Sadhguru and Karl Marx: 5 Points
The video that I am referring to is this one: https://youtu.be/IcYHMo7XhDY. It is a five minute video titled “Why Marx’ COMMUNISM is failed idea : Sadhguru”. And so, I decided to make a list of some of the things he says in the video and explain why they are wrong. There is so much more to be said about everything in this list, but I have tried to limit myself for a short article here. If things seem incomplete, this is why. I might go on to write another article on it sometime, one that includes his other comments on communism.
Five Quotes from Sadhguru that I will Question:
- “You know the great experiment: Karl Marx”
- “[Marx thought] if you bring communism…that means everybody lives according to their needs, their fantastic lives; this can only happen when human beings have great regard, respect, and love for each other. But he thought he could do it politically. And what a mess.”
- “Why communism failed is because Marx might have known so much about the economy, but he failed to understand human nature.”
- “He openly spoke about it: the first country to become communist will be United States.”
- “Those who have don’t want to share. Those who don’t have want to share. Terrible idea it became.”
I. “You know the great experiment: Karl Marx”
Okay, I want to get it out of the way that I have put this in for ridicule, of course. Sadhguru starts his piece on communism with this sentence. Perhaps if Marx had been an experiment, it would have been the greatest show of capitalism; enter Mark Fisher:
‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.
But also, enjoy this quote from Slavoj Zizek’s book The Relevance of The Communist Manifesto:
II. “[Marx thought] if you bring communism…that means everybody lives according to their needs, their fantastic lives; this can only happen when human beings have great regard, respect, and love for each other. But he thought he could do it politically. And what a mess.”
But it needs to be explained with:
III. “Why communism failed is because Marx might have known so much about the economy, but he failed to understand human nature.”
Sadhguru started this section by speaking of Marx as a compassionate human being. Let’s not go to personal attributes, but think of his intellectual attributes glued to Marxism. This is a quote by Marx from Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.
Sadhguru does not mention capitalism, ownership, exploitation, or materialism in his five minute speech, rather he just mentioned this one line: “he thought he could do it politically.” He explained Marx’s ideas first as though they were more of an emotionally charged philosophical attempt at a revolution. But he then followed it up by saying that Marx did not understand human nature.
In his early writings, Marx talked of conscious suffering and its role in distinguishing human consciousness. But in Capital, Marx is not very forgiving about it. He rather says that humans need to realize and suffer. Marx also believed that the road to communism will involve suffering: it requires self alienation. Communism at its ultimate form is humanism, which will strive to melt the conflicts between nature and man, and man and man. Thus, human nature and politics (to use what Sadhguru uses to sum up the political and economical) for Marx were extremely intertwined, ultimately if not the same. Read more about it here from Erich Fromm.
It is rather hard to understand why Sadhguru posits that the revolution will come through ‘regard, respect, and love for each other’, when Marx was very open to the idea of taking up arms where necessary:
We must make clear to the governments: we know that you are the armed
power that is directed against the proletariat; we will proceed against you by
peaceful means where that is possible and with arms when it is necessary.
IV. “He openly spoke about it: the first country to become communist will be United States.”
No, Marx did not say that the US will become the first communist country. What he did say, however, was that a communist society will emerge from enhancements in the productive forces that include technological advancements. And yes, this did not happen, but also the communist countries that were existing did not emerge from a last great revolution.
The relevance of Marx does not need to be only where he was right. Let us come back to Slavoj Zizek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto.
As I’ve written in the last paragraph, productive forces have to do with the technology but also the labor power that we use to produce our society. And the relations of production are the relations between people that are a part of this process, such as the capitalists and the laborers. The technological advancements mentioned earlier will help in throwing the balance of the relations of production. Zizek here introduces the Internet of Things and the Collaborative Commons.
More serious is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin calls the ‘collaborative commons’ (CC), a new mode of production and exchange that leaves behind private property and market exchange: in CC individuals are giving their products for free, releasing them into circulation. This emancipatory dimension of CC should, of course, be located in the context of the rise of what is called ‘the internet of things’ (IoT) in combination with another result of today’s development of productive forces: the explosive rise of ‘zero marginal costs’ whereby more and more products, and not only information, can be reproduced for no additional costs.
These developments in forces of production (technology) worries Zizek. He sees it as something that will allow the state and the capitalists to gain full control over its people by owning the ‘general intellect’, that is, by controlling Collaborative Commons. This is already happening through giants like META and Google. Marx did not see a future where intellect can become privatized property.
But while the general intellect is privately owned by capitalist giants, we the people also have access to it, we cannot separate our intellect from ourselves. This is where, for Zizek, exploitation takes on the face of renting. We move away a little from what and how Marx focused on exploitation.
Industrial wage laborers were exploited through the structure of payment (wage). We are becoming exploited through the structure of purchase (rent).
And Zizek says that with the rise in renting (for example, a subscription to Prime or becoming a member on Medium, where there are exclusive benefits or content for people who pay), the hold of state on its people will also increase. The state might provide certain general intellect that will be necessary for everyone to rent out.
When, due to the crucial role of general intellect in the creation of wealth through knowledge and social cooperation, forms of wealth are more and more out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual and relative transformation of the profit generated through the exploitation of labour — its transformation, namely, into rent appropriated through the privatization of general intellect.
What Marx said about capitalist exploitation, then, does not stand true today. The laborers are not alienated from the conditions and the means of production (like me writing this blog on the laptop that I own). But what they are in fact cut off from is the sphere of a general intellect that is not privately owned and regulated by capitalists and the state. Thus, the statement about technological advancements helping in the emergence of a communist society does not hold true because even after the imbalance caused in the relations of productions by the advancements, it is only leading to the capitalists and the state having more control and hold over us.
But why exactly am I trying to explain how what Marx said cannot be mapped onto the current world? Here is a comment on it by The Dangerous Maybe:
Even if some of Marx’s concepts do not immediately apply to our world in the way they used to apply to his, they still hold open a conceptual space that can help us come to understand the details of our particular circumstances. We can understand our times precisely through understanding how they differ from Marx’s — this is just one way The Communist Manifesto is still relevant.
Point is, we cannot be lazy.
V. “Those who have don’t want to share. Those who don’t have want to share. Terrible idea it became.”
Communism is not about sharing. At a linguistic level, the act of ‘sharing’ still recognizes ownership of some sort that is at the private level. The word ‘communism’ comes from the Latin word ‘communis’ which means ‘shared’ or ‘common’, thus the word itself reveals that it is not about altruism. It is about the common people having shared benefits of labor, where the means of production are owned by all.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
