Upstream - Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

When you think about the philosophies and practices of Buddhism and Marxism, you might not immediately think that they have much in common. However, you might be surprised at how much overlap and complementary resonance there actually is between these two rich and beautiful traditions.  In this conversation, we’ve brought on Breht O’Shea, a Buddhist practitioner and Marxist political educator based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Breht is the host of the podcast Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the podcasts Red Menace, Guerrilla History, and, most recently, Shoeless in South Dakota. You might remember Breht from when he was on the show about a year ago to talk about revolutionary leftist theory.  In this conversation, we explore how both Buddhism & Marxism offer helpful pathways to liberation and provide a spot-on analysis of the root causes of suffering. We also explore some of the potential tensions between Buddhism and Marxism, as well as what each tradition can learn from the other. And we end with a powerful invitation to embark on the path of the Bodhisattva Revolutionary to both end the internal and structural causes and conditions of suffering and to bring forth the systemic changes necessary for the transition to a socialist and eventually communist economy based on liberation, equity, and justice for all.  This interview was inspired by an episode of Revolutionary Left Radio titled Dialectics & Liberation: Insights from Buddhism and Marxism where Breht read a speech he gave at Arizona State University on the topic of dialectical materialism, Buddhism, and Marxism. Definitely check that episode out when you’re done listening to this — it’s a great complement to this conversation. Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Mount Eerie for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns. Further Resources: Upstream: Revolutionary Leftism with Breht O'Shea (In Conversation) Dialectics & Liberation: Insights from Buddhism and Marxism, by Breht O’Shea on Revolutionary Left Radio  Revolutionary Left Radio Red Menace Guerilla History Shoeless in South Dakota This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

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please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, inward liberation of the human mind from sort of self-imposed limitations and delusions and the incessant fear-produced need to cling on to things that we like and to run away from things that hurt us. And then, of course, Marxism, in simplest terms, wants to seek humanity from dividing us up into classes. There should be, ultimately, no poor people and super rich people. There should be, ultimately, no poor people and super rich people. There should not be a world in which we have billionaires that own everything and don't have to work, who live exclusively off the toil of other human beings,

while huge masses of people suffer, live lives of extreme precarity, are brutally exploited for the billionaires' classes and the owning classes' profits, and who live half-lives, deformed lives, so that the richest among us can live lives of utter luxury and opulence and unknown comfort. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. When you think about the philosophies and practices of Buddhism and Marxism, you might not immediately think that they have much in common, but you might be surprised at how much overlap and complementary resonance there actually is between these two rich and influential traditions. In this conversation, we brought on Brett O'Shea, a Buddhist practitioner and Marxist political educator based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Brett is the host of the podcast

Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the podcasts Red Menace, Guerrilla History, and most recently, Shoeless in South Dakota. You might remember Brett from when he was on the show about a year ago to talk about revolutionary leftist theory. In this conversation, we explore how both Buddhism and Marxism offer helpful pathways to liberation and provide a spot-on analysis of the root causes of suffering. We also explore some of the potential tensions between Buddhism and Marxism, as well as what each tradition can learn from the other. And we end with a powerful invitation for all of us to embark on the path of the Bodhisattva

Revolutionary, to both end the internal and structural causes and conditions of suffering, and to bring forth the systemic changes necessary for the transition to a communist society based on liberation, equity, and justice for all. This interview was inspired by an episode of Revolutionary Left Radio titled Dialectics and Liberation, Insights from Buddhism and Marxism, where Brett read a speech he gave at Arizona State University on the topic of dialectical materialism, Buddhism, and Marxism. Definitely check that episode out when you're done listening to this. It's a great compliment to this conversation. And now, here's Della in conversation with Brett O'Shea. Well, Brett, welcome. So happy to have you on for these two topics, Buddhism and Marxism.

Maybe let's start with an introduction. If you could introduce yourself, particularly in relation to the two topics of our conversation. Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm a genuine fan of Upstream, not only the podcast, but your presence on social media as well. It's always an honor and a pleasure to be able to collaborate and engage with your work in particular. So thank you so much for having me on. For those that don't know, my name is Brett O'Shea. I host Rev Left Radio and co-host Guerrilla History and Red Menace, all three of which are basically Marxist left-wing political shows with different emphasis, different forms of analysis, different co-hosts, etc. Sort of addressing the tradition of Marxism

from, you know, kind of three distinct angles. Red Menace is more about theory, Guerrilla History more about, you know, history, and Rev Left is like a casting a wide net, touching on whatever I find interesting, trying to bring more people into the left, etc. In relation to the two topics of Buddhism and Marxism, I would honestly say that they are like the core constitutive ideological approaches that really are the pillars of my worldview. Buddhism, I got into Buddhism as a late teen after a pretty intense mental health crisis and subsequent existential crises where I was just really struggling with the big issues of life. Who am I? What is this life about? What is the meaning of life? What happens when we die? And those questions were really haunting me. And so I went on, as many people do, a search to try to find something that can begin to address

those issues at the level I wanted them addressed at. And I had just through actually like friends and acquaintances and random life events, gotten into and introduced to the basics of Buddhism and became very, very interested in it in my late teens and early twenties. And that's how I got into that. And then Marxism, it really arose just from, you know, if Buddhism is me concerned with the inner world, my own suffering, my own existence. Marxism was the highest and best articulation of a politic that fit with my life experiences and my personal values. And so it was really my late teens, early twenties that these things were completely separate,

but I was into them and diving deeper and deeper spent my entire twenties not becoming – I don't ever say I'm an expert on anything. But just as somebody genuinely interested, learning and wanting to teach others what I've learned, got into Buddhism and Marxism separately and through my engagement with both as my understanding of both traditions deepened. in which they dovetail or some interesting connections in their overall worldviews that I had always, or since then, you know, was really interested in. And then I got this wonderful opportunity to write an essay and give a speech at ASU combining these two topics. I was explicitly asked by them, could you do something where you talk about Buddhism and Marxism and their relatedness? And I was like, this is what I've been preparing, you know, my intellectual life to do. And so it was a nice little occurrence. And so I wrote out my thoughts that I had, you know, been developing for years. And my interest in both traditions wrote those out in my episode on Rev Left called Dialectics and Liberation,

if anybody's interested. I'll certainly be drawing heavily from that. But I've also had many more discussions on Rev Left with people in religious and spiritual communities, because I think it's an important element that sometimes gets completely dismissed out of hand by Marxists to our detriment. And so I'm sure we'll get into some of that later. But that's kind of who I am and how I came to be interested in these two beautiful traditions. I am and how I came to be interested in these two beautiful traditions. Wonderful. Thank you. And yeah, it was Robert told me to listen to RevLeft, particularly because I was wondering about what dialectics was and dialectical materialism. And he was like, okay, well, here's a primer from RevLeft Radio. And I was listening. And it was that moment when

I was listening, when I was like, wait, this sounds so much like Buddhism, like the codependent arising of all things. And so I too had this kind of like, wait, this feels very familiar. So I really appreciate the way that you're linking the two and distinguishing and also what can the two learn from each other? It's a great, great prompt. Great question. So let's dive in first to the synergies or connections. So what do you see as the overlaps or the synergies, the connections between Buddhism and Marxism? Yeah, I think they're very different traditions arising out of very different cultures in very different time periods of human evolution. So, and, you know, historically, there's been some conflict between them. We can think about, you know about Zen Buddhist kamikaze pilots in World War II, the Chinese communist versus Tibet and that whole situation.

