The McMindfulness Counter-Revolution

What can we learn from this bastardization of Eastern Mysticism?

NOTE: This essay is the script for my Video, The McMindfulness Counter-Revolution. It was a response to some of the criticism I got from previous videos that accuse me of advocating “self-help.” I address the criticism and actually analyze what I call the “self-help industrial complex,” but in this video I recognize that an extremely harmful industry does have something valuable to teach us and we shouldn’t discard all of it. As Bruce Lee once said, “Take what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely your own.”

A recurring critique of my videos is that I’m basically promoting self help, which is a strange critique given that in my first video, “Collective Improvement as Mutual Aid” I explicitly argue against individualism and I even put a name to the phenomena produced under capitalism, calling it the “Self Help Industrial Complex”

However, I can see how some who may not be up to date on the subject can come away thinking I’m no different. So in this video, I want to take a specific technique this industry is well known for promoting, mindfulness, and seeing if we can utilize it for revolutionary purposes while also critiquing its insidious usage as a defense mechanism of capitalism.

I’m only going to be pulling from one source, mainly. “McMindfulness” by Ronald E Pursuer. I think this is a great read on the subject and highly recommend it, but I’m also going to point out some flaws in it so I’m not accused of liberalism. I don’t know much about Purser. He’s a professor at San Francisco State University. He is a critic of capitalism but I am unsure how far he takes it. As a Marxist-Leninist, I’m very well aware that we need to take any text from academia, including from self proclaimed leftists and Marxists, with a grain of salt, especially from a dude who thinks the Dalai Lama and the former slave-owning Tibetan exiles are a trustworthy source.

However, there aren’t really that many Marxist-Leninists talking about this subject, and that’s a shame, considering how serious we take the question of “iron discipline” when it comes to our cadre, you’d think there would be more of us trying to implement as many methodologies science has to offer in order to achieve that goal. The book is a useful critique that should be in every communist’s rhetorical arsenal, regardless of the author’s tie to academia.

On to the video…

Early in the book, Purser gives a great summary of the problem of mindfulness in this industry:

Depoliticized practices of self-care can diminish our capacities for political citizenship, collective action and civic virtues. The mindfulness movement’s promise of “human flourishing” (which is also the rallying cry of positive psychology) is the closest it comes to defining a vision of social change. However, this vision remains individualized and depends on the personal choice to be mindful. Mindfulness practitioners may of course have a very different political agenda to that of neoliberalism, but the risk is that they start to retreat into their own private worlds and particular identities – which is just where the Neo liberal power structures want them. (ch. 2 pg. 39)

I’m sure that if you ask many of your local mindfulness practitioners they’ll say that they have no desire to acquire wealth or to participate in the system. But as materialists, we know that it doesn’t matter why someone does something, only the material consequences of that action matter.

Mindfulness as it is taught currently, is both escapism for the elites (escape from their own alienation, their own inability to find meaning beyond endless accumulation of profits) and an ideological iron rod used to beat down the workers, justifying oppression by telling the workers that if only they were more “mindful” that they could escape from this nightmare, and it is their fault for not implementing such techniques.

I know this very well from personal experience. Because before I was a communist, I spent lots of times in Buddhist temples, Hindu Ashrams, I took yoga and tai chi classes offered at my community college. I was looking for anything, any method I could to keep myself sane in the grind. The constant fear of my hours getting cut at work and not being able to afford rent, grinding paperwork after paperwork for the chance to get enough financial aid to keep going. You know how it goes. I learned a lot of truly valuable lessons in my journey at these various religious institutions, I truly did. If you are curious, visit some of these places and see what they have to say about life. There are even some comrades from these traditions who can guide you through it. Ask them!

However, none of them were able to save me from that past due notice. None of them could’ve prevented me from having to beg all of my family to chip in to my rent so I wouldn’t get thrown out on the streets with no where to go. It was then that I knew there was something wrong with this system. I radicalized more and more until I became the Marxist Leninist I am today.

Purser also notes that the self-help industrial complex’s bastardization of mindfulness “owes more to American spiritual history than its supposed roots in Buddhism”, taking inspiration from the transcendentalist movement, name dropping Henry David Thoreau. Purser writes:

Retreating to a cabin on land owned by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau turned his back on the horrors of industrialization and injustice, focusing instead on a simpler existence and transcending the mundane through contemplation. (pg. 95)

In other words, the Transcendentalists and later formations like the Theosophical Society and New Thought, had no desire to actually address the root cause of the horrors they witnessed in society, but instead wash their hands clean of it. They chose to run from it, rather than face it head on, because many of the people who entered these movements, were themselves of the class background responsible of it in the first place. Many of these movements pushed a kind of “pure awareness”, a “universal dharma” or as later popularized by Aldous Huxley, “a perennial philosophy”.

