Communism is the movement towards a classless, borderless, moneyless society.
Marxist communism is not the only type of communism. The Jesus movement has them beat by over 1700 years. Unlike the Marxists, the followers of Jesus did not insist on the primacy of class struggle but rather prefigured “the Kingdom of God” “on earth as it is in heaven” by building community and mutual aid networks. Acts 4:32-35 says:
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostle’s feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
With the Great Commission at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus charges his followers to “make disciples of all nations”, which can only mean creating a borderless society now (and forevermore). The passage we looked at from Acts shows that efforts were made to eliminate the importance of class and money within the Jesus movement. As for eliminating money in the world at large, consider the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
So goes the version in Matthew. Luke’s version is similar but replaces “debts” with “sins” in at least one location. “Trespasses” originates from an English mistranslation. And as David Graeber convincingly demonstrates, money is debt. A world with no debt is a world without money.
If that’s too indirect, consider the words of the prophet Isaiah:
Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
So “Christian communism” is far from an oxymoron. But what about everyone’s other favourite religion-founding dude from ~2000 years ago? What about Gautama Buddha?
Jesus lived in Roman-occupied Palestine. His native Galilee was being bled dry by imperial taxation. Peasants were going into debt and being forced off their lands, as the author of the Epistle of James was well aware of. In fact, the gospels were all only written after the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 CE and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in reprisal in 70 CE.
The political situation was not quite as dire in Buddha’s Bharat. According to the CPI(Maoist), the Buddha’s lifetime coincides with the transition from the Varnashrama Dharma Period (1500-500 BCE) to the “rise of the proto-feudal state” (500 BCE to the 400s CE). During this period the four varnas came into existence, with the Brahmins and Kshatriyas being the oppressor classes, the Vaisyas “an exploited peasantry”, and the Shudras captive slaves.
The Vaishya’s fortunes would change a bit for the better with the rise of the state.
The class of wealthy traders, merchants, and landlords from amongst the Vaisya varna was included in the [Mauryan] nobility and the bureaucracy called the ‘Paura-Janapada’. It was from this period onwards that Brahmins leaving aside their traditional profession of performing yang’s [sacrifices] were accommodated in the bureaucracy and came into powerful positions as advisors and ministers to the king. This new type of state was based on Vaisya taxation and Shudra labor.
This explains the enduring popularity of Buddhism amongst merchants in Southeast Asia.
At this point I must turn and address the audience. I must confess that my preferred audience also reads Marx and the Marxist tradition.
Marxism is an amoral method of analysis. Marxism is a ruthless critique of (almost) all that exists. This is to its great credit.
But Marxism is carried by human beings in human bodies. Humans should not be amoral. Humans should not always be ruthless. There is a saying— people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. And it is largely true.
If all Marxists are materialists, then I am not a Marxist. I believe in at least one non-material thing— love. Love is not material, but I hope we can agree that love is still real.
Perhaps you can’t be both Marxist and Buddhist. Then let this be an anchor for a movement of Marxian Buddhism.
Such a movement is necessary, perhaps more for Buddhism than Marxism. Too many people are misusing Buddhism. They are greedily using it as a personal crutch instead of applying it as a social salve. But Buddhism is fundamentally social. We’re NOT supposed to follow the Buddha by wandering the wilderness and forsaking human society. The Three Jewels of Buddhism are buddha (the teacher), dharma (the truth), and sangha (the community). Thich Nhat Hanh also reminds us that Right Speech, a fold of the Eightfold path, is unavoidably social.
Marxian Buddhism, with its insights into how the “capitalist mode of production” works, could intervene quite powerfully on another social fold of the Eightfold Path— Right Livelihood. Belonging to the proletariat usually suffices to satisfy Right Livelihood, but what about those who work at weapons factories? What about police? What about writing software for companies that suck people’s attention for ad revenue? What about founding a nonprofit that reduces harm but gets funding from the state because it clouds the proletariat’s understanding of the contradictions inherent to use-value distribution through the commodity form? These are critical questions for any Buddhist truly seeking liberation; from personal experience I can tell you that deviating from the Buddha’s path also means deviating from the Buddha’s peace, protection, and goal.
Love is not material but it is real. And the Buddha teaches us how to love logically.
Perhaps this teaching should be thought of as “four-line struggle”. Or we can think of it as helping us build a carbon-like, chrystalline lattice where each human only needs to make 4 bonds to be integral to a given structure. It’s a refuge, a base, a modular fortress from which we can attack the enemy.