So it's like not only on the face of them they're so different but even just recent history, they seem to be at odds. So it's sort of counterintuitive for many people to think of these two things as having a relationship. But I think they have several relationships, but the core of their synergy, the core of their overlap is, in my estimation, their dialectical worldviews. So for those that don't know, of course, this is a very big topic and I'm not going to be able to fully flesh out the entirety of dialectical materialism here. to fully flesh out the entirety of dialectical materialism here, but I have many episodes on Rev Left and Red Menace, walking people through the complexities of dialectical materialism and historical materialism for those that really want to dive deep into it. And of course, in my dialectics and liberation speech, I also give a pretty good primer, I think, on what dialectical materialism is. And I use evolution via natural selection to sort of highlight the dialectical worldview. But in short, a dialectical approach to the world,

particularly as articulated in the Marxist tradition, is one that apprehends all phenomena as fundamentally in motion, as interconnected and in relationship with all other phenomena. This idea that higher levels of existence are rooted in and emerge from lower levels. You can think of humans evolving out of lower primates. That contradictions between and within phenomena propel their evolution. And that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws which are knowable. So this idea in particular really gives rise to what in philosophy is called a process philosophy, meaning that process philosophies apprehend all phenomena as processes instead of things or objects, right? They're not metaphysical, static things or objects or platonic ideals, but that all phenomena, including you and I, including the cosmos itself, is in a constant perpetual state of process, of unfolding,

of development. And so in that way, both Buddhism and Marxism are process philosophies. And the dialectical worldview within Marxism is well known and understood. It's a core feature of the tradition. In Buddhism, they don't use words like dialectics, right? These are phrases that come out of European philosophy, German philosophy in particular, out of Hegel. Buddhism existed thousands of years before Hegel or Marx existed. But some core ideas within Buddhism are certainly dialectical. One, and there are many, but some that I highlight are no self or emptiness, which is this idea within Buddhism that nothing, including us, has a permanent, unchanging essence. There is no unchanging, abiding self or thing at the center of our subjective experience, and there is no permanent essence in any given seemingly static object or

thing. And of course, the other idea within Buddhism that I highlight is dependent origination, which is this idea that everything, including you and I, including the cosmos, including the earth, everything you can think of is the product of near infinite causes and conditions coming together to allow something to exist. I mean, there's several, but we can talk about biting into a peach, right? On one level of experience, it is a static thing in your hand that you bite into. And this is a peach and then you digest it and that's it. But what gave rise to that peach? Well, through the concept of dependent origination, we can see that in order for that peach to exist at all, there had to be fertile soil. There had to be storms that bring in rain.

There has to be a that bring in rain. There has to be a proper amount of sun. And then when you go back and say, well, how is the sun there? How do storms happen? You begin talking about, you know, cosmology, physics, gravity. And so you can quickly, just from starting from something as simple as a piece of fruit in your hand, elaborate to the entire universe. That in some sense, the entire universe that in some sense, the entire universe comes together to produce this thing here and now, which in and of itself is a process because a peach, it starts as a seed, it grows, it becomes ripe. If you don't eat it, don't consume it. It decays and goes back into the earth as organic material. If you do consume it,

it goes through your bodily processes, which extracts nutrients, giving you more life and energy, etc. So this idea of dependent origination is a really powerful and core feature of Buddhism. And outside of Buddhism, I mean, we can also think of a political context in which we can understand dependent origination and its power of analysis because we can think about what we're told about billionaires, about rich people. What are we told in capitalist society? We're told that people are rich because they work really hard, they grind it out, they're talented or they're geniuses who through hard work, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and determined grit amass an amazing amount of wealth. But we know as socialists

that all of that wealth and the very existence of a billionaire in and of itself is dependent upon a near infinite amount of causes and conditions. There is no billionaire without an army of workers and consumers. There is no wealth without countless generations of human toil by people that will never know their names and never remember their faces. In order for one man to amass all of that wealth and then to turn around and tell us he did it all by himself is flagrant, fallacious, absolutely absurd by logical standards, by Marxist standards, and certainly by Buddhist standards through this concept of dependent origination. So you can see here that both Marxism and Buddhism, very different traditions, very different cultural contexts, but both are basically advancing a worldview that is inherently dialectical. And because of that, you can take certain Marxist ideas and make more sense of them within Buddhism and vice versa, which perhaps we'll get into here as this conversation develops.

the phenomenon that is sitting here, the countless coordination of the many beings that are teeming on the surface of my skin and my gut, but also the phenomenon that is colloquially referred to as I or Della, right? And that really nailed that point home for me. And also this phrase interbeing from the late teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, that's another way to think about this, that we all inter-are with everything else. And then, yes, this assumption that capitalism is somewhat ahistorical, right, that it's really, it doesn't have a very future thinking point of view, like I'm thinking of indigenous wisdom traditions and seven generation thinking, right, doesn't consider the effect or the impact on the seventh generation from now. but it also right now doesn't seem to really appreciate the deep pain and suffering that has gone into the great wealth accumulation and the structures that we are

currently in. So I really appreciate that. I've heard a reframe that is money is commodified grief. What if we saw money as commodified grief? To me, that speaks to the historical processes of those who have so much wealth that it comes from both primitive accumulation, but also processes of ongoing accumulation that, of course, come from deep suffering. So just, yeah, uplifting things that you're saying. I think that's incredibly profound and very on point. And again, I was talking about the billionaire, but what we see more broadly in our society is this hyper individualism, this worship of the self, and this idea that everybody is a truly unique individual that gets what they deserve. So if you're poor, people won't come out and say it these days, but basically the idea is you're not morally worthy.

