Rev Left Radio - Transcending Capitalism: Insights from Buddhism and Marxism

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Professor of Philosophy and author, Graham Priest, joins Breht to discuss his latest book Capitalism - it's Nature and Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights. Together, they discuss the problems of capitalism, the utter necessity of its transcendence, what Marxism can offer Buddhism, what Buddhism can offer Marxism, and how insights from both traditions can compliment and strengthen one another in the fight against instutionalized greed, hate, and delusion (aka capitalism, imperialism, and ideology)! Learn more about Graham Priest here: https://grahampriest.net/ Check out Kevin's interview with Graham over at Sensible Socialist: https://sensiblesocialist.com/2022/10/18/the-synthesis-of-marxism-and-buddhism/ Outro music "Banquet" by Bloc Party Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Professor Graham Priest to talk about his book that was released in 2021, Capitalism, Its Nature and Its Replacement, Buddhist and Marxist Insights. This is a fascinating text, and it's really just right down the center of the alley of Revf's interest. As longtime RevLev listeners know, we often make forays into, various forms of religion and spirituality, but particularly Buddhism is close to my heart and something that comes up on the show over and over and over again. And so when I was made aware of this text, I knew I had to have Graham on the show to talk about it. And we do precisely that. We cover

a lot of fascinating elements, how these two seemingly totally different traditions interweave with one another, compliment one another, dovetail with one another. And we even explore some of the possible tensions that might exist between them. And so this is a really fascinating a conversation. And I also want to give a huge shout out to my friend Kevin over at the sensible socialist. We've collabed, I think multiple times at this point on our various platforms together. And it was actually on his podcast that this book came to mind because he also interviewed Graham about this text. So if you like this conversation, I will link to the episode that Kevin did over at Sensible Socialist on the topic. And you can go check that out for

for further listening. But yeah, without further ado, here is our conversation with Professor Graham Priest on his newest book, Capitalism, Its Nature and Its Replacement, Buddhist and Marxist Insights. Now I work at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, and I've worked here about 10 years. Before that, most of my professional life has been in Australia, with occasional visits to other countries like the UK and Japan and other places I won't bore you with. That's enough. Well, wonderful, and it's a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show.

I actually recently came across the book that we'll be discussing today entitled Capitalism, its nature and its replacement, Buddhist and Marxist insights. Through your interview with my friend Kevin over at Sensible Socialist, we've been friends for a very long time, both interested in Marxism and Buddhism, have worked together a few times. And when I saw that episode come out, I loved it. I reached out to him to see if I can get you on our show. So welcome to the show.

Okay, thank you. It's pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So the first question is just kind of get people oriented to you as a guest, is how did you become interested in Marxism and Buddhism? Okay, let me answer that in three parts, and I promise they'll be brief. When I was a young academic, I read an awful lot of marks. I didn't teach it at that time, but we had a reading group of Marx,

and we read a lot of Marx, all of capital, grundries, the Paris manuscripts, etc. And I became convinced that Marx had very deep insights into a number of things. I wouldn't agree with everything he wrote, but Capital Volume 1, I thought he'd nailed the way that capitalism works. I remember now reading this and seeing that the capitalists, when he wrote this, well, there it was 1850, 1860, were saying exactly the same thing as when I was reading it and how they couldn't afford to increase wages and so on,

otherwise they got a business. So, you know, that persuaded me that there was a lot of insight in Marx. Buddhism's very different. For years, I taught topics in Western. philosophy and I knew nothing about the Asian traditions. And then in the mid-90s, I met someone who knew a lot more about the Asian traditions than I did. And talking to him, a guy called Jay Garfield, I became persuaded there was an awful lot of insight in the Asian traditions and particularly Buddhism. So I determined to learn more about these traditions and particularly

Buddhism, which I did. First, I wasn't so interested in the ethics. I was interested in the metaphysics, but the ethics and the metaphysics are very closely related. And the third part is that in 2014 I published a book called One, which was sort of a metaphysics book, but there were a couple of chapters on Buddhist metaphysics and ethics. And right at the end of the book, I raised the question of how Buddhist ethics applies to issues in political philosophy. which is not something that's theorized heavily in Buddhist philosophy. And at the time, I didn't know what to say about this. It was clear to me that Buddhist ethics grounds a very damning critique of capitalism.

At the time, I couldn't think of what exactly to, how exactly to phrase this. So I thought about it for many years. And then recently I wrote the book, you mentioned, where I tried to spell out the thoughts I'd had on the matter of the last few years. I mean, I'd find a comment. Actually, I wanted to call the book. The point, however, is to change it, which many of your readers will recognize as a reference to a quote from Marx, the thesis on a followback. But the publisher said, no one will know that means. So they persuaded me to read this rather flat-footed title. But, you know, I would have liked the less flat-footed title. Well, it works either way. And this title certainly, you know, caught my attention for what it's worth. The mixing of my Marxist and Buddhist insights is something that I really try to do myself if in a less systematic way than you here on the show. And so when I saw that title, I had to click on the episode and

I knew right away I had to have you on. I know you're a philosopher and so you're interested in the metaphysics and the ethics and the philosophy of Buddhism. Have you dove in much much into the practice itself of meditation? No. And let me make it plain that I'm not a Buddhist. Whether you'd call me a Marxist depends on how much Marx you've got to subscribe to to be a Marxist. But what interests me is what other people say, whether they're Buddhists or Marxists or other people, which I think are true and supported by reason, by evidence. And I think there's a lot of truth in many of Marx views and in a lot of Buddhist views. But I'm a philosopher. I'm not an expert on religion.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's good to say up front. And a couple other things to say up front. and maybe you could add some caveats as well, is that, of course, when you're getting into a discussion of Marxism and Buddhism, you're talking about, by necessity, the broad traditions themselves, and you're not so interested in parsing out the nuances between different sex or tendencies within those movements, right? There's a million sorts of Marxists, and there's many, many types of Buddhists. They all disagree on various things, but we can safely say that these broad traditions have certain basic insights and basic values or principles. that we can touch on and think about and contemplate. Is that correct?

And is there any other caveat you want to add? That's fair. I mean, Buddhism has been going now, Buddhist philosophy has been going for 2,000 and a half thousand years, and the number of different Buddhist sects groups, schools is Legion, and they don't all agree about everything. There's a general agreement on the basic aspects of Buddhist ethics.

