Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
The Spiritual Crisis of Capitalism
B5C
Veteran
The Spiritual Crisis of CapitalismYou can find the rest here:
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. "
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/102/spiritual-crisis-of-capitalism.html
0
Comments
does he have to please everyone?
The failure of Marxism is due to a fatal flaw in Marxism and cannot be excused, with apologies to HHDL. A beautifully constructed theory either works or it doesn't in the real world when tested, and that's all there is to it. The flaw, it turns out, is that Marxism neglects to factor in normal human behavior. Someone has to set and enforce the rules, meaning someone has to hold the reins of power. Given Buddha said everyone, everywhere is infected with Selfish Desires, then of course Marxism always evolves to a ruling class with more and more wealth and privilage.
And Marxism itself becomes the religion it preaches against.
I'd love to hear the HHDL discuss these points.
“Abolishing the division of labour means, according to Marx, abolishing the subsumption of man under the conditions of his work. Hence it means the emancipation of man from the narrowness and partiality imposed upon him by the condition of alienated labour”(The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx By Shlomo Avineri, 231).
Sounds Buddhist to me. Incidentally, Marx heaped praise on the middle class as the most revolutionary formation that history has recorded.
Does capitalism work in the real world?
It doesn't work in the real world likely because of human nature - I favour each of us looking at our nature and taking responsibility - if human nature is to blame then each and every one of us shares that blame (jointly and severally).
The failings of Marxism are also the failings of capitalism (i.e. progressive taxation in capitalism will fail for the same human reason that Marxism overall fails for) - surely on that basis it is preferable to consider a system that has a flaw in application (not inherent in the subject of the practice) (i.e. Marxism) rather than a flawed system that fits to the flawed human nature (i.e. Capitalism)! The former allows an opportunity for society to grow in a different direction whereas the latter maintains the staus quo with some pressure release vents.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357
I like to think sometimes that capitalism is the most free and open system and it adapts itself to how people behave - namely if greed is prevalent, we will have inequality and depletion of resources and all the other problems we're seeing now, but the less greedy and more generous and selfless people become, it may as well adapt itself to that. Maybe it would resemble some form of socialism then? One thing's for sure, imposing socialism on the economy and society hasn't worked.
The current system has many flaws though. There is no economic value placed on many environmental resources and many other things or activities that we value.
There is a spiritual crises in capitalism in that its values are out of whack or maybe non existent.
As far as not working in the real world and Buddhism. The difference I see is that Buddhism is an individual activity whereas capitalism is a much broader social system.
HHDL seems to have missed the fact that religious institutions in Tibet was indeed aligned with the monied ruling classes. To a great extent, they were one and the same.
Lots of things look nice and moral and practical in theory. When put into practice, human elements come into play. Greed, lust for power, zealotry.
Aside from any major, monied institutions, though, there are/were countless rather modest monasteries and nunneries which could not really be accused of exuberant spending habits.
I do agree that human elements come into play; certainly humans have greed, but they also have a desire to see their children educated, fed, respected, and living a relatively less harsh life than, say, herding and so forth. There doesn't seem to be a tradition of deep-seated resentment against the monasteries and nunneries in Tibet; quite the contrary, so it's hard for me to accept that it was somehow a begrudging system. It seems by nearly all counts to be/have been quite highly regarded.
Here are several historians' observations:
There is also a broader definition, as described by Marc Bloch (1939), that includes not only warrior nobility but all three estates of the realm: the nobility, the clerics, and the peasantry bonds of manorialism; this is sometimes referred to as a "feudal society". Since 1974 with the publication of Elizabeth A. R. Brown's The Tyranny of a Construct, and Susan Reynolds' Fiefs and Vassals (1994), there has been ongoing inconclusive discussion among medieval historians as to whether feudalism is a useful construct for understanding medieval society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
I hear it suggested that Tibet was a feudalist society, but I'm never quite sure what that is to mean in contrast to the societies of Tibet's neighbors (Turkestan, China, India etc.)
My grandparents lived and worked in the border regions of China, Tibet and Turkestan; the difference in their daily experience generally had to do with which language to use and which style of roof the patient's house had, lol. Beyond that, a toothache is a toothache.
Muslim warlords such as Ma Bufang did exact travel tolls and and so forth in that region (west of Lanzhou, China and a small way into Tibet), but that was pretty common practice in many border regions of Asia. Once past the border area, power was generally in the hands of various village heads--much like Native American society. A village or community exerted its power only so far, and then you were either between villages or into the next community.
In wild, often harsh climates and terrains such as Tibet, there is often a sort of hospitality code, not unlike that in Afghanistan and desert regions of the world. It's not that travelers faced no danger, but most people were quite supportive of the fact that it could be difficult to survive on the road, and would help out a passing stranger, take them in overnight, etc.
I guess that's why talk of "feudalism" sometimes perplexes me, because most of the stories I have from my grandparents are tales of great generosity (and interesting characters, to be sure).
http://historymedren.about.com/od/feudalism/a/feudalism.htm