You didn't work hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You didn't do the right things. And so the position you're in is wholly and exclusively a product of your own failings. And the opposite is true of somebody who's rich. They got there because they worked really extra hard. They're way more talented. They apply their talent in the right way. And so we can see how capitalism just re-entrenches this idea of all of us as individual little islands unto ourselves that either make it

or break it. But in reality, when you look at you or yourself, what are you really? You are a product of everybody you've ever come across. You're a product of your culture, the ideas that it gives you. You're a product of the genetics of your parents. You're a product of your early socialization. gives you you're a product of the genetics of your parents you're a product of your early socialization there is nothing about any one of us that is disconnected from the panoply of causes and conditions that gave rise to us and so for us to then say this is all mine or that's all your fault it's silly and marxists know this because we shift from individual failures to structural analysis and buddhists know this because they undermine the very idea that there's a separate abiding self that is called I that actually exists. They undermine that entire idea and show how all of

us are processes and dependent on dependent origination. So yeah, I think there's so much there. You could have an entire discussion just about the implications of dependent origination yes and i'm also hearing just the power of systems thinking you know thinking systemically both in terms of time but also in systems so let's go into the aim the aim of buddhism and marxism they both share it of liberation so what does, liberation, to each of these paths or to each of these philosophical practices? Yeah, and that's another synergy that I point out, of course, the dialectical worldview, process philosophy, but also this idea that both of these traditions in very different ways, but in complementary ways, seek liberation. liberation so for buddhism there's an inner liberation and for marxism there's an outer liberation and we also understand through dialectics the need to bring the outer and the inner together in the unity of opposites right there's no night without day there's no up without down there's no inward without outward so marxism can definitely account for an analysis of the

outward and buddhism can definitely account for an analysis of the inward, but they really shy away from doing the opposite. You don't hear Marxists talking about the self and the eye and the individual's experience. And you don't see Buddhists talking about the structural development of capitalism out of feudalism, right? Because they're fundamentally aimed in different directions, but I like to bring them together and see how there's a totality of liberation that can be achieved by these two seemingly different traditions. So in Buddhism, what do they mean by liberate? What's liberation within Buddhism?

It can certainly mean sort of different things. And by necessity, there's a bunch of different sects and factions within Marxism and Buddhism like there is in any tradition. and Buddhism like there is in any tradition. So I'm speaking very generally about these traditions overall. And most of what I say is going to be shared by most factions within either one of these two major traditions. But Buddhism seeks to liberate human beings from the unnecessary suffering that stems inevitably from our constant desiring, our identification with our egos, and our desperate clinging and attachment to things that, by their very nature, change and dissolve away. We are always talking to ourselves in our heads. We are always grabbing at pleasure and trying to push pain away. We have this nagging sense of

always being not quite satisfied, never quite complete, and so we spend our entire lives leaning forward into the future and backwards into the past, searching for something external to us that will finally make us happy and fulfilled, and trying to protect ourselves from all the pain and tragedy and despair in our lives by building up our psychological defense mechanisms and reifying our sense of separateness. So we're always extracting ourselves from the present moment, what is right here and right now, in anticipation for what's coming or in nostalgia for what we once had. So in a sense, we're a mess and the world is a mess, according to Buddhism, because we're a mess and every individual suffers in this way. So Buddhism seeks to liberate us from our delusions,

our self-inflicted suffering, our desperate clinging and craving, and the faulty idea that we are located somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears looking out at a world that is fundamentally not us and acting as a trembling little commentator to our own lives. So to be liberated from all of this is to genuinely fill ourselves viscerally, completely at home in the world, completely at home in our own skin. It makes us feel in the highest levels of Buddhist liberation to be the very cosmos we think is outside of us, to neither cling to pleasures nor run from pain, but to live our lives in the present moment in deep equanimity and to accept life and death as they come on their terms with love and compassion and joy in our hearts.

So there is this deep sense in which Buddhism is seeking to liberate us from the delusions of mind, of ego identification. Of this idea that we are put into a world that is fundamentally not us. And we're quaking and shivering and talking to ourselves in our heads until we're ultimately annihilated. And that is a scary thing. And we all sort of internalize that in various ways and through Buddhist meditation specifically, but through the Eightfold Path more generally, Buddhism gives us a path toward liberating ourselves from all the unnecessary suffering that comes from those things that I mentioned above. And the Eightfold Path, of course, is the path to get there.

So that is Buddhist idea of liberation and that is the Buddhist path to liberation. Now, Marxism, as I said earlier, it seeks to liberate humanity as a whole outwardly from the exploitation, the irrationality, alienation and injustice of class society in all of its forms. Marxism seeks a human civilization

wherein human beings are no longer divided into rich and poor, into exploiter and exploited, into master and slave, into king and serf, into worker and boss, but rather a truly human civilization wherein equal and free human beings can cooperate in order to benefit all and to increase the quality of life for all people. So in a sense, Marxism aims toward a world in which we can be fully human for the first time, perhaps since primitive communism. Historical materialism within Marx, talking about the path to get to this liberation. Historical materialism is the scientific approach to societies and their evolution over time in the Marxist tradition. So it's this attempt to study the development

of societies through history by understanding the material economic base of that society, how humans come together to produce and reproduce the necessities of life. That's the core locus of analysis for Marxists trying to understand societies and their evolution over time. And then dialectical materialism. If historical materialism is the scientific approach of Marxism, dialectical materialism is the sort of philosophical framework through which we think through historical materialism, where we can generate social analyses, we can strategize movements and build organizations dedicated to engaging in class struggle with the hopes of

ultimately transcending this current mode of production and ultimately class society altogether. And the way we do that is engaging in class struggle consciously. That's the path. Though the form that that class struggle takes, of course, will differ dramatically between different societies at different times in different contexts so you know sort of summing up what i'm saying here buddhism is interested in the inward liberation of the human mind from sort of self-imposed limitations and delusions and the incessant fear-produced need to cling on to things that we like and to run away from things that hurt us. This running away and clinging doesn't get rid of suffering, it exacerbates it. It's pouring gas on the fire of suffering and Buddhism shows us a way out. And then of course Marxism in simplest terms wants to seek humanity from dividing us up into classes.

in simplest terms, wants to seek humanity from dividing us up into classes. There should be, ultimately, no poor people and super rich people. There should not be a world in which we have billionaires that own everything and don't have to work, who live exclusively off the toil of other human beings, while huge masses of people suffer, live lives of extreme precarity, are brutally exploited for the billionaires classes and the owning classes profits, and who live half lives, deformed lives, so that the richest among us can live lives of utter luxury and opulence and unknown comfort. You know, these are the things that Marxism is seeking to liberate us from. And it does so not by appealing to the morality of how bad things are or coming up with ideas, sitting in your armchair about what the world should be like, but by actually analyzing the real world, analyzing contradictions in the current state of things and seeking to, using those contradictions, move from the way things are now toward the way things could be scientifically, methodically, organizationally. And so, yeah, I guess that would be my answer to that wonderful question. Yeah, thank you. And just to highlight one phrase you used, you said something like, Buddhism helps us in liberation from unnecessary pain.

