Rev Left Radio - Che's "New Socialist Man" and the Bodhisattva Revolutionary

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Breht reads the speech he recently gave in-person at the 2026 Socialism Conference in Chicago. In the Speech, he analyzes the role of human subjectivity in revolutionary politics, explicates Che's argument in his famous essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba", articulates his notion of the Bodhisattva Revolutionary archetype, and argues in favor of Buddhist meditation as a potent and time-tested tool for the deliberate cultivation of a revolutionary and liberatory subjectivity.   ---------------------------------------------------------- Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, I am going to simply read the speech that I read at the Socialism Conference, 26, in Chicago, Illinois. I don't want to have too much prelude here. I just want to say that, you know, despite the controversy that sort of exploded afterwards, and you can go listen to my interview. I just did on the D program where we talked a little bit about the actual content of that controversy. But despite that, I had personally had a wonderful time. I met a lot of great. people, had a lot of wonderful conversations, had a really cool listener meet up with Rev Left patrons after the speech. We went to a bar, and then we came back to the hotel bar. And there was, you know, over the whole thing, maybe three dozen people that showed up to that after meeting,

maybe more because people were coming in and leaving. And I just wanted to say, like, if you showed up to that, if you showed up to my speech and supported it, if you met up afterwards and, you know, shook hands and hung out and had some beers with me, I really appreciate it. I love meeting the people who listen to the show. And I was really just blown away and proud because, you know, listeners are a reflection. Your audience is a reflection of the values of the show. And, you know, when you meet people who listen to you and give a fuck about what you put out and they're all like thoughtful, loving, super intelligent, fun people, it's a really fucking good sign. And it means that I must be doing something right here. So I deeply appreciate it.

The turnout was absolutely great. It exceeded my expectations. We had people standing up in the back, people sitting in the aisles, and then afterwards a long line all the way to the door of people that wanted to come up and meet me and give their two cents, talk about how long they'd listened to the show. Some people going all the way back to the beginning of Rev Left Radio in 2017. And just incredibly powerful, incredibly moving, so humble, so grateful. Afterwards, you know, me and my wife we're sitting up in our hotel room. We're just like, we're blown away by, uh, by not just the turnout, but the sort of people we met, the sort of conversations we had. Um, and, you know, I just am so grateful to, to all of you. Um, and this speech is really, it doesn't come out of the book

by any means, but it's, it's an argument within the book that I'm putting out and we just finished editing a couple days ago. So the book, A Letter to Young Revolutionaries through Iskra Publishing is coming out soon. The editing process is done. The design for the book cover is done. We're getting some copies to give out to a few people to write blurbs, the dedication, the acknowledgments. Everything is done and ready to go. It just needs to be structured, printed, and put out. And so please keep your eye out for that. And if any of the arguments or the content of this speech is interesting to you, just know that the book goes much deeper into all of this. This is a minor argument or perhaps just a smaller argument within a much broader range of

the book covers. So, you know, people want to hear more of this. There's more to the book. Obviously, there's Aristotelian virtue ethics. There's existentialism. There's, you know, explorations of death and human meaning and how to spend our lives and so much more in the book itself. But if this at all wet your palate. If this is at all is interesting, the speech I'm about to give, then I think you would absolutely be interested in the book. And for what it's worth, when I wrote that book, and in my future book I'm going to write, I want them to be readable and accessible. I'm not trying to put out a 400-page tone, which will just radically decrease the number of people who can read it. I want to keep my books tight and clean, hopefully crisp, while also being, you know,

hopefully enjoyable to read if you enjoy my writing voice. It hopefully will be enjoyable to read, but also something that you don't have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks trudging through. But 150 pages, roughly is what I'm aiming for when I write books because I want people to really be able to get it, be accessible, read it over a relatively short period of time, sit with the arguments, etc. I don't want to give people too much, especially in this era of distraction and everybody's being pulled in every different direction and lower attention spans. I don't want to play into that by any means, but I do want to put. something out that I think people will actually read. And the longer a book gets, the less people will actually read it. That's just a raw fact of statistics. And so I'm just really excited to put it out. The cover design for the book is absolutely beautiful. The editing process was a delight.

And so I'm really excited for people to finally get that. So stay tuned. I'll let you know all the details as they come out. You can follow Iskra, Iskra books on social media. And they always, you know, we'll put their stuff out as well. So that could be another layer. by which you're reminded when the book comes out. And obviously, I'll make an episode when it does announcing such. In the meantime, I went over to the D program and went on their show as a guest and talked about the book. So if you want more details about the book and some of my core arguments and more of the themes that I explore in the book, an episode with the D program is already out with me talking about it, kind of getting people who might otherwise,

you know, getting people interested perhaps in the book when it comes out, which should be in a few more. months, hopefully. So keep everybody updated on that. With all that said, let's go ahead and get into the speech itself. I wrote the speech, so I wanted to get out to just more than the, you know, people that were in that conference room. So I hope people enjoy it. Let's get into it. Everyone here in this room today has one thing in common. At the deepest levels of our being, from the bottom of our hearts, we sincerely want to create a better world, a more just world, a more equitable world. On some level we want this for ourselves, sure, but more than that, we want it for others, for everyone. We want politics and economics to work in the interest of

