure proposed by Ackerman and its implications. Of course, Dear Reader, I claim no expertise in any of the relevant fields: I certainly am no economist, Marxist theorist, Buddhist hagiographer, radical Occupier, rock-star cultural critic, or significant participant in the American Sangha. Both articles remind me of Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology (more), as many things frequently do.
Meanwhile, I'm reading a biography of Nikolai Bukharin.