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Let’s call the Marxist socioeconomic system that is grounded in Buddhist metaphysics Compassionate Marxism. The focus of Compassionate Marxism has to be on ahimsā – nonviolence. Only then can Marxism be immune to totalitarian and authoritarian abuse, and hence no longer prone to repeat its history. Whether Marx himself taught that revolution is necessarily violent, or if there is a possibility of a peaceful transformation, is a vexed question. During the 1844-49 period, Marx held that violent revolution is indeed necessary, given the stringent structure of the bourgeois system. But if it is the economic circumstances that necessitate a turn towards something communist, and not totalitarian, then nonviolent revolution might be possible given the right political interventions.

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They say all beings have the Buddha nature

and that means you folks right here

these persimmons too, these chestnuts we’ll share

Budding, blooming, becoming

Act as if all beings as your relatives, parents, children

because they are

get together and take back the land you work

what is unborn cannot be owned

but it can be shared

this dharma is without high nor low, rich nor poor, masters nor slaves.

inherited will, embodied, the incessant heartbeat:

freedom, freedom

ripening, struggling, being

they put you in a noose for your love, your doubt and your rage

for teaching the children, comforting the oppressed and suffering

and refusing to bow

to the powers of this world

falling, dissolving, decomposing

and so you drop your body once again plunged into the stream

tossed and tumbling

scattered and scarred

open, weary

smiling

another foolish dharma seed

something which Law

cannot name, cannot claim and cannot hang

Some thing which is No thing at all

going, gone, gone

what we always were

are

will be

boundless blue sky

in other words: love

&

because this love is selfless

because this love is change

because this love is pain

because this love is empty

it is foolish, it is free,

gone beyond

thus:

gone beyond beyond

another world is possible

because it is possible

It

will

be

…the fruit, the seed,

and the fool

always returning to

THIS

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Técnicas humildes para el decrecimiento

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History tells us that this is our greatest hope for the kind of green Marshall Plan that a crisis such as the planetary ecological emergency calls for. This is not a time for lukewarm reform or ‘proportionate responses’. ‘The crucial problems of our time no longer can be left to simmer on the low flame of gradualism,’ wrote the historian Howard Zinn in 1966. If we are to bend rather than break over the coming decades, we will need rebellious movements and system-changing ideas to coalesce with the environmental crisis into a Great Disruption that redirects humanity towards an ecological civilisation.

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(...) the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.” Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.

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from Journal for the Protection of All Beings, City Lights, Whole Earth Catalog, 1978 https://wholeearth.info/p/coevolution-quarterly-fall-1978

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Why should we entertain the conventions built up around art that require it to be fundamentally exceptional, credentialed, and toothless? What would it take to speak the truth through art without that element of plausible deniability engendered by self-othering, self-objectifying practices?

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The denaturalization of given listening through psychoacoustic theorization and endlessly refining computational modeling opens up to new, ever-transforming domains. After all, we do not yet know what the ear-brain complex, synthetic or organic, can do. We don’t know what multiplicitous impressions it can create—what hallucinatory experiences might await?

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Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski argued that magical beliefs and superstitious behaviors allow people to reduce the tension created by uncertainty and help fill the void of the unknown.

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All of us routinely fabricate plausible-sounding explanations that have little, if anything, to do with the actual causes of what we think, feel, and do. This must be so for reasons of energy cost, which forces the bulk of what happens in the brain to be outside consciousness.

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The pressing yet overlooked need for transitioning away from fossil-fueled comfort would benefit from re-examining architectural interventions from before mechanical comfort became the normative way of conceiving habitable spaces.

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The issue of comfort seems to have placed us in a vicious cycle of seeking out the next innovation in sustainable-but-comfort-producing technologies that bring with them yet more matters to care for, not to mention more so-called externalities to contend with. It is high time to turn the equation around and make caring for Earth’s environment a precondition of comfort: its very necessity, not an afterthought.

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 Is art capable of being a medium of truth?

This question is central to the existence and survival of art because if art cannot be a medium of truth then art is only a matter of taste. One has to accept the truth even if one does not like it. But if art is only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. In this case art can be treated only sociologically or in terms of the art market—it has no independence, no power. Art becomes identical to design.

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In one faux-innocent speculative sentence, Haraway here disappears billions from her own 11 billion+ projection of this century’s likely peak homo sapiens headcount. 33 Elusive as its explicit appearances turn out to be, in the final analysis, the numerical goal of population reduction undergirds and drives this book – not just its pivotal chapter (chapter 4 – “Making Kin”). 34 As she repeatedly drums home, don’t make babies – as much as make kin – becomes the take-home injunction for the reader of Donna Haraway. The vision of trans-species Gemeinschaft that emerges is not so much post- as anti-human.

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We all experience the wisdom of anger when we see how society mistreats people. When we have an honest insight into our own neuroses and vow to change. When we are inspired to say no to injustice and fight for something better. This wisdom is a source of strength, fearlessness, and solidarity. It can drive positive change.

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...cuando se refiere al capitalismo no habla de “los mercados, el comercio o los negocios, que ya existían miles de años antes de que llegara el capitalismo”, sino del problema central de este modelo: “que la producción esté controlada por el capital; que las grandes corporaciones y entidades financieras, el 1% que posee la mayoría de los activos invertibles, sean los que determinan qué tipo de producción hacemos”.