from unnecessary pain. And I just want to highlight this idea, this distinction between suffering and pain in Buddhism, because there's this idea of the double arrow sutra, this idea that imagine you're hit with an arrow, that first arrow is pain, it's unavoidable, it's there. But suffering is the second arrow that we stick into the first arrow. And that is our perception or view on certain things. So just to distinguish that Buddhism isn't trying to liberate us from all negative sensations, feelings, experiences in life. In fact, it accepts that there is change, there is death, and there is aging or sickness, right? Like those are inevitable parts of life. But what Buddhism is trying to liberate us from is the mental

formations or habits or clinging ways of thinking that we put on top of those sensations on top of that pain. And so as you were speaking, I got this sense that in some way to Marxism might appreciate that there are natural ways that we have pain in our lives. However, it makes a clear distinction of the ways that are human made, capitalist made, that is suffering. So that the division, the alienation, the exploitation and the inequality, that is not inevitable. That is totally changeable. We can have an alternative system. So I just wanted to, yeah, appreciate that difference between pain and suffering in both Buddhism and Marxism. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point. And like the two arrow is a great metaphor

for this. And, you know, the original arrow, the first arrow is the pain, right? The pain of life, these things, this isn't the necessary suffering of being an embodied sentient being in the cosmos. We're going to deal with pain. It's not this, Buddhism is not this idea that you'll never have a negative experience ever again. Once, you know, it's about reorienting, not the outside world and reality, but your relationship to it. And interestingly, especially with like physical pain, just as an example, and perhaps you

could speak to this as somebody who has practiced meditation. I find when you're incredibly mindful of something like stubbing your toe, right? What happens when you're walking around your house and unexpectedly you slam your pinky toe into the side of your couch? What happens is this huge rush of sensation flooding up to the brain. And what do most of us do most of the time? We resist that pain by clenching our face, screaming out so our partner knows we're in pain, grabbing our foot and hopping around like an idiot, right? That's what we do because there's- Holding our breath. Holding our breath, exactly. A bunch of different things that we do because there's the initial pain stimulus, and then there's our rejection and our urge to get away from that pain, which is this

second arrow of suffering that exacerbates the pain and the suffering. But in physical pain in particular, I find that the other option, especially if you're keeping up a Buddhist practice, because momentum within the practice, I think is important to be able to meet things as they arise. You can start being interested in the sensation of pain. Now you slammed your toe into the couch and your body is being flooded with signals that say you need to start grabbing your foot and hopping around screaming cuss words. But if you can hold back on that reaction and just become curious of what actually is this pain, what is this sensation? You can start to break pain apart. You can start to see its constitutive parts. And what is really there is just intense sensation. You know, there's not really, I mean, there is pain, of course,

that is what we call those intense sensations. But if you can disassociate that concept and just sort of address and look at and face the sensations themselves, I find that you can even turn physical pain into at least an interesting sensational experience. And that right there is not eradicating the sensations, but is refusing the second arrow, is refusing to suffer by rejecting and trying to wiggle out of and escape the pain that's there. And you can radically reorient your relationship with that physical pain as mere sensation instead of trying to rub it away, get away from it through all the extra suffering that we do in that moment. And so I've found that that is a really interesting part of my meditative practice of seeing pain as a merely intense sensation and being curious about it as

such, it can be a very powerful, you know, sort of a practice to engage in. And I've wondered if do you have any experience with doing anything like that? You know, I do. And I'm also thinking though around how Marxism can be a way to feel into or notice or honor the more societal or social pain. Like I'm using the same analogy that you're doing. For example, I remember learning about the concept of alienation and then having a friend who was hired as a designer. He did all this design work and then he was let go. And his employer said that he couldn't bring any of his designs or

have like a portfolio demonstrating anything that he had designed while working for this person. And I was like, oh, that is alienation. You were alienated from your artistic, creative, you know, labor endeavors. And so that was a moment of pain and marxism gave me a word to be able to give in that moment to this person to explain his experience and that can be a path to liberation this is why one thing we're interested in is liberation psychology this idea that we can feel into our societal pain but when we're given a name for it like class consciousness or alienation or exploitation or understanding why it is that we're feeling a certain way and pathways to alternatives, the lens of

Marxism on our pain can be very liberating. I absolutely love that. Yeah, I love how you're taking the other side of what I'm saying about Buddhism and applying it to Marxism so wonderfully. And you said something earlier too about necessary versus unnecessary suffering that I think is really interesting. And you attached it to capitalism. I just kind of want to flesh that out a little bit because there is the necessary suffering of life. We've talked about it in the Buddhist context, but just in the existential context,

what is life? Well, we're born through no choice of our own into an incredibly imperfect world, right? The birthing process itself is painful and traumatic. We're socialized into pretty rotten societies, at least if you take the last, you know, thousand years of slave societies, feudal societies, capitalist societies. We are born into a world in which everybody that came before us, our parents, our grandparents, Life already is suffering. And this life and death thing and our grappling with it is a necessary part of our existence that can never be washed away. It can never, we can never get out of the fact that we are finite creatures in a finite

cosmos. And we one day will die after watching everybody we love die. That is horrific, but the true state of things at some level. Then on top of that necessary suffering in the capitalist epoch is all this other suffering that nobody should have to put up with. It's not necessary. It is imposed socially, culturally, systematically on us. And that is the suffering of not being able to get health care because you can't afford

it. You know, the suffering of having a low self-worth because you live in a society with minimal class mobility and you were born into a lower class family. But our society tells you if you're not rich and successful and famous, then your life is a failure. And you internalize that not as a structural problem of capitalism, but often people internalize that as a character flaw, as I did not live up to my potential. I did not make it. And you struggled to pay bills, all the indignities of having your house foreclosed on, losing your job and your sense of self-esteem

and your ability to provide for your family, right? And then you go and turn on the TV and you're dazzled by this spectacle of people in Ferraris and Bugattis with $450,000 watches like DJ Khaled, more money on his little wrist than you will ever have in your entire life and your kid's life combined at any one time. This is the unnecessary suffering imposed on us by a class society. And of course, I'm talking about capitalism, but think about feudalism. Think about ancient slave societies.

But think about feudalism. Think about ancient slave societies. All class societies divide people up into categories of exploiter and exploited, as I was saying earlier, rich and poor, etc. That entire structure of imposing class divisions on humanity causes so much unnecessary suffering, whether it's feudal, slave, or capitalistic. And so I think that that dichotomy between necessary and unnecessary pain and suffering has a lot of traction, whether we're talking about Buddhism or we're talking about Marxism. You're listening to an Upstream

Conversation with Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of Red Menace, Guerrilla History, and most recently, Shoeless in South Dakota. We'll be right back. The feeling of being in the mountains Is a dream of self-negation To see the world without us How it churns and blossoms Without anyone looking on on It's why I've gone on and on And why I've climbed up alone But actual negation When your person is gone And the bedroom door yawns There is nothing to learn Her absence is a scream

Saying nothing Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about Back before I knew my way around these hospitals I would like to forget And go back into imagining That snow shining permanently Alone could say something to me true and comforting comforting Thank you. That was Emptiness Part 2 by Mount Eerie. Now, back to our conversation with Brett O'Shea. And so moving from the experience of necessary and unnecessary pain, let's move to the causes. Because I think Buddhism and Marxism really do offer kind of an understanding of why.