There's much more disagreement about metaphysics. Okay, and, you know, as many of your readers will know, Marx has been interpreted so many different ways in the last 130, 140 years. And I think there's a lot of disagreement amongst Marxists about how you interpret Marx. So it'll be crazy to say, you know, you can take any school of Marxism and any school of Buddhism and put me together and get something coherent. That would not be true. so yeah it's fair i think to talk about the sort of basic ideas which are sort of very common to all groups from Marxists and Buddhists and what can be gleaned from those yeah absolutely

and of course the the thing you said in other episodes and the book itself as well i believe is that you're talking about Buddhism philosophically you're not necessarily talking about buddhist religion which i think there is an important distinction there correct? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so Buddhism is many things. Okay. It's a religion. It's a philosophy. It's a power structure. It's a kind of art. It's some social arrangements. And what interests me is the philosophy of Buddhism. So that's just the ideas that have been put forward by Buddhist philosophers over, you know, nearly two and a half thousand years now. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get into the questions themselves and the text itself. core theme of this text and of our show is a principled anti-capitalism articulated from different directions, socioeconomic, political, environmental, spiritual, etc. Can you simply remind us what capitalism is, why it cannot serve humanity, and why it must be transcended? Sure. So what is it?

Well, it's a socioeconomic system, which is driven by units of capital whose rationale is growth. so if you want to personalise it you can talk about capitalists but it's always seemed to me that it's not individual capitalists there is here it's the way that the logic of capitalism works which is growth the people who own and manage capital aim to increase the capital so in the sense the capital itself the aim of capital is to grow and they can the capital can grow because the owners of capital can or need to improve employ workers, but because they own the means of production, they keep the whatever is produced and then can sell it, make more money because of the labour that's been put into it, the

commodities. But the money that's made, the profit or the surplus value, if you want, which are not the same thing, but we don't need to go into that here, is reinvested to make more money. So the point of capital is growth. The point of capital is growth. The point of capital is simply to make more capital and people are used in the process. So the point of capital is not the good of people. People work for capital, not vice versa. And in the process, people are used, abused, and what we could do with social wealth could be used in a much more humane and rational way for the benefit of people. So our socioeconomic system should work for people, not for simply capital growth.

Yeah, definitely. And in the 21st century, we are seeing the contradictions of capitalism becoming more and more stark, the contradiction between, you know, capital accumulation and the health and well-being of the entire context in which we exist, the natural world in our environment, is increasing. You know, Marx says, you know, something is fundamentally wrong with the system that at the same time it grows its opulence that it also grows in direct proportion its own misery we have the richest society here in the united states where i'm based in that's ever existed in human history

and every major city has blocks and blocks of homeless people who can't get mental health care or basic housing you know i'm somebody who is born in the working class in the u.s have never been able to have anything like consistent health care and had to go through things like major bouts of depression or broken ankles or burns even without the help of any doctor because I just didn't have the money to pay for it. And so in this way, this is an incredibly anti-human system. And America is like perhaps one of the places it has blossomed the most fully, if you will, and the inequalities and the misery that it creates is most stark here because the money is here, right? The wealth in the United States is amazing. And imagine what we could

do if the priority was increase the quality of life for human beings and not grow and accumulate capital for its own sake? Yeah, I agree. I mean, the United States is a very striking country just because the amount of wealth is amazing. And yet the number of people who live below the poverty line is also largely the most advanced capitalist countries. But if you're looking at suffering, I mean, you look, I think in first to the third

world, which capitalism has exploited since imperialism to grow the capitalist pile. And the people who are working under conditions of exploitation in, you know, South America, Bangladesh, and other countries in the global south is just staggering. Yes. Absolutely. The inequality within, you know, capitalist countries in the global north is grotesque, but the inequality between the the global north and the global south is even more so. And yeah, it's really a grotesque system as a whole. And that's why it needs to be transcended and why it cannot serve humanity. So let's go ahead and move on because you argue that, in a core part of the book, of course, is that you argue that Marxism and Buddhism, though seemingly concerned with two totally different aspects

of existence, can be complementary to one another. So we'll get into the details, but just generally, what can Marxism offer Buddhism? And what can Buddhism offer Marxism? And what can Buddhism offer Marxism? Well, let's start with what Marxism has to offer Buddhism. Generally speaking, Buddhist philosophers have been more concerned with individual well-being than with social well-being, which is not to say they deny social well-being. I mean, compassion is one of the fundamental principles of Buddhist ethics.

But at least until the 20th century, there's been very little in the canon about politics, society and so on. Now that has changed to a certain extent in the 20th century where you get the rise of what's often called engaged Buddhism, people like Tichnat Han and the 14th Dalai Lama who are very much concerned with the politics of the world. However, generally speaking, there isn't a lot in the Buddhist canon about socio-politics, okay? Of course, there's an enormous amount about socio-politics in Marx, and I think Marx provides an analysis of the way that capitalism works, which is acute and which you certainly don't find in Buddhism. I mean, you could hardly find it in most Buddhism, just because capitalism, okay, where it starts, you know, scholars

argue about, but let's say it's only 400 years old, and most of the canon goes back a lot longer than that. Okay, so Buddhism offers an understanding of the contemporary state of the socio-economic world, which you just don't find in the Buddhist canon. Okay, so what can Buddhism offer to Marxism? Well, Marxism has always been wanting an ethical basis. So what you get in the later Marx, once Marx and Engels discover historical materialism, is the view that the way that people think is part of the superstructure depends on the forces and means of production and that includes ethical systems

now because the forces and means of production change that means that the superstructure is going to be relative and so the ethical views are also going to be relative so the later Marxist view lapses into relativism which means in a sense that you know that the capitalist ethical views are just as good as Marxist ethical views. And that strikes me as crazy and completely, you know, out of temper with Marx's damning condemnation of capitalism, which you find in capital, for example.

So the later Marx-Engel's view on ethics is somewhat unsatisfactory, I think. The early Marx views, the things you get in the 1844 manuscripts, the Paris manuscripts are rather different where he's under the influence of Hegel more that people experience alienation from the kind of society in which they live and we could talk about alienation but it's pretty unpleasant

and he has more of a clearly objective view about the wrongness of alienation deriving from Hegel and maybe from Aristotle but it's not sort of tempered with this relativism that you find in the later the later marks. And I think he's onto something there.