regular people, to increase the quality of their lives, to help them flourish, and to catch them when they fall, not only at home, but around the entire planet. When we see Palestinian parents pulling the dead bodies of their children from the rubble where their home used to be, weeping madly, driven beyond the brink of sanity by their suffering, our hearts break in ways that we cannot articulate, and we weep with them. When we see ice agents violently tear, crying, terrified children from the desperate arms of their screaming mothers

or watch as a police officer empties his magazine into the chest of an innocent man in front of his family or stare at the bloodstained backpacks of little Iranian girls who were blown apart alongside their teachers by American bombs, bombs funded by us, we are overwhelmed with a dizzying and gut-wrenching combination of despair, hate, rage, and helplessness. We, as Che Guevara famously quipped, tremble with indignation. We vow to do what we can to stop this madness, to stop this criminality. Especially here in the United States, it seems that this capitalist system,

born out of the incomprehensible horrors of genocide and slavery, and maintained by ruthless exploitation and imperial slaughter, rewards with power and wealth the very worst amongst us. This, of course, is not a coincidence or an aberration. It is the totally foreseeable and expected outcome of this particular historical process. It is the cold, amoral logic of capitalism, imperialism, bearing its dark and rotten fruit. All of us here today arrived through different paths. At some point in our lives, for one reason or another, we began to see under the veneer of Western life.

We began to deconstruct our ideological conditioning. We developed an understanding and critique of the systems that dominate us, and through concerted study in the pursuit of truth and justice, we all came to the realization that the structure of this system itself was the problem, and that the struggle for socialism was and is the only approach. to the brutalities of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and fascism that actually attempts to address them at their root. Awakened by experience, moved by compassion, inspired by resistance, educated by study, each of us threw our lot in with this beautiful, deep, and complex tradition.

A tradition animated by the profoundly human refusal to subordinate ourselves, or stand idly by as others are subordinated to any form of oppression or exploitation. In short, we know in the marrow of our bones that a better world is possible. Not only is it possible, but increasingly, we are aware of its absolute and existential necessity. We often talk of late capitalism, precisely because we recognize on some level that this way of organizing human life is fundamentally unsustainable. It is wholly incapable of producing a desirable future for our species, it is likely incapable of producing a future at all. In the face of its own crises and contradictions, and in response to any organized challenge to it,

it morphs seamlessly into a fascist death cult. Vladimir Lenin famously said that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and he was correct, but it's also worth remembering that fascism is capitalism in decay. and today, all around the world, in a million ways big and small, we can smell the rot. If, as Rosa Luxembourg once proclaimed, our only real choice is socialism or barbarism, as indeed I believe it is, then we here today join the growing chorus of human beings all over the planet who say confidently that our choice is socialism. And we are more than willing to fight for it, to sacrifice for it, to dedicate our lives to the struggle for it. it. This is what history demands of us. This is what future generations demand of us, and I would

argue this is what Mother Nature herself demands of us. Socialism is, as most of us know quite well, a form of collective struggle aiming toward the development of a new mode of production and set of social relations. It is political, economic, and social in its dimensions. It is the radical extension of genuine democracy into the economy. It is the transfer of political power out of the hands of the oligarchic elites and into the hands of the global working class. And it is the attempt to finally begin after millennia of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism to organize civilization around widespread human freedom and flourishing on our shared path toward the transcendence of class society altogether. Albert Einstein called class society,

in all of its iterations, quote, the predatory phase of human history. And Karl Marx himself described it as, quote, the prehistory of human society. The implication is that humanity can mature and evolve to the point where we liberate ourselves from the rusted cage of class stratifications. One day in our species' future, if we survive the interregnum, humanity will no longer be split between rich and poor, slave and master, colonization. Nizer and colonized, boss, and worker. Rather, we will cooperate together consciously as equal and free human beings to produce and reproduce the means of our collective existence.

We will look back on human history up through the 21st century as a regrettable and tragic, though perhaps inevitable, process of becoming, of growing up as an intelligent species and civilization in the cosmos. If you believe in this possibility, and if you desire, to see it come to pass, then you are a communist. Socialism then is the transition out of capitalism and toward communism. It is an outward social, economic, and political transformation. In short, it is objective. But all of this raises an important set of questions, questions that are often overlooked or underappreciated by socialists themselves, which I will spend the rest of this speech wrestling with and trying to offer an answer too.

If socialism is, as I just said, an outward objective struggle for material transformation, might there also be a subjective correlate to that struggle? No serious socialist would dispute that capitalism, for example, produces certain forms of subjectivity and is in turn maintained by them. The historical materialist model of base and superstructure has this dialectic between the objective and the subjective at its core. how we organize material life shapes our institutions, our culture, our values, and ultimately even what feels normal to us. And those ideas and institutions then act back upon the

material world, helping reproduce or transform it. A capitalist economy produces a capitalist culture, imbued with its logic, assumptions, and values. This relationship between the base and the superstructure of society is not linear, nor is, it reductionist in the simple way that vulgar materialists sometimes assume. Rather, it is dialectical. The material base in the superstructure are two intertwined aspects of a single process, which co-arise and evolve along with one another. In a theoretical sense, the material base can be said to be primary or foundational, but as the process actually unfolds, the two aspects of it are functionally inseparable. The material base, therefore, has,