Why are we in these certain systems or structures that are bringing about so much unnecessary suffering? So can you tell us about the three poisons in Buddhism and how it also relates to a Marxist view? us about the three poisons in Buddhism and how it also relates to a Marxist view and looking at this in the relationship between the causes of the unnecessary suffering that we are experiencing under capitalism. Yeah, absolutely. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well. But within Buddhism, the three poisons are known as greed, ill will, or hatred, and delusion. So let's do greed, ill will, and delusion. These are the three poisons, and they are features of the unenlightened human mind. And when they are present in the mind, and importantly, when one is identified with them, they wreak havoc on an individual psyche. They bolster the ego delusion and create suffering for all involved. And while

Buddhism talks about this stuff almost exclusively in terms of the mind, your own personal struggle with your insatiable greed, your desiring and wanting things, and like the ugliness that comes out when you have a chance to grab what you want, even if it's at the expense of somebody else, or ill will in the way our ego finds people to hate and be disgusted by and want to hurt and delusion all the ways in which we're ignorant about how reality actually is and how that ignorance of Buddhists say, are susceptible to these poisons, that when you get a bunch of people who are susceptible to these poisons together in a society, they can be instantiated not just at the individual psychological level, but also on the collective, social, political level. And so it's my argument that capitalism in many ways institutionalizes, not creates these three poisons, because the Buddha was talking about these three poisons being present in the human mind, you know, 2,500 years ago, but institutionalizes them, attempts to naturalize them, and then by doing so exacerbates their intensity on both the individual and the

collective levels. So, you know, what is greed under capitalism, if not the urge to profit at all costs, right? When you're a CEO of a company, structurally, you have a fiduciary responsibility to increase profit margins for your shareholders as much as you possibly can. And if you start getting sentimental about how you're treating the workers or how the environment's being degraded, profit margins for your shareholders as much as you possibly can. And if you start getting sentimental about how you're treating the workers or how the environment's being degraded by the poisons you're producing, and you start thinking, maybe we should pay our workers a little bit more and maybe we should put a few more of our costs and our revenue towards blunting our terrible environmental impact, what's going to happen? You're going to be fired and replaced.

And so I think it's important when we're talking about greed in the Buddhist context, this is an individual problem, the person that's greedy, but structurally, this has been institutionalized. So it's not just an individual problem. And if an individual in a certain position of power within the capitalist hierarchy decides that he wants to fight against the greed in himself or in his company, he will be easily replaced. And this is why structural analysis is more important than moralism. A lot of times you'll hear liberals say, oh, Jeff Bezos or inter-billionaire here is so greedy. You know, if only we had a less greedy person that was more willing to share his revenue with

Amazon workers and all of this, like this greed of this guy is terrible, but it's not the guy. Of course the guy is also greedy, but he's incentivized by an entire structure to be as greedy as fucking possible. And if you're not super fucking greedy, you don't maximize profits at all costs, you will be replaced. And then there's ill will. What is ill will? If not in the capitalist context, the colonial expansion, the genocide, the slavery, the primitive accumulation that it took to build capitalism, the closing off of the commons, and then the modern day imperialist wars and brutality and bombings going on right now as we speak that maintains the domination of the American empire and its fundamental value of protecting corporations and their ability to profit at all

costs. This going out to Iraq, destroying an entire country, turning it over, ruining countless lives, going over to Afghanistan, doing the same, all for nothing, really? What was gained by humanity, by the people of Iraq, by the people of America, by these adventures? Absolutely nothing. What is delusion, if not the ideologies that come along with capitalism, right? Marxism tells us that the ruling ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. This is what we mean Marxist wise when we say ideological conditioning, ideological propaganda. We are given the values and ideas of the ruling class and then internalize them as our own. So you have a guy who's making $30,000 a year arguing against raising taxes on the rich or against universal health care, not because it's actually

in his direct financial interests, but because he has been conditioned with an ideology of our rulers who want to profit more than they want to take care of human beings. So these are just some examples. We could sit back all day and think about the ways in which delusion is instituted in capitalism, the ways in which ill will, I mean, one way that jumps to mind right now, ill will is like the intense competitive nature of the free market where you and your coworkers are alienated from one another and you're pitted against one another for who's going to get that promotion, right? Or you're in the unemployment line and somebody comes up to you and says, Hey, I'll hire you at my job because my workers are striking. They want $15 an hour.

That's disgusting. I'll pay you $10 an hour to come scab. It's better than the $0 an hour you're getting. And so in so many ways, and these are just a couple that jumped to mind, we're pitted against our fellow human beings for the interest of other people that are not us or the people we're pitted against. It's for the interest of a ruling class that profits from us being pitted against each other. Another thing that jumps to mind, racism. You cannot

understand class divisions and capitalism within American society in particular without understanding the role that racism has played historically and presently in pitting working class desperate people against one another for the benefit of people that are not us. And so in all of these ways, these things are already present in the human mind. They manifest through history in different societies and different cultural contexts. We can make this exact same argument for the feudal context, right? Greed, ill will, and delusion. How did those things manifest in feudal monarchies? How did they manifest in ancient slave societies? Wherever there's class society, these things are institutionalized in one way or

another. But we live under capitalism, and so those are some of the ways that capitalism institutionalizes those three poisons. Now, from a Buddhist point of view, and this is some of the limitations of spiritual communities in particular, is you'll often hear, and I'm sure you've heard this too, yes, but you can't go out and do anything really about it. The best thing you can do is not attack necessarily the institutions that incentivize these things, but to root it out in your own mind. And there's some truth to that. If you did the work of, you know, following the Eightfold Path and uprooting greed, ill will, and delusion within yourself, you're going to be a better neighbor, a better partner, a better father, mother, husband, wife,

friend, community member. You might even inspire a couple people in your life to do the same. Wow, this transformation and so-and-so was so profound. This meditation has changed their life so much. Maybe I'll get into it. And even if you don't, you're creating good vibes and good karma to the people around you because you're not dominated by greed, ill will, and delusion. But that has limitations. And the idea that everybody or most people in the world are going to sit down and meditate their way to uprooting greed, ill will, and delusion in enough time to save humanity from the environmental apocalypse or nuclear war or whatever, I think is incredibly sort of naive. And so it's important in its own right, but you have to have both sides of that puzzle. We have to not only work on uprooting those things within ourselves through meditation

practice, but we also have to find ways to challenge those things on the institutional, structural and collective levels through political organization and struggle. And so this is another way in which concepts within Buddhism can be made sense of within Marxism and even elevated in some way, taken from the individual realm, which is still essential, but also applied to the external outward realm, which is crucial for a totalizing approach to uprooting these problems. Now, if you're a Marxist and you want to attack these institutions, the way that these things are institutionalized, but you yourself have not

even thought about doing the internal work to uproot greed, ill will, and delusion within yourself, right? That's going to dramatically impact and limit your ability to take these things on institutionally, you know, collectively and politically. So these are two sides of a very important coin. And if you only do one side of that coin, you're doing good in the world for sure. It's better than doing nothing. But in and of itself, it's incredibly limited. And so I see this bringing together of these two traditions, you know, and using these conceptual tools within Buddhism and Marxism to complement one another and to fill out the other side of that picture. And so with greed,

ill will and delusion, I think I've sort of articulated how that might make sense. But again, there's so much more to be said on this front. a sedentary and very like quiet reflective path. And, and really, you know, this time on earth is really calling us to get off the cushion and bring our spiritual practices into into action. And yet, I'm also thinking of the beautiful Robert M. Persig quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He says, if a factory is torn down, but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but systematic patterns of thought that produce that government are left intact, those patterns will repeat themselves.