Capitalism does alienate people in all sorts of ways. But of course, alienation is only one of the nasty things. Alienation because of class is only one of the nasty things. People are alienated because of their gender, because of their race,

maybe because of their religion. Those are all pretty unpleasant too. So alienation is a species of class alienation is a species of alienation in general which is itself a special case of something that's much broader

in Buddhist thinking the Sanskrit word is Dukha and the standard translation is suffering although that's a standard translation it's not a correct translation but alienation is certainly

suffering physical mental it's frustration, it's boredom, it's alienation of varying kinds. I mean, the things which you really don't want to experience in life, okay? And the prime Buddhist thought has always been, how can we get rid of this horrible experience for people? So I think what Buddhism could bring to Marxism is an understanding of an ethics which provides a very clear basis

for a critique of capitalism. And I guess that's when my thinking on this matter started, as I explained a while back. Yeah. No, absolutely. I agree with all of that. And another thing that I would add is, we'll both have what they have in common is one of the things

is that there is this theoretical and practical element, theory and forming practice that I think we can get into a little bit later on in this episode. But another thing that they have in common, but they focus on different aspects of is transformation. So Marxism and Marxists are interested in social, economic, political transformation of the world order, of the way things are towards a more humane, rational system rooted in human well-being and not-profit growth, etc. Buddhism, in some sense, or at least it can be articulated like this, is interested in the transformation of the self or the looking and seeing the lack of a self. and this process of meditation can actually, you know, transform your relationship to your own existence in a profound way.

And one of the things that I see is that they can, they're both focusing on different aspects of transformation, outward and inner, but bringing them together can complement and fill out that entire picture. Does that sound right to you? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, according to both of them, the world is not a happy place. Both want to make the world a better place. both offer partial diagnosis of why the world is not a happy place and things you can do to make it better and there are things one can learn from both directions, I think,

to help make the world a better place indeed. Absolutely. So moving on, we know what Marxism can offer us with regards to a critique of capitalism. That's kind of the point. But less well-known and explored is what Buddhism in and of itself might offer us in this regard. So what elements of the Buddhist tradition do you, think are or can be anti-capitalist, despite what you said earlier, Buddhism flourishing

2,500 years ago, under a number of social, economic, and political systems, including, of course, capitalism itself, but also feudalism, etc. So what can Buddhism offer us in terms of an anti-capitalist critique? Well, I mean, I've already explained how Buddhist ethics really undergirds a trenchant critique of capitalism. And that's one thing. More generally, Buddhism is based on something called the Four Noble Truths, which is the analysis of the way the world works. The last of these is called the Eightfold Noble Path, which are kind of eight things you can do to help get rid of suffering your own and then other peoples as well. And the first of the Eightfold Noble Path is right view. What that means is understand the world in which you live.

So Buddhism tells us something about the world in which you live. we live. Marxism tells us something about the world in which you live. And by and large, they have sort of different parts of the picture, as it were. So you can put these together. Let me come back to Buddhism in a second, but let me talk about something else for a moment, which is ideology. So when I was writing this book, I became convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to progress is ideology. How do you keep control of a society? Well, you can use violence. You can use violence. violence, okay? And sometimes capitalism uses violence. But the striking thing about capitalism is that it doesn't buy large use for violence. If you can control people's minds, you don't

need to control their bodies. And that's precisely what ideology does in a capitalist society. People are conditioned into thinking that capitalism is, you know, fill in the blanks, just inevitable, good for everybody, fair, et cetera, et cetera. And the more you think about this, especially if you apply the principles of Buddhist ethics, that really is not true. Coming back to right view, one thing I think that Buddhism can do

is an emphasis on understanding the world in which we live. Okay, now there are a number of aspects of that, but one thing that Buddhism emphasizes is interdependence. So the Sanskrit term is Protiti Samapada. It's sometimes translated as dependent arising, dependent conditioning. But everything that you do is a result of multitude effects, and everything you do has multitude effects.

And we live in a social and natural world where we're thoroughly dependent on other people, on a natural environment. Marxism emphasizes very much, depends on other people. Not so much dependence on the environment, but that's coming, of course, painfully obvious with the very imminent ecological disaster we're facing. So in Marx, you find a critique of something else often called social atomism. The view that people are essentially autonomous, independent, and have interests pursuing which is the point of society. So, Marx emphasizes the interdependence of the social independence of people.

And what Buddhism does is kind of generalize this, not just to social independence, but to a much bigger interdependence. The social stuff is there, certainly, but also the natural world is important. As I said earlier, we're now coming to the sea. So those are some of the things that I would say in answer to your question. And I agree with those wholeheartedly, and I would also add, you know, in Buddhism, It's known by different terms, but one of the terms is known by is the three poisons of delusion, ill will, and greed. And we can see how those three poisons exist within ourselves and as they exist in the socioeconomic collective.

So we can see how capitalism takes these three poisons and turns them into these totalizing structures that dominate our lives. I mean, what is capitalism, imperialism? I use that with a hyphen, capitalism, imperialism as one term, if not greed, delusion, and hatred, you know, dominating on the geopolitical and global level. And so if we want to attack greed, delusion, and ill will at that level, it certainly helps to be able to root it out of ourselves. And of course, the Buddhist meditation practices are ways in which we can actively seek out that ability to cultivate that capacity to uproot greed, delusion and ill will within ourselves, and thus at least contribute a little bit to the uprooting it among the collective. But also in and of itself, of course, I could be the perfect person.

I could be Buddha himself. It's not going to change what's happening in Yemen or how the mode of production operates in the U.S., etc. So, you know, just by changing myself, it can certainly lend itself toward changing the world, but in and of itself is insufficient. And so you need a collective political struggle program organization to kind of confront these things at scale, if you will. And so I see this is another way in which Marxism and Buddhism can complement each other because if you are somebody that is greedy and diluted and full of hate yourself, you're not going to be very effective in trying to, you know, rid those qualities from the

world at the political level and vice versa. So I think that's one way in which they can help each other as well. Yeah, look, I agree. I mean, the three poisons, the clashes, are the ones that you mentioned. And they can be given a social spin as a number of left-wing Buddhists have pointed out. So delusion, ignorance is about misunderstanding the world in which you live. And I've already commented on the fact that capitalist ideology gets us to misunderstand the world in which we live. Greed is certainly something that plays enormous role. The point of capital is to accumulate. And in a sense, the intentions of the people who manage it are irrelevant, I mean, because it's going to do that anyway. But the way it sort of, one of the way it grows is by inducing it to the people who control it. Averist, agreed, okay. So that's there on a social level, not just an individual level.

The other one is attraction. so the thought is we want bad things to go away that's the aversion but we want good things to continue and what capitalism pushes is the pleasure motif so for example a small example constant advertising tells us that we'll be happier if we earn more have the latest iPhone live in the most desirable suburb have a private jet, et cetera, et cetera, you can fill in the details.