explanatory and causal priority without having exclusive causal efficacy. Let me say that again. The material base, therefore, has explanatory and causal priority without having exclusive causal efficacy. All of this is to say, in simple and clear terms, that the outward process of objective transformation that we call socialism also consists and must consist of a course. responding subjective transformation of the individual human beings involved in the process. It is not enough to say, as some do, that if we succeed at changing the outward world, the inward world will eventually come along. But it is also not correct to say, as various liberals and idealists do, that we must change

ourselves first, and then the material world will change naturally as a consequence. Each of these positions, one overly deterministic and the other overly, idealist, abandons dialectics. I am arguing instead that each of us has the responsibility, as socialists, to organize politically in pursuit of objective transformation, while at the same time consciously cultivating our inner lives in pursuit of subjective transformation. With all of that in mind, let me ask you this. What kind of human beings are capable of building and sustaining a truly liberated society? Can people with unexamined subjectivities, with unconscious ways of thinking, being, and behaving forged through capitalism, actually build socialism? Can we abolish capitalism

out there while continuing to reproduce its logic within ourselves? Alternatively, does the process of building socialism produce genuinely new ways of thinking, being, and behaving in those involved in its construction. Luckily, we do not have to wrestle with these questions in a vacuum because someone who actually helped lead a successful socialist revolution wrote an entire essay on precisely this question. And so we turn to him now. Part 2. Socialism and Man in Cuba In early 1965, Che Guevara wrote a letter to a friend which was eventually published

as an essay titled Socialism and Man in Cuba. In this essay, Che was attempting to respond to a popular critique of socialism, which argued that socialism is characterized by indifference or outright hostility toward even the abolition of the individual in favor of the collective, which, as the argument went, manifests itself in the form of an authoritarian state. Che is wrestling with the very question we are wrestling with here today. What kind of human being must socialism produce? Contrary to the lazy idea that socialist don't care about the individual, Che launches into a rather profound analysis of what he refers to as the dialectic between the individual and the masses of which they are apart, as well as the dialectic between the revolutionary government and the people in whose interest that government is sincerely attempting to operate. Che begins an investigation into the sort of subjectivity produced by capitalism,

pointing out how this subjective dimension is a real force that the new revolutionary government must grapple with. Che argues that capitalism is not merely an economic system which structures markets, trade, work, and prices, but that it is a total system that acts upon, quote, all aspects of one's life. It penetrates people's consciousness. It structures their desires. It shapes their understanding of success what they take to be normal or possible. The very ideas people have about how to spend their lives and what happiness consists of are structured by individual advancement, competition, rewards, and status.

It elevates the individual above all else and prevents success or failure as a product of individual merit while obscuring structural causes and class relations. Che focuses in on the concept of alienation in particular, which marks. Marx discussed at length, highlighting how people raised under capitalism are alienated from their own labor, from one another, and even from themselves. Work becomes something outside themselves, something coerced and exploitative, instead of natural and free expressions of their capacities and creativity. Che shows how capitalism structures our material lives and fully permeates our consciousness. This capitalist subjectivity not only harms those who inhabit.

inhabit it or are inhabited by it, but actively works against the construction of a socialist society where the values of collectivity, reciprocosity, and solidarity come into conflict with the values of hyper-individualism, competition, and greed. Che points out that even after a revolution, quote, the vestiges of the past remain. The old society survives and habits, desires, expectations, and values that were produced by capitalist conditions. Marx, over a century earlier, made a similar point when he said, quote, The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Imagine, if you will, a successful socialist revolution in the United States. What would the response to it be from millions of ordinary Americans who have had their entire inner lives, their ideas about the world, their orientation to others, unthinkingly shaped by being born and raised in pre-revolutionary 20th and 21st century America. The apoplectic response from the wealthy and the privileged elite would be obvious and expected. But think about the response from regular working class or petty bourgeois Americans, those with Punisher bumper stickers, don't tread on me flags, and thin blue-line t-shirts. If you thought the subjectivities of pre-revolutionary Cubans were difficult, you ain't seen nothing.

yet. This is also why Chey warns against attempting to build socialism with what he calls, quote, the dull instruments left to us by capitalism, commodity relations, profitability, and individual material interest. These mechanisms are not neutral for Chey. Insofar as they remain dominant, they continue to cultivate the same habits, motivations, and forms of consciousness that socialism is attempting to overcome. The danger is that the material structures of society, and the nature is that the material structures of society can be transformed, while capitalist values continue to reproduce themselves within the people attempting to construct the new society. The conclusion which Che draws from all of this can be summed up perfectly when he declares,

quote, to build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman, end quote. This is Chee explicitly recognizing the central question of this entire. your speech. True socialist transformation must be simultaneously outward and inward, objective and subjective. When we go out into the world and organize and struggle in an attempt to change it, we ourselves begin to change. And when we ourselves begin to transform, we become increasingly capable of transforming the world. The objective and subjective aspects of transformation must proceed together in dialectical Union. As Che puts it elsewhere in the essay, quote, the change in consciousness does not take

place automatically, just as change in the economy does not take place automatically. So how does Che think this new socialist man, the new socialist person, is actually produced? Well, first and foremost, it is worth emphasizing that Chee believes this new subjectivity emerges, as I hope I've made clear through struggle, through the attempt to transform the world. In Che's context, that meant through the process of revolution and socialist construction in Cuba. In our context, it means forms of conscious political activity aiming toward revolution and socialist construction. There is no substitute or shortcut for political organizing. We must join socialist organizations and begin to struggle alongside our comrades to develop higher and higher forms of disciplined, theoretically coherent political activity.