So it is this interesting both and, the inner and the outer transformation that is necessary. And this brings me to one of the things that I kind of see as a, maybe we went over the commonalities and the synergies of Buddhism and Marxism, I see as one of the potential differences. And I'm really curious to hear what you think. So it's this idea that in Buddha's view, there's a real sense of equanimity, right? Equanimity in my mind is like seeing beauty in the microwave as well as the flower, like really holding things kind of with the impartiality, a lack of attachment and kind of appreciation for all things, but also, you know, being a quantumist to all things. And it also has a quality of loving kindness

to all beings. That's another element of Buddhist view is loving kindness. And the delusion part of Buddhism, the rooting out delusion is rooting out a sense of like othering, like separation and othering. And so then when I think of Marxism and at least some of the words and phrases that are used like class war, class struggle, right, it has a very oppositional frame. Like there is us and them. And, you know, there's the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, for example. So I'm struggling with how to tap into this Buddhist view of equanimity and loving kindness. And even what you said about how the billionaire, yes, they may be personally greedy, and yet the system is also that they're a part of is also reproducing or encouraging them to be greedy. So I'm holding that with this very,

very also helpful view of understanding who are capitalists and what is that separation and the very real class struggle so i'm just curious what you think about that dynamic i'm also thinking of a quote by the buddha hatred is never ended by hatred but by love and i'm just i'm like hearing that and and thinking of marxist texts and Marxist analysis. I'm just wondering, how do you see this tension that I've laid out? Maybe you don't or you do. And how do you reconcile with it? Yeah, great question. And I'm not going to be able necessarily to do an exhaustive answer, but I'll definitely give some thoughts and would love to hear yours as well. First thing that jumps to mind is under capitalism, everyone suffers. So there's

a sense in which, yes, rich people live lives of opulence and luxury and comfort, but we often see, and it's portrayed very well in popular culture, how when they get the money and the fame and the status that capitalism incentivizes them to get, they still so often find this yawning void within their souls that's still there. And it's extra scary and extra bad because you were taught your entire life that by getting fame and money and status, you can make that feeling of not being whole, of not being worthy or whatever, go away. And the neurosis produced by having insane amounts of money when in your very city, people are sleeping on the concrete in tents,

people are sleeping on the concrete intense crime is on the uptick society and the fabric of it is falling apart and your very role in that whether it's conscious or not create suffering within you if only the fear of one day this money being taken from you of one day the barbarians knocking down the gates and flooding into your gated community and taking all the things that whether you think about it consciously or not, you know, you didn't fully get in a just way, you know, and I don't want to, I don't like talking about this in the sense that I don't like to compare the neurotic suffering of the rich to the material suffering of the poor, but there is a way in which the insanity of capitalism makes everybody suffer in different ways.

So that's the first thought. So Buddhists are concerned with ending suffering. We should at least think about the suffering on all parts of that spectrum because it would allow us to feel perhaps some compassion on a human level for a figure within capitalism who is noxious. For example, and this gets to your point, can you feel compassion for Donald Trump? Can you see the Donald Trump within yourself?

Can you feel for a little boy Donald Trump who clearly did not get the love and validation he needed from probably his dad, but maybe both his parents, and whose ego was distorted in such a fantastic way that it produced the man we see today. A man with no real inner depth, no sense of connection to friends or family. Everybody is just a transaction to be used. Every assault is an assault only on the ego. The ego is the only thing that needs to be defended. And the more he tries to defend it, the more people hate him and attack him. Right now on one level, I can feel compassion

for that. I can feel the little Trump within me that is narcissistic as fuck, you know, that wants to give into every ego craving, um, that wants the validation of other people, but doesn't want to look like I need the validation of anyone, right? That person is within us, but it's brought to monstrous proportions in the figure of Trump. So, okay, let's say yes. Let's say yes. I can feel compassion, even love for Donald Trump. I can imagine him as a five-year-old boy who just wanted a fucking hug and wanted his dad to say he's proud of him, right? At the same time, look at the suffering he unleashes on others. Look how he takes his own suffering and puts it onto other people, right? Through these immigration bans, through the re-entrenchment

and resurgence of fascist groups and organizations, through the ideological conveying and dog whistling about who the real Americans are and who the non-real Americans are, leading to spikes in hate crimes and more and more suffering. So this is a figure whose internal suffering is not addressed, is not looked at directly, is projected out onto the rest of the world, and makes other people suffer. So on one hand, you can feel deep compassion and understanding for him. On another hand, you have to stop the suffering he's imposing. And I'm just using Trump as a specific figure, but you know, you can think about anybody throughout history or even today that has this impact on people. So then if you're totally in the feeling love and compassion for Trump, and you're not in

the, what about the suffering he's helping cause for so many other people? It's only one side of the coin, right? So with that in mind, I think that there is something to this idea of the dialectical unity of opposites. You know, it's precisely our love for others that pushes us into the fight against those who would hurt them, right? It is my love for human beings sleeping on the street that makes me want to go out and do whatever it takes to get that person a home, even if it means confronting and fighting with, maybe even going to war with other human beings, right? It's our embrace of class war is often out of love for other sentient beings. And this dialectical reality is brought to a sharp point with both

quotes from Mao and Che. You know, Che would talk about a revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. You know, communism is love in some sense. And what does Mao say? Communism is not love. Communism is the annihilation of the enemy. Communism grows, the power grows out of the barrel of a gun it is destroying our enemies that both of those things can be true at the same exact time and you have to ask yourself what suffering unnecessary suffering is being caused by this system and then once you figure that out what would it take to actively confront this system and when you say what does it take to confront the system?

What you're really talking about, what does it take to confront the people who have all the wealth and power and who make all the rules and who this unjust order, it solely or almost exclusively benefits them? What do we do about those people? Because they're not just going to one day wake up with compassion flooding out of their heart and hand over their billion dollars in the reins to political power to the working class. So look at the suffering capitalism and imperialism and colonialism cause around the world. Okay, that's terrible. It's unnecessary. We want to end that unnecessary suffering. And then the minute you start saying, how do I do it? You have two options. Well, it's going to be ugly. So either I'm going to not do it because I have this sort of a priori commitment to nonviolence and peace. So I'm just not going to engage with the political realm at all. I'll just turn inward. Or you say, I'm willing to

weaponize my love in the fight for justice. And I'm willing to take on other people who want to entrench this unjust system of suffering and impose misery on countless people so that they can live with as much power and wealth as they currently have. It is a tough issue, but again, you have to, I think, see it from both sides. So a great challenge for us is to try to hold both simultaneously. Can we love other human beings while we struggle against them? Can we relate to and even feel compassion for those who are totally lost and greed and ill will and delusion while at the same time challenging that greed ill will and delusion are we lost in our polarity or can we see the totality right we need darkness to appreciate light we need death to appreciate life we need

hate to appreciate love so we can play our role on the side of light and life and love without losing our place in the totality, without seeing the darkness within ourselves, the death within ourselves, the hate within ourselves, right? And so it might not be a perfect answer. There's contradictions are still going to exist in this realm. Different Buddhists and different Marxists will come to different conclusions about this question. But I believe something important is in this sort of attempt to hold both simultaneously