So in inducing these desires in people, it ends up by producing just more and more unhappiness, because the desires, even if they can be fulfilled, which often they can't. Satisfaction of desires is very transient, and once those are fulfilled, you have more desires and more unhappiness because you haven't got these things that capitalism tells you falsely will make you happy. Oh, and the last point, you mentioned working collectively and in solidarity. This is absolutely right. Marxism has always emphasised this, of course, but in its own way, so has Buddhism, because it's important if you're a Buddhist, a practicing Buddhist, you're part of a community. It's called the Sanga. So these are people who share your

goals, your aims, your values, and working together with other people, and Sanga. It helps you to promote your good, the good of the Sanga, the good of other people with whom the Sanga interacts. No one can do, can change the world on their own. It doesn't matter if you're Buddha or Christ, they'd have but nowhere. If it hadn't been for all the people who've worked, taken up the ideas, cooperated, the isolated individual can achieve virtually nothing. We need groups and solidarity to change anything. Amen. I completely agree. And just to your point on desire as well, one thing Buddhism offers in splendid detail is an understanding of the mechanics of desire. And once you see how

desiring creates suffering, and when you get the object of your desire, it doesn't satiate desire, it just creates more desire. And the more you try to satisfy those desires, the more the desires themselves proliferate. And so if you can see the mechanics of how desire operates within yourself, and then you can go into the capitalist social world and see advertisements and the marketing ploys, all these attempts to make you feel less than, and the only solution is to fill it with the commodity or the product being advertised. By understanding your own inner mechanics of desire and watching them closely, you can sort of cut them off at the leg, if you will. You can veto that whole process where the desire starts snowballing

on top of each other. And you can see how this advertisement is appealing to my desire to be fill in the blank, prettier, smarter, higher status, whatever it may be. And then you can sort of, yeah, veto that, if you will, if you've been able to cultivate that understanding through the practice of Buddhist meditation itself. So that's one way in which Buddhism and what it can promote and allow you to cultivate within yourself comes head to head with a fundamental feature of capitalism, which is marketing and advertisement. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if the Buddha were alive today, I have no doubt there'd be various sutras

on capitalist advertising. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. All right, let's go ahead and move forward, because in chapter four, you get into a really interesting topic here. You dive into personhood, and you explore the concept as it appears in both traditions, Marxism and Buddhism. So can you discuss how Marxists and Buddhists,

traditionally understand what it means to be a person and how these conceptions of personhood complement or maybe dovetail with one another. Yeah. So if you don't know much about one or other of these traditions, you might well get the view that these are radically distinct view, that they both give you radically distinct views of what it means to be a person. And that is actually not true. Let me see if I can explain this. So there's a very standard principle in Buddhist philosophy called Anatman, no self. What does that mean? Well, it does not mean that there are no people. What it means is that people do not have a part which is their essential self, which exists all the time that they exist, which defines them as them. Okay, Buddhism arose as a reaction

against the views of Hinduism, 5th century BCE, and Atman was the kind of, central self that the Hindus believed in, and the Buddhists denied it famously. Okay. Now, in the West, the closest analogue there is to Atman is a soul. And of course, Marx was very much against the existence of a soul. So here's one point of commonality. Okay. So both deny the existence of a self, a soul, or whatever.

Okay. So what then is a person? And if you look at the writings of the early Marx in particular, but also their references in the later marks like Grundries and the standard Buddhist views, what you will see is this. People are essentially a bunch of psychobiological parts, which are held together by causal laws, and are in a constant state of evolution.

I mean, change. You're physically, you're different after breakfast every morning. So when we go through life, the things which are, the parts which are me evolving, change in virtue of the laws of biology, psychology, and sociology as well. Buddhism doesn't say much about social changes, but of course Marx does

and Marx emphasises the fact that people change in virtue of their social conditions they both have this view that people are essentially a bunch of changing evolving if you like organisms Marx will talk Marx tells us much more about the social impact of change on persons than Buddhism does but Buddhism tells you more about the subjective factors of change and if you're going to change society let me step back a bit

because let me say something I think is that Marx gets wrong so once you get the rise of the Marx-Engle's view of historical materialism you get this view of base in superstructure so the sort of fundamental driver of changes the economy and the rest is kind of

supervenient on that they're sort of icing on the cake. They pursued that view because it was a reaction against Hegel, who said it was the other way around. Okay. And Hegel, they thought was wrong. But to disagree with Hegel, you do not have to go to the opposite extreme.

You just have to say that both factors are important. And later Marxists, including people like Gramsci, realize this. And so they said, if you want to change society, you've got to change people and you've got to change social structures and of course those have a dialectical relationship between them and even in the end Engels

when he was pushed on historical materialism said that the economy determines things in the last instance there was no explanation of what the last instance means I think it was just a face-saving device because had he been a real dialectician as Marx and Hegel's claim to be

Marx and Engels claimed to be they'd have realized that there's a dialectical relation between social structures and the people each produces the other. And if you want to change, you've got to change both. And Buddhism says a lot more about changing people than Marx ever did. So again, you know, there's this complementation. Yeah, really well said. And I really like your emphasis on the dialectical relationship between things because that's going to be part of the next question here.

But I just wanted to kind of fill out the Buddhist conception of. of no self or a nata or however you want to pronounce it or whatever word you want to use for it. And one of the ways that I describe it to people that might not be fully engaged with Buddhism or understand these concepts is that there's a feeling of a central self that persists through all experience. So while you are you today and you at seven years old are fundamentally different, all your opinions, your physical body, everything that you do hour by hour, all those things have changed. But yet there's this nagging. sense that you today was the same you looking out behind the windows of your eyes at age seven.

