Couldn’t it be said about all of the existing socioeconomic systems to the extent it is all about inter-temporal allocation of resources made up of the four elements?
What I like about the fourfold nutrition model Buddha tells us about in SN12.11 is that it adds 3 more dimensions for evaluating how well or not a political economic system or model is performing:
Are people given enough in terms of solid food, whether coarse or fine?
Are people likely to experience the sort of pleasant and neutral contact it needs to be well and protected from unpleasant contact?
Are people incentivized and motivated to dwell and live out of positive mental intentions?
Are people likely and encouraged, or at least not blocked from developing positively their aggregate of consciousness?
Marx was a materialist through and through. Dialectical materialism itself is Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s dialectical idealism. Marx’s entire worldview is then based on materialism being the true nature of reality. As the Buddha taught, from wrong view comes wrong action etc. To give one example it was Marxism’s wrong view of religion that lead to the inhumane persecution of the religious in Enver Hoxha’s Albania:
The campaign against religion peaked in the 1960s. Beginning in 1967 the Albanian authorities began a violent campaign to try to eliminate religious life in Albania. Despite complaints, even by Party of Labour of Albania members, all churches, mosques, tekkes, monasteries, and other religious institutions were either closed down or converted into warehouses, gymnasiums, or workshops by the end of 1967.[63] By May 1967, religious institutions had been forced to relinquish all 2,169 churches, mosques, cloisters, and shrines in Albania, many of which were converted into cultural centres for young people. As the literary monthly Nendori reported the event, the youth had thus “created the first atheist nation in the world.”[62]
The clergy were publicly vilified and humiliated, their vestments taken and desecrated. More than 200 clerics of various faiths were imprisoned, others were forced to seek work in either industry or agriculture, and some were executed or starved to death. The monastery of the Franciscan order in Shkodër was set on fire, which resulted in the death of four elderly monks … Article 37 of the Albanian Constitution of 1976 stipulated, “The State recognises no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in the people”,[66] and the penal code of 1977 imposed prison sentences of three to ten years for “religious propaganda and the production, distribution, or storage of religious literature.”[62
Couldn’t it be said about all of the existing socioeconomic systems to the extent it is all about inter-temporal allocation of resources made up of the four elements?
Economic systems involving the material and worldly life does not mean one has to adopt materialism at the same time to reach political views on economics and society at large.
I would say if one of your chief concerns is ensuring that people have enough food to eat, have a pleasant environment and are able to freely develop themselves then Marxist Communism is not the ideology to follow. Marxism failed again and again whenever it got its chance and it was the every day worker who ultimately paid the price.
Any type of economic thinking will involve thinking about the material. That is different to having an ideology where there is only the material, i.e Marxism.
Xi Jinping proposed the Chinese Dream as a slogan when he visited to the National Museum of China. Xi said “young people should dare to dream, work assiduously to fulfill the dreams, and contribute to the revitalization of the nation”.
Marx and Engels had similar concepts in their works. They proposed a new division of labor: mental labor and material labor. Mental labors control the means of mental production, and thus appear as the thinkers of the class and make the formation of the illusions.
The material labors, however, are active members of the material production. Marx and Engels argued that since the material labors are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves, they are passive and receptive to the mental labors’ illusions.[12]
The Chinese Dream draws knowledge from Marx and Engels’ ideas about “illusions”. Xi Jinping selected “dream” instead of “illusion” to reflect his ideas that Chinese people, especially the young generation, should dream. Xi did not say that the Chinese dream is made up by the mental labors; instead he argued that the Chinese dream should be made up by the young generation.
By saying that the dream is not the ruling class’s illusion but the young generations’ own dream, Xi continued to recommend the young people to work hard and achieve the dream.
Source: Chinese Marxist philosophy - Wikipedia.
China has lifted millions of its people out of poverty in massive numbers after Deng’s capitalist reforms. China is not a communist state. Its economic base is capitalist. I mean, they are so communist they have more private healthcare than my country does (UK). The Communist Party of China is communist in name only. All they really care about is staying in power, like all Communists do when they manage to achieve it. Deng effectively said so himself:
“I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice .”