Struggle itself transforms people. The experience of taking risks, making sacrifices, assuming responsibility, working collectively, and acting consciously in service of a broader social project begins to produce new habits, new values, and new ways of relating to ourselves and to others. The revolutionary process, in this sense, becomes a kind of school through which people are gradually remade. but for Che, this process is not merely something imposed upon individuals from above. People must consciously participate in their own transformation. And that's important. People must consciously participate in their own transformation. He speaks explicitly of self-education, of recognizing those vestiges of the past within ourselves,

and deliberately and consciously working to overcome them. Additionally, collective and voluntary labor as a contribution to collective life, the cultivation of moral incentives, and the example set by more developed revolutionaries all play an important role in this process. Moral incentives are especially important for Che because the aim is to gradually move people away from motivations rooted primarily in private material reward and toward motivations rooted in social duty. solidarity, sacrifice, and contribution to the common good. The Vanguard, meanwhile, is supposed to lead not merely through commands or authority, but through example, demonstrating in practice the values the new society is attempting to generalize. This is the responsibility of all revolutionaries, but especially those who emerge out of the masses organically to fill positions of leadership.

Fred Hampton, one of Chicago's own, is a perfect example of. of this kind of vanguard leader, totally selfless, totally dedicated to the cause, dignified and ethical in his interpersonal dealings, disciplined and steadfast in his actions, theoretically informed, and practically potent. The two men never met, but if Chee would have been able to meet Fred, I think he would have seen in him his new socialist man staring back. So what then is this new man that Che is trying to describe? They are not some perfect person, some purified revolutionary saint who has transcended every human contradiction or selfish impulse or overcome every character flaw. They are rather a human being in the process of

becoming less alienated, less narrowly self-interested, less governed by the compulsions and values inherited from capitalist class society. They become increasingly conscious of themselves as a social being, as someone whose life is bound up with the lives of others, whose flourishing is bound up with their flourishing, whose freedom is inseparable from theirs. Such a person develops a deeper sense of responsibility, a greater capacity for solidarity and sacrifice, a richer inner life, and a more expansive identification with humanity as a whole. And this is where Chase says something that, in my view, gets very close to the ethical heart of revolutionary politics.

He writes, famously, quote, At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. We are not motivated by resentment or hatred or some pathological need for power. We are motivated in the final analysis by love, an aching love for our fellow human beings and for all sentient beings. Our love is not sentimental or hypothetical. It is expressed and made concrete through action, through sacrifice, through solidarity,

and through the dogged determination to struggle for people we may never meet and for generations we will never live to see. For Che, the revolutionary is not simply someone who understands Marx's critique of political economy or possesses the right political line. The revolutionary is someone whose relationship to other human beings, has itself begun to change, to expand, to transform. And it is here, I think, that Che brings us to the threshold of another revolutionary archetype, developed in a radically different historical and cultural context, but animated by a strikingly similar concern. The Bodhisattva.

Part 3. The Bodhisattva. It is here where I move to a tradition that has developed and been tested over Central and in millennia that has flourished and proven effective in many different cultures and historical contexts, which has a rich and rigorous philosophical, psychological, and existential approach to precisely the question we concern ourselves with today. This tradition is Mahayana Buddhism, and the figure central to it, which I want to discuss now, is the Bodhisattva. Before moving on, I want to make clear that I am not advancing Buddhism as some sort of alternative political theory, nor am I trying to clumsily weld it onto Marxism in some

eclectic fusion. Furthermore, I am not arguing that Buddhism and Marxism have no tensions or even hostilities, both historically and philosophically, nor am I arguing for any set of metaphysical beliefs associated with Buddhism. I am simply arguing that their tradition of Buddhist meditation practice and the figure of the Bodhisattva which emerges out of it is perhaps the most well-developed and potent tradition in human history for the deliberate cultivation of higher states of consciousness and deeper forms of subjectivity. For this reason, those of us who, like Che, are interested in overcoming alienation, the myopia of hyper-individualism, and the infantile narcissism of egoism, in short, the subjectivity of capitalist class society, not just in theory, but in real concrete practice,

have an unparalleled resource in the gorgeous and profound tradition of the Bodhisattva. Now, if you're still with me, let's examine what the Bodhisattva actually is. In Sanskrit, the word Bodhi means awakening or enlightenment, and Satva means sentient being. Together, they indicate a being or a person who is committed to a person. awakening. The bodhisattva ideal is present in earlier Buddhism and earlier Buddhist traditions are by no means indifferent to compassion or the suffering of others. What changes in Mahayana is the centrality and universality of the Bodhisattva path. Awakening is pursued not as purely private liberation, but for the benefit and liberation of all sentient beings. The Bodhisattva therefore