And this sensation of a static, abiding, permanent substance at the core of our experience that we call a self is ultimately a product of incessant conceptualization and thinking. And once your urge to constantly conceptualize and think can be settled for periods of time through practices like meditation, the quieting down and a looking without commenting can show you that what you took to be a permanent existing self is actually just another conception, another form of thought that rises due to certain conditions. And what really is true is there is a constant flux. There is no permanent self at the center of anything, including yourself, and that that is a

form of sort of delusion that comes from over conceptualization, and you can break that down through practices that Buddhism offers. So in both these ways, though, the self is really different than how things in Christianity or non-Marxist forms of philosophy often think of it, you know, a soul, a self, you inside has always been the same, even though your body and your opinions and everything else changes in the world around you changes. There's something deeply embedded within you that never changes and that is fundamentally an illusion i think in both of these traditions is that right to does that sound right to you that that's correct we certainly have an illusion of self you know when you wake up in the morning this little voice comes on hello

i'm back again um and once you understand how people function you can see that it is an illusion so just look at how modern medical science for example tells you what people are i mean someone who thought that, a doctor who thought that they could find your soul by opening you up and looking inside your chest, for example, wouldn't last long in the profession. I mean, modern science has actually really reinforced the Buddhist view of the self. We are a bunch of parts which are in a constant state of change. Okay, but we do have this illusion, but the fact that you know it's an illusion doesn't make it go away. because some illusions are, shall we say, objective.

They're part of the way the brain works. So, you know, there's a standard illusion called the Muller-Lah illusion when you have two lines the same length, but on one of them you put arrows pointing inwards and one of them you put arrows pointing outwards. And even when you know they're the same length, you can't help but see one line as longer than the other because of the way that the visual system works.

Well, you know, there's something about the way the brain works, which gives us this illusion of self. Maybe, you know, it plays a significant evolutionary role in the human evolution. That wouldn't surprise me at all. So breaking this illusion is far from easy. And many people think that Buddhist meditation practices can certainly help with this. And I really like that point you made about biological evolution via natural selection and the role that what Buddhists would call the ego.

might play in that process, right? There's like a pre-self, even as an infant, you know, you don't have a concept of self. There's this oceanic feeling for newborns, I guess, where you know where there's no differentiation between inside and out. But quickly, as you grow up, you internalize certain things and you start to build this concept of a me and here and the world out there. And we could see how that pre-self to self-jump makes sense in this, the process of one individual being born and growing and aging but also evolutionarily why that might have various advantages that come with it and so there's a sense in which Buddhist meditation or Buddhist enlightenment it can't be achieved by the pre-self right it's almost as if you have to go through the

process of building up and falling fully into the the illusion of a self and then being able to through these practices you know transcend that illusion at least for a time here or there, you know, people might claim that certain enlightened people, you know, the thinking totally goes away or the self never reemerges. I'm kind of skeptical of that claim, but there's a deeper seeing that sees through that. So there's like a pre-self, self, and then a post-self. And you can't go back words. You have to kind of, the only way out is through, if you will. And I kind of find that interesting as well. And it makes sense evolutionarily. Yeah, look, I think that the theory of evolution tells us.

a lot about people with which, you know, Buddhists who knew nothing about evolution would readily concur. I mean, we know a lot more about the natural world now than people did 2,000 to half thousand years ago. We've had a lot more time to think about it. We've developed scientific techniques for understanding the natural world and to a certain extent the social world better. And Buddhism has never been, ever, ever been a sort of fixed, stable body of doctrine. There are sort of leading ideas. But the point of Buddhism is improving the world. And if you want to improve the world, you've got to understand the world. And our understanding of the world now is much better than it was 2,000 years ago. And I think

evolutionary theory is something that helps us to understand people a lot better. And I'm sure that Buddha would have been very happy with it had he known about it. Yeah, exactly. And Also, I always bring this up, but Marx and Angles were incredibly excited when Darwin's theory first came out because it fits so well with their developing dialectical, materialist outlook on life. You know, the picture painted by Darwin, when they both read it for the first time, they were astonished. Like, yes, this is completely in line with sort of what we're saying in the realms of history and social development over time. And perhaps evolution and certain core tenets of Buddhism would complement each other as well. If Buddha could live to see some of the scientific discoveries that are only making Buddhism look more and more correct, I think, you know, it'd be interesting to get his thoughts on that. But it leads perfectly into this next question because it's precisely about, oh, yeah, go ahead.

I mean, you're right, but you've also got to remember that the use of Darwin that was made by social Darwinists to justify eugenics. antics, to justify imperialism, to justify cutthroat capitalism, it should also be noted. Now, these are not consequence of Darwin's theory, as people like Krapokin pointed out, but they could be, Darwinism could be used for ideological purposes, which indeed it was by the social Darwinists, and I think one should remember that. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, Buddhism is not immune to this either. There's been, you know, Buddhist movements that have been wholly. grotesque, people like kamikaze pilots of Japan, Zen Buddhists, you know, the goings on in

Myanmar, et cetera, neither of these traditions, you know, prohibit evil or terrible things happening under their umbrellas, and we should always keep that. No, absolutely not. This may lead into the next question, but once Buddhism as a religion gets mixed up and integrated with power structures, social power structures, then things often go badly wrong. Yes, absolutely. So let's go ahead and ask that next question, which is this.

Whether materialist or not, one thing that Marxism and Buddhism seem to share is a dialectical approach to understanding and apprehending the world. Contradiction, of course, is the engine, if you will, of dialectics. So contradiction, too, is present in both worldviews. Can you talk about this in the role that dialectics and contradiction play in both of these traditions? I mean, first of all, contradiction means many different things.

in marks and angles dialectics is essentially to do with a conflict between classes or between different kinds of social arrangements which drives change and of course what happens that the base also affects what happens in the superstructure

so that's the Marxian view of dialectics, Marx angles view of dialectics you don't find anything that's similar of that in Buddhism explicitly. But what you do get is coming back to this view of Protegasama Pada, the way that things are essentially connected by their place in the causal chain. And, you know, dialectics in Marx and Engels is a causal process

in which various social laws about conflict play that play their part. and the Buddhist view of Prachita Samapada can be seen as a kind of generalisation of this of understanding the sort of the tensions in the natural world completely generally in a way that bring about potential conflicts I mean let me give you just one example everything you do is the result of many causes

and has many many effects now if you're looking at the big picture whatever you do, some of those effects are going to be good and some of those effects are going to be bad because the world is untidy. So you might want to say that what you do, the things that your effect have this dialectical relationship, you can't do the good without the bad or the bad without the good.