By attempting to unify such a wide and diverse set of traditions into a singular neatly packaged set of life doctrines, it became much easier for con artists, new age gurus, etc to sell this new commodity to a larger audience which was widely unfamiliar with Eastern spiritual traditions.

“It is not just that advanced meditation practitioners in more traditional Asian settings may not exhibit the kinds of behavior that we associate with mental health,” notes the scholar of Buddhism Robert Sharf, “It is not clear that they aspire to our model of mental health in the first place” (pg. 97)

We unfortunately don’t have time to go into the topic of Orientalism in this video, perhaps a follow up if people are interested. (Let me know in the comments) But in short, it’s not a stretch to say it’s not coincidence the Transcendentalist and Theosophical Movements arose along side the rise of Imperialism. With heightening contradictions both within the newly formed imperial core and in the colonized world. The “turn inward” made a useful escape valve for capitalism to draw away some of the potential revolutionary energy of the time.

The modern justification of mindfulness comes from a fetishization of it being “scientifically beneficial.” However, as explained by Purser:

“Mindfulness was recast as science to meet Western needs, and to circumvent cultural resistance to meditative practices borrowed from Buddhism. Putting mindfulness to work, like a well-trained mule carrying someone’s burden, reflects the focus on results that dominates mindfulness-related discourse. (p. 117)

I won’t bore anyone with the research, or lack thereof, presented in the book. Purser points out that many of the most well known studies on mindfulness have misused neuroscience tools such as brain scans, using improper sampling techniques, the list goes on. But to summarize it all succinctly:

“As mindfulness has increasingly pervaded every aspect of contemporary society, so have misunderstandings about what it is, whom it helps, and how it affects the mind and brain. At a practical level, the misinformation and propagation of poor research methodology can lead to people being harmed, cheated, disappointed, and/or disaffected.” (pg. 130)

This all culminates in the self-help industrial complex’s ultimate goal: to give both material and ideological reinforcement to the system by creating docile workers.

“Corporate mindfulness works very subtly to train good employees to serve their employers – and the broader system that supports them. It’s not an industrial form of brainwashing, as defensive mindfulness teachers think critics are saying. What is does is deflect attention from collective organizing, or the pursuit of structural chances in corporate culture, instead refocusing employees on productive self-discipline. It works like a sophisticated bio-power, binding people’s inner lives to corporate success.” (pg. 140)

Mindfulness, as is currently promoted, is not liberation from suffering, the unity with the universe and/or God. It is apathy. Apathy in its purest form.

“So you will do nothing? Apathy is death, worse than death. Because at least a rotting corpse feeds the beasts and insects.”

-Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords

Now, I hope this puts to rest the accusation I’m some kind of self-help guru masquerading as a communist, because now I want to make a case arguing in FAVOR of implementing a little bit of mindfulness practice into our daily lives as revolutionaries.

First, let’s start with Purser’s argument:

He argues for what American Theravada monk Bhikku Bodhi calls “conscientious compassion” quoting Bodhi:

“[Conscientious compassion] might emerge that could well set in motion the forces needed to articulate and embody a new paradigm rooted in the intrinsic dignity of the person and the interdependence of all life on Earth. Such collaboration could serve to promote the alternative values that offer sane alternatives to our free-market imperatives of corporatism, exploitation, consumerism, and toxic economic growth.” (pg. 260)

Replace corporatism with capitalism and this is a pretty based quote. The adherence to social democracy is simply a fear of communism due to propaganda. The argument, aside from that, remains sound.

Mindfulness, abstracted from any cultural context, including American capitalism, is simply the practice of paying attention, of directing your conscious awareness to at first one thing at a time, and then through consistent practice expanding that to the world at large. Capitalist McMindfulness con artists would have you direct your awareness at one thing: your inner self.

But it doesn’t have to be that way at all. Imagine if the “one thing” you focus on is “the other”, your community members, your fellow workers, your fellow human who longs for liberation for the myriad of reasons. Is that not what “solidarity” is at the end of the day? To have so much compassion in your heart that you are willing to risk everything, including potentially your life, to uplift everyone together? To be so aware of the interdependence of life, to see the flow of material conditions, to see how contradictory elements mutually emerge and clash with one another, that you are able to feel it? That this inter-connectivity is so entwined with your being that it becomes inconceivable to define one’s self without one another? I don’t see how this wouldn’t be a great use of our time.