socializes the process of awakening. In many Mahayana formulations, this commitment. This commitment is so radical that the Bodhisattva refuses to conceive of their own liberation as separable from the liberation of others. The question becomes not simply, how can suffering be overcome, but how can my life become a vehicle for alleviating the suffering of others? Before we move further, it's worth pausing for a moment to articulate what Buddhists mean by awakening or enlightenment. What do they mean when they say they want to? escape suffering, reach nirvana, or become enlightened. A full analysis of this fascinating and intricate concept would, of course, take us too far afield

for the purposes of this speech, though I will discuss the mechanics of it more in the next section, but in its simplest form, Buddhist enlightenment is the progressive and ultimately radical liberation of human consciousness from ignorance about the nature of self and reality, from the deeply felt illusion of ourselves as separate, permanent, self-sufficient beings, and from the craving fear, hatred, and attachments that grow out of that illusion. What emerges from this process of awakening or enlightenment is a profound transformation of one's felt relationship to themselves and to the world, a transcendence of ego identification, and a freer, wiser, less reactive, and increasingly compassionate way. of being in the world. It has absolutely nothing to do with supernatural beliefs, with some sort of

permanent bliss, with an annihilation of the personality, or with some woo-woo, new age, pseudo-spiritual elevation of the self to a higher level. It is simply yet profoundly a transformation in perception, identification, and habitual reactivity. Trying to convey it in words and concepts is a bit paradoxical because the experience itself transcends words and concepts. Trying to understand it through the ego, through the sense of a fundamentally separate self, somewhere in here, behind the eyes and between the ears, looking out at a world that is not me, is also paradoxical because it is precisely that entire psychological apparatus that dissolves in this process.

As illusion and ignorance are seen clearly, processed and transcended in this gradual oscillating process of awakening, the compulsive inner forces of greed, envy, hatred, craving, insecurity, and fear itself begin to wither away. Ultimately, the visceral felt sense of separation that I am in here and that you are out there, that we are fundamentally separate, both from one another and from the whole web of life, that we are thrown into this alien world and will one day, be unceremoniously ripped out of it, this unquestioned feeling of separateness itself begins

to loosen, and we begin to experience ourselves not as isolated self-sufficient entities, but as dependently arisen beings whose lives are inseparable from causes, conditions, other people in the living world. The Bodhisattva is somebody who purposefully and consistently engages in the practice of meditation in order to see through the ego-constructed illusion of separateness in order to cultivate a mode of consciousness in which the liberation of the self and the liberation of others increasingly ceased to appear as competing projects.

The Bodhisattva sees the suffering in here and the suffering out there as one in the same. This is not alien to our human nature. This is the best of it. It is a process of overcoming our baseness. our lower natures and consciously cultivating our highest natures. When you fall to your knees and weep for the suffering of a total stranger, when the iron defenses around your heart begin to break down and let the suffering of the world flood in,

when you find yourself trembling with indignation in the face of every injustice, both the revolutionary and the bodhisattva within you stirs. Instead of passively going through life and waiting for these moments, moments of unconditional love to overwhelm you, the Bodhisattva cultivates through meditation practice and high forms of ethical behavior, the raw openness of the heart, and she embraces the responsibility to others, indeed to all sentient beings, that such unconditional, heartbreaking love demands of us. This love does not stop at our family and friends. It does not stop at the outskirts of our community. It does not stop at the borders between nations, and it doesn't even

stop at humanity. This sphere of loving compassion expands and expands and expands to include all sentient beings, to include the earth itself, and even to include every conscious creature in the whole universe. It represents the evolution of human morality to its absolutely highest degree, and not as an idea or a concept, but as something felt in the deepest parts of our being. wisdom turns into compassion compassion compassion emerges naturally out of wisdom and love

universal unconditional love is its apotheosis the path of the Bodhisattva starts with what in Mahayana Buddhism is called Bodhita the general aspiration and steadfast intention toward awakening for the benefit of others for all beings

this Bodhiita sometimes referred to as the awakening of the heart mind has two dimensions. First, we cultivate aspirational bodiceita, the genuine formation of the intention to strike out on the bodhisattva path. Having heard and understood what this path is all about, we consciously dedicate ourselves to it. Secondly, we cultivate engaged bodiceita. We turn the theoretical aspiration into a concrete practice. I will flesh out what I mean by a concrete practice shortly, but for now, simply notice the parallel here with the revolutionary dialectic of theory and praxis, of having revolutionary values and commitments, and then embodying those values and commitments via real political praxis.