Okay, that makes action difficult because you've got to figure out how best to act, even though the effects don't all work on the same side, as it were. So, as I say, you don't get anything explicit in Buddhist thought, which is sort of dialectical in the Marx-Engel's thought. But I don't think it's hard to see cognate ideas in a sense. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very interesting sort of development there

in a certain interplay. One of the things that I hear certain Buddhist teachers, talk about is acting virtuously without worrying about the consequences because as you were talking about multiple causes and multiple effects, you can never fully know the consequences of any given action of what you do. But by following the noble eightfold path, you can act in a way that is virtuous and you can never know the consequences, but you can know how you're behaving in the world and at least take account of that. And I think that kind of blends in with what you were saying there. But let's go ahead and move on. You brought up, you bring up in the text, of course,

anarchism. And this is something we haven't talked about. You know, we're more of a Marxist podcast, but I found this part very interesting and worthwhile, especially in part two. You bring up anarchism, the state, and bottom-up versus top-down approaches to socioeconomic and political transformation. Can you talk about this, what anarchism might contribute to this discussion and what benefits and drawbacks might come with a bottom-up approach? Yeah. So, maybe this is where I would diverge most significantly from standard Marxist groups

but go back to the first international it was it turned into the conflict between Marx and Bakunin a lot of this was driven by personalities but there was a significant point of difference between them I mean they're both agreed on

roughly how capitalism works and its punishness and so the debate was how you should change things. But the anarchist view was always that, let's put it the other way around. The Marxist view was that to change things, you need some kind of sudden change, you need some kind of power structure run by the cognizanty,

who would then run things for the good of humanity, not themselves. And the anarchist critique was always, look, once you set up a power structure, then it's a feature of power structures that even if they were set up with the best will in the world, they start to run things for their own benefit. As, you know, the British politician, Lord Acton said 100 years ago, 150 years ago, power corrupts, an absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And one thing we have seen in the last 150 years, I guess, is, in a sense, Bakunian's predictions coming true about systems that started off called themselves as Marxists, but established power structures, which then benefited for nomenclatured. So, I mean, the obvious example is Russia.

if you expect to change things for the better by setting up a power structure then almost certainly this is not going to work I think the anarchists like Bakunin and subsequent anarchists got this exactly right of course that makes change really difficult because there are no magic bullets you're not going to create a better society

a significantly better society overnight you can't do it, you can't expect it to be the top-down power structure. So you've got to work slowly by building up, bottom-up power, by building up, bottom-up, decision-making processes, communities, and so on. So change has got to grow from the bottom-up. Yeah, and I think I definitely, you know, plenty of space within Marxism for this emphasis on the bottom-up approach. I think there are tendencies within Marxism that, emphasize it more than others. I would just say a couple of things, and I'd love to get your

thoughts on this as well, because I'm coming from a Marxist perspective here, anarchism seems to have the limitation of being unable to challenge capitalism and imperialism on a global level, precisely perhaps, because of this emphasis on complete bottom-up processes that often result in sort of localism. You know, anarchists have taken over. over territories, perhaps, or cities, like in the Spanish Civil War, but have been unable to challenge capitalism, imperialism, on that global scale like Marxism has, with all of its warts and tragedies and errors and mistakes. Marxism has been able to do that, and anarchism hasn't.

So I wonder what we can learn from the, and I think in your book you actually make room for this, so we might end up agreeing, the dialectical relationship between top down and bottom up. So somebody from an anarchist perspective is not going to necessarily like revolutionary China under Mao. But I think one of the things that Mao did precisely because he saw the bureaucratic malaise and the revisionism of the Soviet state is that he was trying to actively continue the revolutionary process through this bottom up approach and this top down approach. So of course we think Maoism, we think top down, but we think cultural revolution we think bottom up the great leap forward we think bottom up now of course those things

came with plenty of negative baggage this is a revolutionary and messy process but i think in something like that historical moment you see at least this attempt to do both and i think if you just try to do the bottom up and totally you know move off the board any role of the state or any role of a of an organization or vanguard party you're going to run into errors and if you do the opposite mistake of completely doing top-down and imposing your will on people, you're going to see the obvious mistakes of that form of authoritarianism. So do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, look, there are several points there. The first is you say that Marxism can critique capitalism from the top-down, and anarchism can't. Now, top-down attempts to challenge

capitalism have failed, at least in the last 150 years. The Soviet Union, collapsed and has now reverted to a very brutal form of capitalism. China is a capitalist country. So they haven't really challenged capitalism from the top down. That said, as I indicated, it's really hard to change things from the bottom up. There's no magic bullet. It is going to be a distributive process. So you don't expect it to happen the same way all over the place.

Because, you know, for example, Bangladesh is in a very different situation from the United States, which is a very different situation from South Africa, for example. Situations on the ground are different, and you've got to, you know, work with what you've got there to produce functioning, distributed, democratic collectives. But, of course, the hope is that these groups will know about each other, will learn from each other and will gradually grow organically into something which does replace capitalism. And final thing about using top-down power structures, there have been some anarchists who've said, as long as you've got a top-down power structure, you should not cooperate with

it. You should destroy and let things evolve naturally. I think that's probably a recipe for disaster. We're currently in a world with big top-down power structures. And that doesn't mean we can't use them to do good things. So, for example, there have been times when governments have, well, take the British Atlee government after the Second World War. I mean, it introduced the national health care system. It nationalized the railways and the power structure. It got rid of university fees, or it's gotten paid and so on.

did a lot of good things. So where top-down power structures can do good things, let's make use of it. Let's do the things that the pipe-down power structures can do. But in the end, if you expect the top-down power structures to help you, it ain't going to work. I mean, nearly all of the working-class gains of post-World War II Britain have been clawed back in the post-Sathe years. So in the end, you've got to white ant.

power structures. That white anting is a term that may not be familiar to Americans. It's an Australian term where there are things called white ants which get under a house and sort of chew it away from within. So you've got to work at white anting, the top-down power structures, producing them with something more democratic. But that doesn't say you can't use them where possible. I mean, the danger, of course is that when you're working within the top-down power system you can be corrupted by it and you've only got to look and see what's happened to

the British Labour Party in the last 30 years, you know, Blair and company. So this is I mean, this is there's no magic bullet but we know that top-down power structures have singular problems

and though they can be used they've got to be destroyed in the end. That's why it's gotten rid of in the end. Yeah, I certainly agree with that and there's lots there that I agree with as well. And including, I think we both share this, you know, whatever flavor of socialist you are,

experimentation is the name in the game and things that have come before. We might be able to learn from their successes and failures, but, you know, any future attempts to build socialism are going to have to be by definition, open-ended, experimental, and new. And so I do agree with that. I would just gently,

you know, just because it's fun to do this once in a while, gently push back. You said top-down attempts to challenge capitalism or overthrow and have failed. Certainly, that seems to be the case where we are right now. But, you know, I would also argue that bottom-up attempts have failed as well. The difference being that these movements as flawed as they were in the Soviet Union and revolutionary China and beyond many other countries as well, you have certain things like the Cold War between, you know, the West and the Soviet Union. That generated in large part something. like the New Deal, these gains that, like here in the U.S., that were gotten primarily, or at least

in part, because of the threat of a Bolshevik-style revolution and the rhetoric of the USSR talking about the working class and the corruption and exploitation of capitalism. So you see these reform movements in the West being generated by the presence of the Soviet Union. And one of the things that happened when the Soviet Union failed and collapsed is precisely the rise of neoliberalism through Reagan and Thatcher. So you see without that counterbalance, the critique, as flawed as the USSR was, especially in its later years, it did sort of create the conditions in which very capitalist countries like the U.S. and other Western European countries made huge reforms in the face of that challenge.