and to challenge ourselves on both levels. It's hard to think of having compassion for a Hitler, right? Even unthinkable, even disgusting to even utter those words. But it's even more unthinkable to not challenge that Hitler when he starts the Holocaust. And if that means putting a bullet in Hitler's head to stop the imposed misery, destruction, and annihilation of 6 million Jewish people, are you going to say, I can't do violence? Or are you going to say, hey, this is the real world. It's fucking messy. This fucking

asshole is causing insane misery and suffering for countless innocent people. And while I can be on some level compassionate and sympathetic with what turned him into this monster, it doesn't stop him from being a monster until we stop him. And so you can engage in violence with love in your heart. Maybe not always, maybe not all the time, maybe not even very often, but it's at least possible. And if that's a possibility, I think it's a possibility that we should think very deeply about. But again, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, thank you for that. And I do think this one thing you said about, you know, if one is committed to non-violence and peace

that it means that they turn inwards and i i do want to say that in in some very inspiring ways i have seen people who would call themselves engaged buddhists or engage spiritual people who turn towards non-violence in a more active way like i'm thinking about the self-immolation of the monk in Vietnam as an anti-war protest, or even more recently in April of last year, there was a man named Nguyen Bruce who also self-immolated in protest of climate change. And so I do think there are, maybe there's stages, maybe the efforts first are nonviolent, but not nonviolent as in

passive, but nonviolent as in active, if it's possible to prevent the bullet to the head of someone first. I don't know. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but I do find a lot of courageous actions of nonviolence in particularly the engaged Buddhist world. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it's a beautiful thing. I think if you can achieve your goals through peace, that is always and everywhere the preferred option. And there have been historical movements that have, you know, successfully sort of, I don't want to say, yeah, but kind of weaponized peace. You can think of the civil rights struggle, the MLK side of the civil rights fight that was

very dedicated to this idea that we're not going to fight back. We are going to be incredibly peaceful. They're definitely going to get violent. They're going to brutalize us and we're going to use our own brutalization. It's kind of like self-immolation on a lower level, right? We're going to let ourselves be hurt and beat up and sometimes even fucking killed. And we're not going to fight back. We're not going to meet hate with hate. We're going to meet hate with love. And that was a very effective movement. But importantly, it wasn't the only part of that movement. On the other half of the civil rights struggle, you had the Black Panther Party. You had the Black Liberation Army. You had the Malcolm Xs of the world, the Nation of Islam, these people who were ready to engage in violence

to protect themselves and their families and their loved ones. Malcolm X's house was firebombed. They threw a bomb into his baby's bedroom where multiple of his children were sleeping because they hated him, right? And so when you're met with that level of immediate direct violence against totally fucking innocent people only for the gall of saying we should be equal human beings. Peace and civil disobedience and nonviolent forms of protest can quickly meet their limitation. And in the case of self-immolation, I think that is a admirable, incredibly courageous,

sort of stunning approach to a problem. Like I'm not going to inflict this harm and misery on anybody else, but I'm willing to annihilate my own being to bring attention to this issue. But I have to ask at the risk of sounding callous, which I'm not intending to be, what did it accomplish? Did it stop anything? I mean, even in that last instance where the guy self emulated on the white house lawn

or whatever to end climate change, he was in the news for a day and then it went away. Nobody even barely even remembers. It was almost immediately memory hold. Nothing politically changed. Not a single drop of carbon was prevented from flying into the atmosphere. And so while it's noble, admirable, fascinating, I can't even imagine the courage and bravery and selflessness it takes to take a stand like that. There's also the question of efficacy, and that really has to come in with it. a sort of lukewarm liberalism, a sort of walking around with signs that the people in power are so protected, their power and wealth is so protected by the violence of the state that they laugh at the idea that a hundred or a thousand or 10,000 people holding signs, walking peacefully through

the streets is going to do anything. In fact, they don't even notice. They don't even look out their windows. It is so irrelevant to them and their day and their week and their year. It makes no impact whatsoever. Maybe in certain political situations with certain real democracies, people engaging in robust, peaceful efforts to overcome injustice can make headway. If we had a real democracy, perhaps we could do it totally peacefully. That would be our preference. I hate the idea of hurting people, of people dying, of violence. Look at the 2020 protest, Black Lives Matter. How many people were killed? You know, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, these names will forever be in my brain

as totally innocent human beings doing absolutely nothing wrong, gunned down by a racist, white supremacist, militarized American police force rooted in slavery, right? These are the injustices and the brutalities and the violences being inflicted on innocent people. And if you're going to only meet that brutality and that violence, that organized violence with mere peaceful, symbolic protests, I think in some instances it can work. In many, it can't. And I look at the current American situation, the current power and hegemony domestically of the violent American state, and I see how they respond to even a initially incredibly peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, they respond to it with rubber bullets

and tear gas and attack dogs and tanks in our streets. So if you're going to want to seriously commit to peaceful resistance, I get it. I think it's admirable. I think it's lovely. But you have to admit that if it's ever going to be effective, it at the very least also needs a certain group of people who share your ideals, except the part about not being violent. Because when you try to take power and money away from the most powerful, wealthy people in the world, they will meet you with violence every time. And if you're going to meet them with your hands in the air, you're going to get shot in the face. And again, I have deep love and appreciation and admiration for people who engage in that, but I think

there are deep limitations to it. And if you're really serious about changing this world, eventually when you get to a certain, we should do it as peacefully as we can. And we should never be the first to start the violence. But the moment you get too far, you will be met with extreme, insane violence. And you're going to have to at least think very deeply about how you and your organization and your movement is going to react to it. Having said that, there are a whole bunch of terrible things that come with non-peaceful protest and militant forms of

activism. It immediately escalates the violent sort of spiral. Good people are killed. Innocent people who might just be associated with your organization often get killed, right? With Black Lives Matter and stuff, there was like these hate crimes against black people, for example, not the people out on the street necessarily, but just because people were angry at the idea that black people in general were standing up for their rights would take it out on any random black person. And that's in the context of, you know, Black Lives Matter was both peaceful and militant and had both sides of that coin and innocent people catch the backlash often. So again, neither side of this coin is without its own specific deep issues. And again, I come back to this idea of granting legitimacy to both sides of that coin and to seeing how

one side helps bolster the other and vice versa. And then quickly on the question of violence in general within Buddhism, you know, what if you are just a classic example in America, this is all too classic and all too common, a mass shooter, right? Nonviolence. I don't believe in violence. I cannot hurt somebody else, but this person is actively hurting innocent people. So do I set aside my commitment, my laudable and admirable commitment to peaceful resistance and take this person out because they are hurting others? Or do I stick to my peaceful protest? Maybe stand in front of him. Maybe be one of his victims. maybe prevent him by

killing me. He doesn't kill an extra innocent person. But you can see how that has limitations and you can see how it would not be unjust to take out that mass shooter with extreme violence and prejudice to save others. And that is always the question of violence. That is always the ethical conundrum of violence is how do you not use violence against somebody who is so willing to use violence against people you care about love and who are totally innocent so this is this is a very complicated picture but again i go back to we need both sides of that coin thank you and i really just appreciate your the delicateness of this question and and really the nuances because it really is a complex question and yet very,

very alive for our movements and activism and also for thinking about how do we get to the future, the post-capitalist communist economic system that we want to have. So these are really, really delicate and great things to speak through. And so I want to ask about the Bodhisattva revolutionary, because it's also related to this. So this idea that you've offered in your talks is that combining, right, communist revolutionary and the Bodhisattva path. And so would you tell us about that idea and also frame it in terms of invitations for our listeners. Like how might someone listening start on this path or act on this path inspired by this transition, this change that we want to see?