This is most easily seen in the Left direction, the direction of compassion, of karuna.
Compassion has a far enemy, cruelty. Cruelty is the opposite of compassion.
A significant portion of the USian left now believes in defunding and abolishing police and prisons. And they are correct to raise this revolutionary demand. Given the cultural context of US history, these institutions are nothing but enforcers of cruelty upon target populations–– against the internal colonies of New Africans, Native nations, and other ghettoized peoples, who must be suppressed at all costs; against unhoused populations, excluded from work by a system that does not guarantee full employment and has structural motivations to maintain a “reserve army of labor”, excluded from housing by a system that produces for profit instead of for need.
Marxism is not very good at absorbing this movement because its theory of the state is too crude and/or polluted by malpractice. There’s Lenin’s “State and Revolution”, which echoes Engels’ “Origins of The Family, Private Property, and the State” in the thesis that the state is nothing more than an instrument of class oppression. If you take a flexible view of class, this is not wrong. If we determine what classes exist in a given society from observations of how the state reacts to their concerns, it is an incisive analytical tool. The problem is that American police departments are not primarily or even secondarily designed to suppress proletarian revolt, but rather to suppress “racial” or “ethnic” minorities, who many Marxists fervently deny constitute a class of their own, and to harass the so-called “lumpenproletariat”, a class which Marx refers to in the 1848 Manifesto as “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society”––– not a class we are supposed to be in full solidarity with, to say the least. Police in the US don’t really suppress strikes (is this true?). Marxists who reason “Amerika is an advanced capitalist nation, the primary contradiction must be between the bourgeois and proletariat, so the state must enforce the Dictatorship of the Bourgeois against the proletariat” reveal that their first principles are incorrect.
Marxism-Leninism, which at least acknowledges that oppressed and oppressor nations exist, with Tsarist Russia being a “prison-house of nations” and the SSR system granting real autonomy to some of these nations after the October Revolution, can be applied correctly to account for the role of Amerikan police in enforcing “racism”, a material force and not a boogeyman invoked only to “divide the working class”. 1917’s “State and Revolution”, when taken together with the democratic centralist method of combining “legal and underground work” outlined in Lenin’s 1903’s “What Is To Be Done?”, offers a concrete strategy for “flipping the state around’’ from protecting the oppressor to protecting the oppressed. But Lenin’s pious claim that, as socialism is the last stage in human history, because the class contradiction between bourgeois and proletariat is the last class contradiction, the state will afterwards “wither away”, must be interpreted in the subsequent context of the Russian Revolution and the USSR, the Chinese Revolution and the PRC, as either naive or an opportunist phrase to obtain the support of the anarchists (who were critical allies in overthrowing the provisional government. See also April Thesis #5: “Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy”).
This question of abolishing police and prisons threatens to splinter and isolate the movement. On the one hand, we must present an argument to the masses, especially the “intermediate” strata, overcoming their fears and winning them to a revolutionary line; on the other hand we must maintain ideological cohesion within the movement despite the many schisms which scar the socialist movement, starting with the split in the First International.
We must agree that compassion is better than cruelty. We must agree that the current state enforces cruelty. Even supporters of the state typically concede this, it’s just that they believe this cruelty to be directed at an “other” which deserves it. This agreement is enough to ground the seemingly radical demand for “abolition” in Buddhist thought— safely distanced from anarchism, Marxism, and anyone’s personal feelings.
Pity is the near enemy of compassion. Liberals confuse pity for compassion. Compassion destroys boundaries between people, while pity reinforces them.
Compassion is better than cruelty. Compassion is better than pity. And not just for the world–– cruelty and pity separate you from the world and cause you to suffer. The Jesus movement also heavily emphasises compassion, and it and the Marx movement both require self-sacrifice, but following the Buddha is entirely within people’s logical self-interest.
There are three other directions.
There is upekkha, or equanimity. I was first introduced to these four by an article on lionsroar.com titled “How Equanimity Powers Love” that I still link to when someone asks how to deal with climate despair. The near and far enemies are fuzzier for upekkha than for karuna, but we might say that “despair” is a far enemy and “indifference” is a near enemy. The world is in dire need of climate upekkha, which will likely require radical climate strategy and tactics.
Because of the Buddha’s particular path towards enlightenment (abandoning human society for the wilderness), many people think Buddhism is mainly about upekkha. Critics accuse Buddhists of detachment and apathy; many Buddhists themselves emphasise upekkha to the detriment of the other three immeasurables. This delusion must be destroyed.