And once that challenge fully disappeared, we see this brutal reemergence of what we now call neoliberalism, which is this capitalism without social concerns, you know. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, look, I agree with a lot of that. I mean, the demise of the Soviet Union was a complex process. And the early Soviet Union did not have it easy for all the reasons you pointed out and others. And that certainly helped it to go off the rails even faster. And it has had the consequences that you mentioned. Now, the question is, without these things, would it have gone smoothly? And that may be the point where we disagree, because I think the psychology of power

is such that once you set up a power structure, it starts to run for its own good. And you see this in any organisation, nearly every organisation, whether it's an educational organization whether it's a political organization whether it's a religious organization there's something that corrupts about power and so I think whenever you get a top-down power structure you're heading for trouble until you change people and the way their minds work you know and maybe there's a lot that can be learned from Buddhism in this regard maybe if you had people who had managed to destroy ego through Buddhist practice maybe, you know, being in positions of power wouldn't corrupt, but, you know, that's a long

way off. So, I mean, the psychology of power is something that Marxism has not thought through very carefully. Neither actually has Buddhism, neither actually has science. You know, people are complex organisms, and there's an awful lot we don't understand about them, but it's pretty clear from if you look at what happens in the power structures we know they have a tendency to corrupt. And I certainly agree with that, and I think the history of Marxism shows that that is a problem that needs to be worked against. And I think the best

ultimate remedy for that is that precisely that dialectical relationship with bottom-up democratic structures built in already. Of course, with the Soviet Union being established, the first thing that happened was the attack on it by 14 different imperialist powers. And so in the context of being under, you know, insane pressure from the outside attempts to, you know, gut your government and overthrow you from the world's most powerful countries. It can become harder to experiment openly with these bottom-up democratic processes and can kind of solidify things toward, you know, top-down and away from bottom-up. We saw, I think, even in the Russian Revolution, we saw these Soviets, for example,

these attempts at building this bottom-up structure that might have been an interplay with a more top-down structure. but because of subsequent events, you know, some out of their control, some within their control, these things veered away from that. And that was an ultimate failure, and we should absolutely learn from that. But your basic point, that power structures seek to over time proliferate themselves or, you know, simply perpetuate themselves for their own sake. And those that are within that hierarchy, want to defend their positions in that hierarchy, and thus the hierarchy itself, I think are completely on point in something that, you know, Marxists generally

really need to continue to wrestle with. Yeah, but let me point out that. One of the first things that happened was, as you say, a civil war, invasion by various European and American interests. But another thing that happened very soon was the destruction of the Soviets. So the Russian Revolution was not Bolshevik inspired. It was a generally popular revolution forced by discontent. of all kinds of things, one of them being, you know, the First World War, but also the

corruption of the Tsarist regime and so on. The establishment of Soviets were not a Bolshevik thing, but the Bolsheviks moved in and decided they wanted to take over these things. So effectively, they moved in and started to control the Soviets, effectively getting rid of these democratic, well, democratic. I mean, they weren't completely democratic because they didn't having many women in and, you know, so, but put all those things aside, the Bolsheviks constructed a central government by taking over and getting rid of the collective decisions of organ making. So, you know, the centralization of power was something that Bolsheviks were very much involved with. Sure, yeah. And I think, you know, just looking at the legacy of Russia

in itself, or even the history, the cultural history of China. there aren't these long-running democratic strains in those countries. And so whatever movement takes over, beat on the right or the left or something else, they tend toward these sort of cultural historical momentum that's already built up. And so, I mean, for many reasons, including that, building, let's say, socialism in a country like the U.S., for all of its anti-democratic and profoundly anti-democratic structures and flaws, at least has this ideological or rhetorical idea. a commitment to democracy and democratic structures. Thus, any socialist construction here would,

I think, be fundamentally different because of the historical and cultural and ideological momentum of a society that's going to have to come into play, and that's going to determine in large part the form that those socialist experiments ultimately take. But you know, you and I could talk about this for a very long time. It's clear that we have some differences, but it's fascinating to hear your your opinions and I appreciate it. The differences of opinion are good because no one is sure that they've got things right and is by disagreeing that we work through the limitations of all of our views and hopefully come up with something better.

But I mean, just coming back to socialism in the United States, I mean, the left has actually been very strong in the United States, a period of time in its history. You know, if you read Chomsky, for example, on sort of working class structure in the 19th century, if you read about the sort of the union movements in the 1920s and so on, the left has been strong in the United States. But what's happened is that because of that, and, you know, as a period in the 1930s and 1940s, when capitalism was very scared of the left.

And what it did was create the modern ideological means, which now dominates American thinking. And this was a very deliberate policy to change the ideology of the country. And so undercut the left-wing movements. Yeah, absolutely agree with that. Yeah, we have many episodes on the IW and the early Communist Party or even movements of feminism and the Black Panther Party and these forms of liberation movements taking place in the 60s and 70s, there's been many times in the U.S. where the left has been, you know, ascendant and then is met with brutal reaction backed by

the full power of the state time and time again, and we've got to find a way to get around that for sure. Yeah, and violence was involved in these things, but let me come back to the importance of ideology because the battle was won largely by taking control of people's minds, not control of their bodies. You know, capitalism does that when it needs to. but generally speaking it doesn't need to because if you have control of people's minds you don't need to control their bodies absolutely

so one more question before we wrap up here is where do you because we've talked about these compatibility these complementary aspects of these two traditions the ways in which they dovetail or can reinforce one another but even after this analysis do you still see any tensions or even possibly irreconcilable

aspects between Buddhism and Marxism that should be noted well this takes us back to the fact that There are many different kinds of or interpretations of Marx and many different sort of species of Buddhism. It also takes us back to the question of how much of Marx you've got to agree with to be a Marxist and how much of Buddhism you've got to agree with to be a Buddhist. There are obviously certain Marxist views which are incompatible with certain Buddhist views