Sure. Well, for this, I think I am just going to read directly from that essay. It's only a couple paragraphs. It's my concluding essay. But I really think I try to tie everything together very well and answer all your questions in one with this. So let me read this out and then I'd love to get your thoughts on what you think about this idea. And this is just an idea that I came up with when I'm thinking about Marxism and Buddhism and the ways they interlap. As my concluding sort of call to arms, if you will, I advanced this idea of the Bodhisattva revolutionary. So let me just read this

last part that I wrote about it and flesh this out. So today I've argued that Marxism can benefit from a sincere engagement with Buddhism and that Buddhism in turn can benefit from a sincere engagement with Marxism. I hope I've outlined effectively the primary goals of each tradition, the ways in which their philosophical orientations share a deeply dialectical lens, and the ways in which each tradition could benefit and deepen the other. To end, I want to leave you with an image, an archetype if you will, that synthesizes everything I've said here today into a template that each of us, insofar as we are more or less convinced of what I've been arguing for, can adopt and strive to fulfill.

This archetype is what I call the Bodhisattva revolutionary. Now, we all know what a revolutionary is. It is someone committed to confronting the injustice and inequality and suffering that are ubiquitous in class society and working to build a better, more just, more equitable, egalitarian world. The revolutionary is selfless, dedicated to the people, and shaking with indignation at every injustice. dedicated to the people and shaking with indignation at every injustice. Figures like Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Rosa Luxembourg, and many, many others jumped to mind. All of these people mentioned were also willing to pay the ultimate price for their vision of a better world.

All three of them were brutally murdered by agents of the status quo, of capitalism, of fascism, brutally murdered by agents of the status quo, of capitalism, of fascism, of imperialism. Their images are seared into our brains and we strive to contribute even a fraction of what they did to the project of building a better world. Now we must combine that with the image of the Bodhisattva, that figure within Mahayana Buddhism who, in one telling, is an already enlightened being who, out of pure loving compassion for other sentient beings, remains in the cycle of samsara and foregoes nirvana simply in order to save others. Now that version might be too ideal for many of us who are anything but enlightened, and of course I count myself among the unenlightened. The other version of the Bodhisattva is a little more realistic.

It is someone who is on the path towards Buddhahood and who commits themselves to dedicating their entire life and their whole being to the alleviation of suffering in others. The Bodhisattva is selfless in an even deeper sense than the revolutionary, because she seeks to actively dismantle the illusion of a separate self and uses the insights gained from that endeavor to better understand and thus help other sentient beings. Bodhisattvas set for themselves the impossible task of ending all suffering and helping all beings to awaken. They vow not to enter nirvana themselves until all beings can enter it together, hand in hand. By combining these archetypes, one Marxist and one Buddhist, we can create for

ourselves a well-balanced ideal to strive for. Instead of dedicating our lives to careerism, the accumulation of wealth, and the pursuit of high status within the capitalist framework, as we are trained to do, we reject all of that and dedicate our lives instead to alleviating the suffering of other beings, confronting courageously the forces of oppression and hate and greed, and toppling structures of domination and exploitation and suffering in order to build an egalitarian civilization rooted in interconnectedness, justice, truth, beauty, and solidarity. A world where no one sleeps in the gutters. A world where no one

goes without healthcare or food. A world in which no one goes without an education. And a world where no one suffers in totally avoidable and unnecessary ways so that others And that's kind of how I ended the speech and tied Buddhism and Marxism together into a practical template that any individual can strive to work towards. individual can strive to work towards. And I think, again, going back to this idea that we've been batting around this entire conversation of both sides of the coin, I think the Bodhisattva Revolutionary really embodies that idea of having both and, and using both to end suffering in all the unnecessary ways that it exists internally and externally. Yeah, thank you for that. And just to highlight some of the things from this conversation that I'm taking with me, one of them is, you know,

I really love what you said about that capitalism, in under capitalism, everyone suffers. And I think about the book, The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, and about this idea that under capitalism, everyone is worse off in terms of physical and mental health, in terms of drug abuse, trust, discordance with neighbors, violence, etc. And so it's this idea that we can do something different and that it would be better for

everyone. So that was a really heartening thing. And then I also recalled the Tibetan Shambhala warrior prophecy, as you were speaking about how the billionaire may be greedy, but it's really the structures that they are acting in that also encourages and enables their greed. In the Shambhala warrior prophecy, the Tibetan prophecy, they say that our weapons are mono-maya, they are made by the human mind, and therefore they can be unmade by the human mind. So capitalism is not necessary. It's not ever present, right? It can change, we can have something different. So not only can we have something different, but it would be better for all. And then finally, this Bodhisattva

revolutionary, really combining the two practices of Marxism and Buddhism is really saying, you know, while the Buddhism can help uplift greed, hatred and delusion within and also address the suffering that second arrow that we inflict on ourselves, we bring in Marxism to be able to address that second arrow that we inflict in terms of our social structures and institutions, again, not necessary. And also Marxism as a way to uproot greed, hatred and delusion societally, culturally. So just thank you so much for this beautiful combination of these two practices and what we can learn from them. Any last words? Yeah, all I would say is thank you so much for having

me on. I really appreciate this conversation and I really appreciated your insights as well. I feel like we could go for several more hours talking about some of this stuff. But the big thing I want to emphasize at the end here is that, you know, change is the only constant. What emerges from both Buddhism and Marxism is that all of life is nothing but a continuous cascade of relentless change. And why that is threatening to the status quo is because those at the very top of the capitalist world order want to naturalize it. They want to make it synonymous with human nature. They want to basically pretend that this is the end-all be-all of economic systems and arrangements. And while it might need some finagling around the edges, it might need some reforms here

and there, we've pretty much arrived at the end of history, economically speaking, and that capitalism is here to stay. But everything within Marxism, within Buddhism, within process philosophy, and within dialectics says that change is the only constant. And so we should never fall prey to these attempts to naturalize these fleeting ephemeral systems. And we should work with that idea in our head that change is constant, work toward the next change, the change out of capitalism and toward communism, that thing that we call socialism. And so I think that is something to definitely keep in mind going forward and to resist any attempt by anyone to naturalize

a fundamentally unjust social order. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of Red Menace, Guerrilla History, and, most recently, Shoeless in South Dakota. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Carolyn Rader for this episode's cover art and to Mount Erie for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie.

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