Purser ends the book as follows:

Liberating mindfulness requires us to face our own delusion. Although this is sometimes a solitary process, it isn’t a retreat from the outside world. Instead, it can deepen our sense of connection, provided we see beyond clinging to the illusory separateness of self. If we shed this defensive skin, along with the constant sense of lack that it produces, we face our individual powerlessness. In that insight into the emptiness of self, into the futility of grasping, for comfort and control, we find liberating power beyond the isolated “me”. Truly revolutionary mindfulness is non-dual: its trans formative strength is undivided, owned by no one. By harnessing this together, we can seek the liberation of all sentient beings. (pg. 262)

This is a great start, and pretty sufficient enough reason as is to spend a little bit of time cultivating mindfulness to share with your community and in your organizing.

However, I want to go a step further than what the book argues, a step not willing to be talked about by Purser because he is an academic in the imperial core.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il Sung, and so many other successful revolutionaries gave us fantastic texts on how to organize the masses for revolution.

One idea comes up pretty regularly: discipline.

Lenin writes in Left wing communism:

It is, I think, almost universally realized at present that the Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half months, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party, or without the fullest and unreserved support from the entire mass of the working class, that is, from all thinking, honest, devoted and influential elements in it, capable of leading the backward strata or carrying the latter along with them.”

The cadre needs to be disciplined, each and every one of us needs to learn how to behave ourselves when interacting with each other and the masses. They need to see leaders in us, not petty children on the internet who can’t unite over the most minute of disagreements. We also need to be able to handle extreme conditions. The masses want leaders who are mentally and physically capable of protecting them from the metaphorical guns of the capitalist boss or even the very real guns of fascist paramilitaries or even the state. If we can’t build a cadre capable of being these things, we aren’t a vanguard. No party or org has reached this level yet. This isn’t dismissing comrades in orgs trying to get us there, but we need to be honest with ourselves.

That said, Lenin also points out that

The fact that, in 1917–20, Bolshevism was able, under unprecedentedly difficult conditions, to build up and successfully maintain the strictest centralization and iron discipline was due simply to a number of historical peculiarities in Russia.

Every revolutionary scenario has its peculiar conditions that make revolution possible. The need for iron discipline is universal. No matter what conditions we face, we need to get our shit together. There’s no getting around that… HOW we get there, HOW we get our shit together, well that’s going to require a bit of flexibility on our part.

If Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il Sung, etc were all born in the late 90s or early 2000s and were young communists on twitter. They’d behave exactly like us. Arguing on twitter with their peers, posting “hot takes” all the time. Of course they would be out in the streets leading actions, but they’re not immune to the trappings of the modern digital era. They’re human just like us. Their consciousness is no less bound to material conditions that ours are. I’m not saying their time organizing was easier or harder. That would be massively arrogant to say, but it is different, quite different.

Two modern problems that simply didn’t exist in the boys’ time are hyper alienation, caused by neoliberal atomization, and the flooding of information, caused by the digital revolution. Peasants generally lived in villages, either on the lord’s land or just barely on the outskirts of it. Proletarians at the time were generally able to generate a collective sense of solidarity because the workplaces of the era were not as atomized as they are. You worked on the assembly line together. It was not clear per se, but clear-er to see the value of your labor and how that’s being sent to the boss, in stark contrast to today with the emphasis on non industrial labor like service industry, tech, and gig work. Workers of previous eras also were much more capable of recognizing the common interest of their communities. There were still common festivals and holidays where the community gathered and got to know one another outside of their direct families. In modern America, there’s very little cultural activities where people bond. Holidays are generally spent with direct family, sporting events are at best held with close friends. I’m not saying there aren’t any left but it’s undeniable the number is dwindling. Then add Covid and the lock down and the situation is even worse.

This is then alleviated through the flooding of digital information such as video games, Netflix and other streaming platforms, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, etc. It is incredibly easy to distract one’s self with cheap entertainment, even if you are poor. Only the poorest of the poor, who tend to also be the most hyper alienated from their peers, generally don’t have access to distraction. And even then, there’s always drugs and alcohol.