Mudita, which has no English translations besides the invented word “compersion”, is in some sense the opposite face from karuna/compassion. Practicing compassion implies that in some sense you are better off than the one currently suffering and in need of compassion; whereas practicing mudita implies that some other person really is doing better than you to the extent that a “normal person” might feel jealousy (its far enemy).
Propertarian reactionaries often accuse leftists of being jealous of the rich. This is largely untrue. Marxism is constructed in such a way as to not require either mudita or karuna (though upekkha is crucial).
It’s always telling that the reactionaries focus on material wealth. The left has emphasised mudita in practice–– against traditional sexual norms. Marriage in traditional bourgeois society is built around property. The logic of ownership and control, which historically goes hand in hand with male supremacy, means that men tend to see themselves as owning their wives. From the Communist Manifesto (1848):
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common…
Even “progressives” and “reformers” in bourgeois society usually only graduate from this to “mutual ownership”, where wives own their husbands as much as husbands own their wives. But hell, even Paul(1 Corinthians 7:5) gets that far! Marxist communists go further and advocate for the abolition of the bourgeois family. The earliest theoretical grounding for this is Engels’ Euro-supremacist book “The Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State”, which, despite its flaws both in facts and feelings, was remarkably progressive on sex and gender. Engels asks:
What then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean? It means the absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force. We have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down. If there is one thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late.
Certainly jealousy is always bad. Genuine mudita in the realm of sexual relationships is to be welcomed, though we must be wary of its “near enemy”. This does not mean that everybody should be polyamorous.
The fourth face of love is metta, or maitri. I think of it as “the benevolent wish”, as expressed in the Buddhist mantra “may all beings be free from suffering”. Its far enemy is resentment.
Karuna, upekkha, mudita, maitri. In a peaceful world, these are the only four emotions you would need to feel.
To be a Buddhist means to teach the Four Noble Truths, to walk the Eightfold Path, to be destroying the three mind poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, and to accept the Three Jewels of buddha, dharma, and sangha.
Buddhism is a form of Bhakti yoga. The word “bhakti” comes from the Sanskrit “bhaj”, which means devotion. In the Hindu context, this meant devotion to a deity–– Hanuman, Ganesh, Krishna, Durga, etc. To be Buddhist is to be devoted to the Buddha.
But I say you can be Buddha-conscious without being devoted to the Buddha. Con means “with”, like “connected”, “scion” means knowledge, like “science”, so Buddha-consciousness means knowing with the Buddha. Anyone who knows about the four immeasurable–– karuna, upekkha, mudita, and maitri— is Buddha-conscious.
Buddha-consciousness clearly moves us towards a borderless society. It breaks down the borders between humans. It opposes cruelty in all its forms, and therefore also most, if not all, states which enforce borders.
Practicing Buddhism and spreading Buddha-consciousness sparks mini-revolutions, grounded in love, in the communities we find ourselves moving through. People get out of their heads and grow into better versions of themselves. I see it happen everywhere I’m welcome. Unlike with Jesus, there’s no need to believe in anything like the resurrection of the material body, or even anything supernatural at all. All that is required to avail yourself of the Buddha’s peace is to devote your feelings to him and his movement, so that they can be transformed into peaceful love. Small-c communism starts from community. Small-c communism works everywhere it is sincerely tried. And every Buddhist should be a small-c communist.
Big C Communists–– anarchocommunists, Marxists, Leninists, Maoists–– should avail themselves of Buddha-consciousness. Communists should personally avail themselves of the four immeasurables in line struggles against other Communists. Peace among revolutionaries is necessary so that our disagreements reflect real contradictions among the people rather than phoney struggles between personalities. Buddha-consciousness could be the basis of a much-needed anti-schismatic, anti-dogmatic movement within Communism.
But Buddha-consciousness is even more important when “mass line organizing”. Because the highest goal of most “good people” is a peaceful life, and us Communists are associated with violence. This can separate us from the people if we don’t address it. Our goal should be to break the solidarity the “intermediate” strata of the masses we are in contact with–– often family and old friends–– have with the enemy state, which inflicts structural violence upon the world and will never be anything but an impediment to world peace, and to put them in conversation with the four immeasurables. Those not practicing this peaceful love in their own lives should not lecture others about non-violence.
But as Communists, our goal is not peace, it is freedom and liberation. We refuse to accept peace without justice. We are not non-violent.
To truly put Buddhism and Big-C Communism in conversation requires us to dive deeper, to subject both the current and historical Buddha-movement to “ruthless criticism”.