Not it is not.
State ownership is widespread and a key reason for their successes in terms of low rates of poverty, hunger and physical discomfort has to do exactly with the sort of wealth redistribution and management allowed for that heavy state-ownership of capital, be it physical or financial (the financial system is effectively a monopoly of the state).
I think you missed the lesson on socialist market economy …
It has a capitalist market economy where corporations employ workers to made commodities to sell at a profit on the market, part of which they then use to re-invest in the business. Only the commanding heights of the economy are state owned monopolies. If Marx were alive he would criticise China for having money, commodities and exchange for profit since these are the capitalist base which then informs the whole superstructure. This is pretty standard Marxist dialectical analysis as per Das Kapital Vol 1. and other works.
This is like saying Norway is socialist. It isn’t, since the economic base is a capitalist market economy.
I think you missed the lesson on socialist market economy …
Marx essentially criticised this idea in his attacks on Proudhon and Mutualism. If I recall it was mostly in “The Poverty of Philosophy” and some other writings.
There is one sense in that the CPC remained true to its communist roots. The persecution of the religious and the totalitarianism, as well as the rampant corruption that comes with authoritarian systems.
That is an invention of the CPC. Based on the actual works of Marx I see no basis for saying he would support it. As I said, in Das Kapital and other works he states that unless the base of society is changed from exchange for profit to exchange for use then you do not have a socialist society. Its a capitalist one.
A very good and welcome one, not only for the Chinese people for the rest of the world given that without China the world economy would be in much worse shape nowadays!
But the whole process is dialectical and allows for thesis > antithesis > synthesis transformation to take place. This is a fundamental aspect of left-wing thinking in many ways, it is always open for change.
It is usually right-wing thinking which is not so much open for new ways of thinking or pursuing fairness in conditions and improvement of circumstances of the individuals in a society…
Some right wing thinkers even propose a return to gold standard I have heard. It is like they really want to go back to a world in which power and wealth comes from hoarding shining things!
Open for change? Communists are some of the most dogmatic people I have ever met. As I said, I used to be one so I would know. Marx’s theories have been shown to be a total failure time and time again, but what is left of his followers today still uphold the theory through adding ad hoc hypothesis on top to excuse why it just does not work. Popper made an excellent point of this in his ideas on falsificationism.
To give one example, Marx predicted that the worker uprising would start in the heavily industrialised societies at the time. In particular Germany and the UK. The theory, based largely on the outdated Labour Theory of Value, was that capitalism in its relentless pursuit of profit would lead to worsening pay and living conditions for the proletariat. So much so that they would rise up. In reality the conditions of workers began to improve and the socialist revolutions took place in pre-industrial societies without a large proletarian class. Revolutions were lead by a small group of people who grabbed all the power and ruled in the name of the workers. Centralised post-capitalist planning was then attempted and was shown to be a grossly inefficient way of organising the economy. Marxism is a failure of an ideology that has left millions dead in its wake.
Fair enough. Marx is not the whole of story and as we have seen so far the CPC proved open for change and found a way to move beyond it and is doing a great job. I am not aware of crime or poverty being an issue in China, while at the same time we know it is a widespread problem wherever right-wing thinking shapes up policy and politics…
There is crime and poverty in China, as well as rampant corruption. China also has an appaling human rights record. Right now its imprisoning Muslims in concentration camps:
Owen Jones seems determined to get most things dead wrong it seems. The difference between capitalism and communism is that the deaths of communism are the direct result of Marxist policy and persecution, since Marxist socialism is inherently totalitarian and grossly inefficient. With capitalism it is fully compatible with a free and tolerant society and its amenable to regulation and some measure of welfare.
There is an entire movement of self-described Buddhists who seem to walk backwards from predetermined conclusions, think that the Dhamma logically leads to political conservatism as it exists in USA today and end up defending the current system against any meaningful change for the better. I would urge them to give up on political partisanship, understand where real power lies in society today (spoiler: not in the political realm), how it seeks to manipulate society to its own advantage and beware of the refined propaganda machines the powerful use as their weapon of choice.