and I wouldn't pretend otherwise. So it's really hard to generalise. But let me just say that, Buddhism is a living tradition. It's changed markedly over two and a half thousand years and it's now moving into the West and it's morphing in the process and lots of aspects of Buddhism

which were acceptable in an Asian culture and context are not going to be acceptable to Western thinkers. So one of these is is simply feminism. Buddhism has been as patriarchal tradition as any other world religion,

yet the kind of people who are attracted to Buddhism in the West are less likely to accept patriarchy. So this is going to go, I think, from Buddhist religion in the West. Another thing is that Western cultures are much more

scientifically oriented than cultures in the East have been, although of course that's changing too. But there's a kind of what you might call a cosmology or if you want to make say a morocardia mythology that goes with lots of groups of, lots of Buddhist groups in the East, you know, views about rebirth, for example, and celestial beings, etc., etc. And there are some Western Buddhists who endorse these. But generally speaking, these views don't sit comfortably with Western thinkers.

And I think that some of those aspects of Buddhism are going to disappear as Buddhism moves into the West. So that's a way of avoiding your question, I'm afraid. But let me just say that Buddhism's always been a work in progress. And Marxism should also be a working progress. because we've learned a lot and had Marx come back and write capital now, I've no doubt it would be a very different book. You know, we've seen globalisation in a way that Marx could not, would have been surprised by it, I think.

We've seen the working class movement corrupted in many places. we've seen ecological destruction which Marx could not have imagined so if you're writing now I don't think he'd have changed his mind about the way that capitalism works

but he'd have said a lot more about these things which we know a lot more about so I mean Marxism shouldn't be a kind of fossilised dogma we've learnt from the history of the last 150 years and it's up to us to improve Marxism

and if you like improve Buddhist philosophy so I mean this this is a work in progress on both sides so if they're incompatibilities this is something that people who believe in elements of both can talk about and try and figure out where we should take these views yeah and I really like your point about these both of them as these evolving processes of course Marxism itself originates technically within Europe but then quickly spreads throughout the rest of the world and takes on certain characteristics of

global South countries or East Asian countries based on what their socio-political needs and histories are and the reverse has happened with Buddhism of course it started in the Indian subcontinent moved across to the rest of East Asia into China and Japan and Korea and changed in the process as it ran into those cultures. And, you know, Taoism mixing with Indian Buddhism creates something like Zen Buddhism in Japan as it travels through China. And that's fascinating. And you can see a similar process happening with Marxism as it moves into different countries and gets articulated and elaborated in ways that are specific to those cultures and those histories. And so I really think that that's one place where you and I totally agree is the emphasizing of the open-ended

evolving and experimental nature of both of these traditions as processes. Another thing, though, and just one more thing I would add to, the possible, you know, tensions that could exist here is there's probably a way in which Buddhism could be used in the way that, you know, Marx was talking about in that famous quote of religion being the opiate of the masses. Now, that quote is often, you know, decontextualized and made to seem much harsher than it actually is. I think the full quote is a quite compassionate statement about religion that Marx offers. but there's a way in which you could practice a practice like Buddhist meditation that seeks to, you know, orient yourself or accept the way things are and kind of look inward and not be concerned with what's going out out there and kind of use Buddhism and meditation as a salve on the, you know, the abrasiveness of the world around you and kind of lead you inwards as opposed to outwards.

And so I could see that being a possible tension. Do you think that that sounds right? yeah no that that's true I mean when Marx was talking about the opening of the masses he was talking about the ideology of Christianity the Christian church the Christian church's

power structures and so on and any power structure can form this function and Buddhist power structure is absolutely no different so I mean you've only got to look at the way that for example the whole all the Japanese Buddhist sects, including the Zen sects, supported Japanese militarisation in the Second World War.

So once you get power structures, whether they're secular or religious, they can change the way that people think in a way that the founders might well not have liked at all. And of course, the same goes for the Soviet Union and Marx. So Marx, I'm sure that Marx couldn't have cared one iota for Stalinism. So, yeah, I quite agree that religion could be used in a very unhealthy way, and if that religion could be Buddhism. And this is a feature of power structures in general, I think. That said, it doesn't have to be used that way, but there's a real danger that it could be.

Yeah, definitely. And in my somewhat limited, but also probably more expansive than the average American's engagement with certain Buddhist communities, in the United States, it can certainly often does take that form where people, you know, turn away from the world and turn inward as a sort of defense mechanism, if you will, and use spirituality as the sort of justification to do that. But yeah, your point about Stalin is an interesting one. I would be, I'm perpetually fascinated with what would happen if Marx came back and got to, I mean, as a trenchant critical mind, right, he's always going to be critical of everything, what he would think of the various forms. and there are many that Marxism have taken after his death. It would be a fascinating but ultimately unknowable counterfactual. In any case, Graham Priest, this has been a wonderful conversation. It's a wonderful book. I got so much out of it.

I highly, highly recommend it to anybody who is interested at all in Marxism and Buddhism and what they might offer each other. And it's been absolutely delightful to speak with you today. The last question I have for you is, what do you hope readers ultimately take away from your book? And where can they find it online? I guess if you just Google the title, you'll find it. I mean, it's published by Routledge, so you'll find it on their website,

but of course you can find it on Amazon. What do I hope that people will take away from it? Well, look, I'm an academic, a philosopher, and we're a pretty esoteric bunch. We tend to write for each other. But when I wrote this book, I try to write it in a way that you don't have to be a philosopher to understand. So I wrote it because I wanted to reach a broader argument

than just academic philosophers. I wanted to advance the debate on people's understanding of the world and are thinking about how we push it in a more rational and humane direction. Now, I don't have all the answers. No one has all the answers. As we've discussed, you know, we're going to have to advance things in a sort of a tentative direction learning as we go along and if people take away from the book

the understanding of the significant failures of capitalism in particular how ideology really messes us all up and allows capitalism to thrive that's important and then we all face problems in going forward and figuring out how the best way to do that. And if I can force people, if reading the book helps people to think about these issues, come up with good ideas, discuss these ideas, try implementing these ideas, then I'd be really happy indeed.

Beautiful. Well, I will link to the book and the show notes as well as to your website and anything else you want me to link to. You could always just send me an email before we release it. I'll make sure they're in the show notes. But once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really, really appreciate your insights, and I appreciate your willingness to come on and talk with me today. Thanks, Brett.

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