In Buddhism, like in Marxism, it is one thing to understand the theory intellectually, but it's quite another to take that theory and apply it in the material world. A Marxist who reads and understands theory, but spends all this time arguing online instead of going out into community and applying that theory is hardly a Marxist at all. The point is not to interpret the world, the point is to change it. In addition to the cultivation of Bodhisattva makes a vow. The exact formulation of this vow differs across various Mahayana traditions and the types of vows one can take abound as well,

but the essential commitment is as follows. Beings are innumerable, yet I commit to liberating them. delusions are inexhaustible yet i commit to overcoming them the teachings are vast yet i commit to learning them enlightenment is unsurpassable yet i vow to attain it what strikes me as extraordinary about those vows is that for all intents and purposes they're impossible to achieve in an unimaginably vast cosmos how can anyone liberate all sentient beings if our delusions are inexhaustible how can anyone actually overcome them? If enlightenment is virtually impossible, how can anyone attain it? But it is, of course, precisely in the impossibility of these vows that the unwavering commitment to them is so profound. Here again we find deep resonance with our revolutionary politics. When one looks out at the state of the world, do the injustices and inequalities and brutalities not seem overwhelming? When we study the history and the present of the United States,

do we not often despair in the face of its monstrosity? When we realize that class society has persisted in various forms for thousands upon thousands of years, does the ultimate realization of communism not sometimes seem impossible? When we look American capitalism in its dead sociopathic eyes and watch with a constant sensation of nausea, its dark capacity to adapt again and again into the consequences of its own contradictions, do we not sometimes feel hopeless? And yet, what are our options?

Do we numb ourselves into oblivion through drugs and distraction? Do we recoil like cowards into the false safety of our petty personal lives? Do we deform ourselves into mindless and heartless little automaton so as to get along as frictionlessly as possible in this bloated corpse of a system? Or do we courageously and humbly continue our work against all odds, engaging in a struggle both inwardly and outwardly that is not conditional upon certainty that we will win or that final victory is inevitable? Like the Bodhisattva, the revolutionary has an almost impossible task. Almost. Yet we insist on carrying it out, come what may, for no other reason than it's the right thing to do.

It is our responsibility to ourselves, to our fellow human beings, and to future generations to do it, and so we do. So now we can see the path of the bodhisattva, the necessity of cultivating bodichita, the parallels between the Bodhisattva path and the path of the political revolutionary, and the impossible vows to which the Bodhisattva dedicates herself. But what kind of person does all of this require exactly? Here we turn briefly to the six paramedas or six perfections, which in Mahayana Buddhism are core virtues or character qualities associated with the process of awakening. These traits are essential to cultivate for the bodhisattva, and they resonate, as you may notice, quite well with the qualities that Che argued for in his articulation of the new man under socialism. The traits are as follows. generosity, the loosening of possessiveness and self-centered accumulation, ethical discipline, behavior consciously ordered toward non-harm in the welfare of others, patience, the capacity

to endure difficulty and hostility without being dominated by reactivity, diligence or joyful effort, sustained energetic commitment to the good and the just despite difficulty and setbacks, meditative concentration, the development of stable attention and mindful awareness, and wisdom, a deepening clarity about the nature of reality and the human condition, especially insight into emptiness and dependent origination, that beings and phenomena do not exist as isolated self-sufficient entities, but arise through an interrelated web of causes and conditions. Taken together, these virtues produce the subjectivity,

of the Bodhisattva, a disciplined, compassionate, courageous, increasingly non-egocentric human being capable of sustained action on behalf of others. Such a subjectivity, I pray you can see, is hostile to its core to the systems of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, colonialism, and fascism that haunt us. To drive this point home, we need look no further than the character traits and subjectivities of the people this system rewards. with power and wealth. If we had to find people in our world today that exemplify the exact opposite

of the traits embodied by the Bodhisattva or by Che's new person under socialism, would we not find them ready-made in the grotesque figures of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Benjamin Netanyahu? Would we not see the antithesis of everyone we seek to be in the likes of a Pete Hegeseth or a Peter Thiel?

In addition to this, if we cultivate an inner life aimed at the dismantling of our narcissistic and self-obsessed egoism, of our ceaseless craving for more and more things in a futile attempt to feel happy and fulfilled, and of our very idea that we are fundamentally different from and other than those people over there, what would capitalism have to sell us? What mangled form of belonging could jingoistic patriotism tempt us with? How could we look away from, or worse, justify the atrocities that our government inflicts on our brothers and sisters around the world? You see, my friends, the whole orientation of the Bodhisattva, like the whole orientation of

the sincere revolutionary, is hostile to this entire social order, both its material base and its ideological superstructure. The subjectivity cultivated by the Bodhisattva path and by conscious revolutionary praxis is a threat to the basic premises and core logic of not only capitalism imperialism, but of class society writ large. The moment we see ourselves in the tears of a grieving Palestinian mother, in the sweat of a child toiling in a cobalt mine, or in the silent despair of an old man curling up into a tattered sleeping bag under a bridge,

the whole edifice of this system begins to crack. They want us to look at Palestinian suffering and say, they deserve it. They want us to look at the skin color of the child in the mind and shrug indifferently. They want us to step over the man in the sleeping bag on our way to work. And if that fails, if our wretched little human hearts still insist on noticing and aching, the system will settle for our inaction. In fact, they count on it. As long as we still go to work, buy their shit, and stay in our place, we can feel any way. we want. But the moment our heartbreak spurs us into taking meaningful action, to organizing politically

to confront this unacceptable state of affairs, the whole system lurches and consolidates to stop us, to crush us, to make an example out of us. So now we understand what the Bodhisattva represents in terms of a new subjectivity. The Bodhisattva dismantles egoic self-centeredness. She expands her identification beyond the private self. She responds to suffering in her midst with compassion and action. She cultivates discipline instead of merely having good intentions. She becomes capable of experiencing negative emotions without being consumed by them. She relinquishes all attachment to recognition and rewards. She anticipates and accepts difficulty and hardship without abandoning her task and she regards her own liberation both inwardly and outwardly as inseparable from the liberation of others.