We need to also recognize that we don’t suddenly gain immunity from either of these problems because we gain a revolutionary consciousness. How many of your comrades have had bouts with depression and anxiety? I fucking guarantee if you if not yourself at least 5 of your comrades, easily, if not way more. Has this fight for mental stability led to at least one break from required, commonly called burnout? Don’t even respond because you know I’m right. We’re not going to win if we keep losing people to burn out. And nobody accuse me of ableism here. I’m arguing that the responsibility to solve this problem rests on the org’s leadership and internal structure, not the individuals who get burnt out.

Stalin, gigachad himself, argues this in Mastering Bolshevism:

A large number are expelled for so-called passivity. What is passivity? It is considered, we discover, that if a member of the Party has not mastered the Party program, he is "passive", and due for expulsion. But this is not right, comrades. The statutes of our Party cannot be interpreted so pedantically. To master the Party program one needs to be a real Marxist, a tested and theoretically trained Marxist. I do not know whether many Party members will be found by us in the Party who have already mastered our program, have become genuine Marxists, theoretically trained and tried. If we were to go further along this path, we should have to leave only intellectuals and learned people in general in the Party. Who wants such a Party? We have the Leninist formula about Party membership which is verified, has stood all tests. According to this formula, a Party member is one who accepts the Party program, pays membership dues and works in one of its organizations.

• Note that Lenin's formula does not speak about mastering the program, but of accepting the program.

Then there’s the question of information overload. We aren’t immune to this either. Just log on Twitter for 5 minutes and you’ll see an endless timeline of hot takes and “principled take downs”.

In Mastering Bolshevism, Gigachad says the following

It should be remembered and never forgotten that as long as capitalist encirclement exists there will be wreckers, diversionists, spies, terrorists, sent behind the frontiers of the Soviet Union by the intelligence services of foreign states; this should be remembered and a struggle should be carried on against those comrades who underestimate the significance of the fact of capitalist encirclement, who underestimate the strength and significance of wrecking.

I know what you’re going to say: “No You!!!”

Is the plot twist that I’m the one underestimating the significance of wrecking? I mean you could disagree on my solution to the problem but it’d be kind of ridiculous to accuse me of wrecking when I’m bringing it up here, and have done so in my previous videos.

The topic of wreckers, diversionists, spies, and terrorists, as gigachad calls them, deserves a separate video. But ask yourself this important question: are you absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who those people are? Thomas Sankara was betrayed by his right hand man. Intel on Fred Hampton was given to the FBI by a close member in the chapter. How are you absolutely certain the wrecker is some other communist in an org that isn’t yours, perhaps even in chapters miles away from where you live, is the wrecker, and not someone you sat right next to in your weekly or monthly meetings?

Your hubris will not only bite you in the ass personally, but will hurt other comrades as well.

Now before anyone freaks out. No, I’m not saying be paranoid all the time. What I’m asking is that you question your fundamental assumption that the wreckers are “out there” wrecking. I’m asking all of us to gain the kind of awareness that gives us the ability to look at the most minute of details so that we can spot that behavior early on before it becomes a problem. I’m also asking we train ourselves to have the kind of control over our emotions so that we don’t let rage and anger cloud our judgment. It’s way too easy to get too hot headed when dealing with a problematic individual, either in person or online. The question of “has this person done something so egregious that it deserves removal from the collective space?” isn’t always easy to answer. Sometimes it’s really easy, obvious even, other times it’s not.

This isn’t the video to get specific because this is already becoming a long video. The point is that technology has made it so we have a significantly higher quantity of inter-org visibility and interactions. And with social media, significantly more instances of visible individual behavior.

So circling back. The gigachads of a previous generation gave us great information and a solid foundation to start with. How do we update this theory for the new material conditions? How do we deal with the hyper alienation and information overload that previous generations of gigachads didn’t have to deal with.

Well, here me out. I’m not saying this is the end all be all. All I’m saying is that meditation, with patience, with an open mind, and acknowledgment of the importance of collective support, can be a stepping stone in the right direction.

Think about it. Throwing out all the absurd studies of meditation that tell you you’ll get big brain super powers if you meditate for an hour a day, the one thing research can agree on is that mindfulness can generally help you calm down, and remain calmer in situations where you might otherwise become overwhelmed with stress.

Obviously as said before this is used by the self help industrial complex to make docile workers, but the ability to remain calm in stressful situations can mean life or death. If you can’t control your emotions you might get shot by a pig or a fascist and they’ll use the excuse “I was under attack” and you know damn well they’ll get away with it. What if the police start throwing tear gas and you need evacuate someone, start to panic and you’ll get trapped in the tear gas no problem. The ability to stay calm enough in that kind of a situation could save someone’s life.

