The slogan "We are the 99%" emerged during the Occupy movement, thanks in large part by David Graeber, to point to the extreme disparity in wealth between the elite and everybody else. Increasingly though I think the notion of the 1% v.s. the 99% should be imbued with a sense that the issue is not …
On The Contradictory “Practical Ontology” of Capitalism and the Paradoxical Ontology of Process Buddhism
I think there is an implicit ontology baked into capitalist social relations, and it's a contradictory "practical ontology" that simultaneously upholds a dualism between subject and object, self and other, the intensive and the extensive, mind and matter, etc. while unfolding through time as a tendency towards a monist subsumption of the former (subject, etc.) …
Capital, Buddhism, and the Open-Empty Future
Financial capitalization has a certain uncertain relationship to uncertainty. On the one hand, it has to be somewhat certain about the future income stream it expects from its present investments, otherwise there would be little point (from the capitalist's perspective) to engage in the productive activity; it would be deemed too risky. On the other …
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On the Mutual Non-existence of Capitalism and Communism
If "Full Communism," understood as communism brought to its highest measure, is truly superior to all "logically prior" modes of production which historically precede it (such as slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism), then it must "inclusively transcend" them all, which is to say that it must contain them all as partial abstractions of itself, which …
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Science & Religion Beyond Capital & Labor
The forces of science and religion, do not just have the potential to be, but have always-already been, in a constant mutual interaction since the genesis of either concept. In fact, to the extent that the present definition of the one makes absent the present definition of the other, they are known to be mutually …
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On Reified Cognition and Class Society
At absolute polar extremes of the radical left we have on the one hand, an anarchist primitivism which considers the erection of class society and the development of technical civilization as an unjustified contingency initially resulting in the death of freedom and the birth of domination, and on the other a communist prometheanism that considers …
Nirvāṇa/Saṃsāra; Communism/Capitalism
A general strategy that a Madhyamika (agent of the Middle Way, i.e. a meddling middler) may deploy once they identify a pair of contradictory forces at play, is neither to affirm the possibility of resolving the contradiction in those terms, nor to abandon those terms, but to see how those terms actually compliment each other. …
Beyond Ownership: notes on Commoning
True wealth is an expression of what “we do together” rather than what “I have myself.” For what “I have myself”, or what one has in possession, are inert things separated from the flow of life, susceptible to destruction by time or contingency, which is why this expression of wealth tends to be “stored” or …
Divine Persistence: Notes for a Post-Atheistic Conception of God
God does not exist. Nor has God ever existed, and nor will God ever fully come into existence. God is neither the efficient nor the final cause independent of the actual world. God can never be found and never will be found. God does not exist, but it can be said that God persists in action to …
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Unity-In-Difference
There is no essential difference between Ultimate Reality and Conventional Existence; between Emptiness and Appearance; between Being and Becoming; between Universal and Particular; between Feminine and Masculine. While they can be thought independently, in actuality they arise interdependently, with their cooperative interplay creating this fantastical flux that we call life. It is through their union, …