Crucially, she is not born this way. The entire bodhisattva path assumes that these capacities and qualities can be trained and cultivated. The next question asks itself, If this kind of subjectivity can indeed be cultivated, then what are the actual practices through which Buddhism proposes to cultivate them? Part 4. Meditation and the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. So how, practically speaking, do we cultivate this new subjectivity? How do we become increasingly capable of seeing through ego identification,

regulating our own reactivity, expanding our sphere of compassion, and turning the Bodhisattva ideal from an aspiration into a concrete way of being? The primary technology Buddhism has developed for this purpose is meditation. Now, meditation is often mystified, exoticized, commodified, and stripped of its radical implications in Western culture. At its core, however, meditation is a metacognitive practice. It is the deliberate cultivation of an awareness of what is happening within our own minds. Most people spend enormous portions of their lives thinking without being particularly aware that they are thinking. A thought arises and we follow it. In emotion,

erupts and we become it. Somebody insults us or disagrees with us, embarrasses us, cuts us off in traffic, criticizes our work, threatens our status, and an entire cascade of thoughts, bodily sensations, memories, judgments, and impulses immediately come online. Before we know it, we are 10 minutes deep into an argument inside our own heads with somebody who isn't even in the room. Meditation allows us, slowly and gradually to stand back from this process and observe it. In an interesting way, this is similar to what Marxism itself allows us to do politically and historically. The person totally immersed within the ideological common sense of liberal capitalism experiences the existing social order as simply reality itself.

Private property is natural. Competition is natural. Markets are natural. The nation state is natural. Wage labor is simply. what work is. Marxism gives us a higher order perspective from which we can step outside that ideological immediacy and examine capitalism as a historically produced system with a beginning, an internal structure, contradictions, and therefore an end. We become conscious of the system precisely by gaining enough theoretical distance from it to see it as a system. Meditation performs a strange analogous operation inwardly. Instead of remaining totally immersed within the stream of thought, emotion, desire, fear, and egoic narration, we begin to observe that stream as a process. We become

aware that thoughts arise according to causes and conditions. Emotions arise, peak, and disappear. Desires appear without our permission. The ego constantly narrates experience, compares itself to others, defends itself, seeks approves, nurses grievances, fantasizes about recognition, and desperately tries to maintain some coherent story about who and what we are. Once we can see this machinery operating, we are no longer condemned to automatically obey every demand it makes. Human beings have already undergone something analogous in our relationship to our more basic

animal instincts. Hunger, sexual desire, aggression, exhaustion, and the impulse to flee for from danger remain embedded within us because we are animals produced through evolution. We did not transcend our animal nature by somehow eliminating those instincts. They remain part of us. What developed was a form of consciousness capable of becoming aware of those impulses, reflecting upon them and deciding whether or how to act upon them. I can be hungry and choose not to eat. I can feel sexual desire without acting upon it. I can feel fear and still walk towards something I believe I have a responsibility to confront.

Higher forms of awareness gave us a degree of freedom from automatic identification with instincts that remain entirely real within us. Let me say that again. Higher forms of awareness gave us a degree of freedom from automatic identification with our animal instincts that still remain entirely real within us. The ego can be understood in much the same way. Transcending ego identification does not require the destruction of personality or the disappearance of the practical self. The ego remains part of our cognitive and emotional architecture.

We simply become increasingly capable of seeing it, understanding it, and refusing to allow it to unconsciously run the show. And for revolutionaries, the implications of this are enormous. Every single one of us brings an ego into our political work. We bring our insecurities, our childhood wounds, our hunger for recognition, our fear of humiliation, our desire to be seen as intelligent, righteous, important. And because politics concerns questions that we take extremely seriously, the ego has an almost unlimited supply of noble language through which to disguise itself. suddenly my inability to tolerate criticism becomes a principal defense of correct political lines.

My resentment toward a comrade becomes a profound theoretical disagreement. My inability to admit that I was wrong becomes ideological steadfastness. An interpersonal disagreement metastasizes into a factional dispute because neither person involved can endure the psychic wound of simply saying, I fucked up. I was defensive. I wanted to be right. I hurt somebody. Let me try again. Anyone who has spent enough time around radical political organizations or any political organization across the spectrum, for that matter, has seen some version of this. Organizations fracture over conflicts whose stated ideological content bears only a passing relationship to the emotional

forces actually driving them. Brilliant people become impossible to work. with because they cannot listen. People who sincerely want liberation reproduce domination in their interpersonal relationships. Comrades become enemies. Political disagreement becomes moral condemnation. The movement loses people who might otherwise have given decades of their lives to it. Now, none of this means political differences are unreal or that every conflict can be psychologized away. Serious disagreements exist. Line struggles exist. They must exist. Opportunism exists. Abuse exists. There are moments when organizations must discipline members. Sometimes they must split or expel people. The point is simply

that our ability to understand what is actually happening becomes much greater when we are capable of examining our own egoic investment in the conflict. And meditation develops precisely this capacity. With enough practice, Anger can arise and we can feel it clearly without instantly converting it into action. Jealousy can arise and reveal something about ourselves without becoming sabotage. Criticism can sting and we can watch the little ego scrambling to defend itself before we decide whether the criticism is actually true. We gain a small space between what arises within us and what we choose to do in response. And that space is freedom.