In less intense scenarios, not going into a blind rage, even if the person 100% deserves it, could deescalate a situation so comrades witnessing the situation will be more sympathetic to your side and the perpetrator has less of a cause to accuse you of irrationality. Maybe a level head could spot more minute details and use that as evidence to deal with that person. Or in the best case scenario, it might be possible to turn that person around into something more useful. Maybe they’re always obstructing necessary actions for your org. But maybe with a level head you could manipulate that person into doing something useful, like working on a side project that occupies most of their time in a way that is net-beneficial. I generally advocate trying to get the most use out of people, even problematic individuals.

There are many other scenarios but I hope you get the point.

So, if after all this that you still think I’m some crypto-self help con artist masquerading as a communist, you probably already left and aren’t watching this video. In that case, I genuinely wish you well. I hope whatever praxis you are involved in makes an impact and let me know how I can support you.

If you are on board in theory, you’re probably asking, “OK so what do we do?”

I got you.

The most simple start one can do is meditate right before bed for 5 mins a day, the length of a song. This is the best time to start for several reasons. Some people have to rush in the morning, meditating before bed can help you sleep better and there is way more research to suggest quality sleep is a more important factor to cognitive function than mindfulness, and it’s good to end each day trying to let go of all the hardships of that day, either from work, organizing, or personal life. You can’t change the past, don’t forget what happened, but also learn to accept it and move on. Take whatever lessons you need and use that to build a better tomorrow.

Implementing a collective practice is tricky. You don’t always know the state of mind everyone is in. If someone is dealing with intense trauma or even just intense anxiety or depression, telling them to meditate can feel very insulting, and for good reason. Plus, it’s probably not going to do them any good. What I’m experimenting with with my comrades locally is whenever you have small meetings, roughly 5 people or less, do a quick vibe check, make sure everyone is okay. Ask if anyone needs to talk or vent about stuff that happened, then once you confirm everyone is well enough to continue, before any discussion about reports or tactics comes up, sit in silence for 2-5 minutes. Ask comrades to breath and focus on their breath. You can either let them go at their own pace, or suggest a particular breath pattern like box breathing or the 4-7-8 method. Keep it short. 5 minutes is a good maximum. The goal isn’t to attain enlightenment, the goal is to lower the heart rate,& clear the head of excess banter so that when it’s time to make decisions the odds of providing the best solution increase. Also do NOT do a guided meditation. That rarely does anything in my experience. They’re always really cheesy and really corny and never taken seriously. This is not a feel-good trip. If anything, we want people to take time to confront their demons and learn to control them. A cheesy new age guided meditation would fall into the same docility trap Purser warns about in the book. The breath, and nothing more.

I would start with just these two for now. It’s what I’m doing for me and my comrades. I’m still experimenting with this idea. And like I said before, this is just one possibility out of many for dealing with the problems of atomization and discipline. If you disagree with this on a theoretical level, let me know why and what your solution to this problem is. If you tried this experiment for a couple months and it doesn’t help at all, let me know and maybe we either need to rework it or I’m also willing to admit that maybe I’m wrong and the solution to this problem lies elsewhere.

All I want at the end of the day is for this problem to be taken seriously, because I do genuinely think this is a real impediment to building a successful vanguard in the imperial core and that we can find a solution that works for everyone.

Thanks comrades, let me know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter!

If you can support me financially, I’d really appreciate it. I’ve been struggling with acquiring stable housing. I’m publishing this in the study room of a student cooperative that I don’t live in. Arguably it’s quite ironic I ended up in this situation months after writing this video despite advocating for an improvement tip. But 1) I never claimed such tips are any kind of ticket out of financial hardship like self help gurus do. The point is to use a practice that does have some amount of evidence from this subsect of capitalists and use it for a completely different purpose, as well as do so collectively and not individually. And 2) I will say that anecdotally speaking, this little practice I do keeps me going despite sleeping in my car for the past week. With the financial support from my comrades within the CPUSA and a few outside it to help with the physical, taking a moment to calmly breath through the current crisis helps me stay level headed enough to keep going, to maintain mental stability to keep going and keep looking for resources. It’s only a little difference, but little changes can be the deciding factor between a comrade who is alive and a comrade who isn’t.

Any support so that I can eat and get a few steps closer to housing would mean the world to me. And if you don’t, sharing this article among friends and comrades and letting people know about my articles to spread the word as well as sharing my mutual aid request tweets, will also help me a lot.

Cashapp: $PathfinderAmihan

Venmo: PathfinderAmihan