And because the revolutionary project ultimately depends upon millions of human beings cooperating, resolving contradictions, accepting criticism, trusting one another, and struggling together across years and decades, that seemingly private little space within consciousness can have profoundly social consequences. Meditation will never organize your workplace for you. It will never overthrow a government, defeat an imperialist army, or socialize the means of production. The work of revolution remains political, collective, organized, and material. Meditation helps cultivate human beings more capable of doing that work with maturity,

clarity, discipline, humility, and love. That is its revolutionary potential as a proven tool of inner transformation and systematic maturation. Part 5. The Bodhisattva revolutionary. And so we arrive finally at the figure I have been circling around throughout this speech, the Bodhisattva Revolutionary. The Bodhisattva Revolutionary is the revolutionary subject who consciously takes up both dimensions of transformation we have been discussing from the beginning. She throws herself into the organized struggle to transform the material conditions of the world, while simultaneously undertaking the discipline transformation of our own consciousness.

She understands these processes as distinct, irreducible and dialectically intertwined. These two orientations meet in praxis. The revolutionary changes through the activity of changing the world. The meditator changes through the disciplined examination of consciousness itself. The Bodhisattva revolutionary does both, and each process acts upon the other. Political struggle reveals hidden dimensions of the ego. Meditation helps us meet these revelations consciously.

collective work breaks down individualism. A less ego-dominated subject becomes better equipped for collective work. The movement produces new people and those new people strengthen the movement. There is no final state of personal purity from which we suddenly become worthy of revolutionary politics. We begin exactly where history has deposited us. Contradictory, wounded, conditioned human beings carrying capitalism, around inside our heads while attempting to abolish it outside ourselves. We organize anyway. We meditate anyway. We study, struggle, fail, correct ourselves, apologize,

learn, grow, and return to the work. Think for a moment about what our organizations might become if we took this task as seriously as we take political education. Imagine a movement populated by people who can receive criticism without immediately experiencing as humiliating. people secure enough in themselves to admit error publicly, leaders who genuinely do not need to be worshipped, cadre who can endure tedious, thankless work without constantly needing recognition for it, comrades who can engage real ideological disagreement without secretly enjoying the destruction of another person, people capable of carrying tremendous anger at injustice while remaining motivated fundamentally by love. this is why the question of subjectivity is ultimately political.

Communism represents, at its deepest level, a possibility far greater than rational planning, public ownership, or the distribution of wealth. It represents humanity consciously beginning to leave behind the long historical childhood of class society itself, thousands of years in which one part of humanity has dominated another, in which wealth has accumulated alongside misery, in which human beings, have repeatedly organized social life around hierarchy, exploitation, conquest, and war. We have become an extraordinarily powerful species. We split the atom.

We've walked on the moon. We communicate instantaneously across the planet. We alter the chemistry of the atmosphere. We possess weapons capable of ending civilization in an afternoon. And yet emotionally, morally, politically, we remain capable of behaving like frightened little primates fighting over territory, status, resources, and imaginary tribal divisions. Our technical capacities have outrun our maturity. That contradiction cannot continue forever. The Socialist Project asks humanity to consciously reorganize the material foundations of civilization

around cooperation, democracy, equality, and collective flourishing. The Bodhisattva path asked the individual human being to undertake an equally profound maturation of consciousness, to expand the sphere of moral concern beyond the private ego, beyond family, nation, race, and eventually beyond humanity itself. Put those projects into conscious relationship with one another, and the horizon becomes a civilization organized around human need instead of private accumulation inhabited by people increasingly capable of experiencing the needs of others as intimately connected to their own. A society which no longer systematically rewards greed while individuals consciously work to uproot greed within themselves. A world which dismantle structures of domination while

cultivating human beings increasingly uninterested in dominating one another. We may never see communism. We may never see imperialism defeated. some of the people in this room may spend the entirety of our political lives organizing under capitalism. We may win tremendous victories and suffer tremendous defeats. History owes us nothing. And still, the Palestinian mother is weeping. The child is still in the mine. The old man is still underneath the bridge.

The planet is still getting hotter and hotter. Human beings are still being humiliated, exploited, bombed, starved, and worked into the ground by systems built and maintained by other human beings. We know enough to understand why this is happening. We are capable of doing something about it, and that knowledge creates responsibility. So we organize, we build institutions, we educate ourselves and one another, we cultivate discipline, we train our attention, we examine in our egos. We learn to love more deeply and more expansively. We develop ourselves into people increasingly capable of carrying the enormous historical task that has fallen into our hands.

We allow the suffering of the world to break our hearts without allowing it to break our spirits. We tremble with indignation, and then we get to work. This, to me, is the Bodhisattva revolution. the conscious transformation of ourselves through the struggle to transform the world and the transformation of the world by human beings who are themselves, learning how to become freer, wiser, deeper, more courageous, and more loving. There are innumerable beings suffering. There is an unimaginably long road ahead of us. And here we are, alive together for this brief moment in history,

capable of walking some small portion of that road. and so we walk in. Thank you.