[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Marxism: where the twain could meet

[jkirk]

I leftist thinker which has left us with much interesting thoughts that
could help with a further development of Buddhism is Pierre Bourdieu. His
critique of capitalism is a.o. the utilism of right. Capitalism is said to
be the best because it generates more money and goods then other systems.
Bourdieu argues that this economic field is only one among other fields
that are important to human life.

erik
========================
Re Eric's last sentence, above: As can be seen in the mixed economies of the Scandinavian countries. 

Recently, in Sweden the leftish Social Democrats were opposed by a centrist party that won the Sept 17th elections by a small margin.  Fredrik Reinfeldt, the new Moderates PM, promised to cut taxes and boost employment (which is apparently not as ample as the official figures suggest, since those figures consider people on welfare as employed). 

"Reinfeldt successfully argued during the election campaign that the Social Democrats, who've been in power for 12 years, had failed to create jobs and promote new businesses. At the same time, he pledged to maintain the bulk of Swedish welfare programs, the fruit of the Social Democrats' domination of government for 61 of the past 70 years." Quoted from  http://tinyurl.com/hfxnx  

What's discouraging is that discussions of socialism vs. capitalism, not just on this list but almost everywhere, in the USA anyway, tend to ignore what's been going on in Scandinavia for almost a century with their successful (if not generous for the rich tenth of the population) results. Compare their welfare and national health care systems to what we have in the US, the land par excellence of unrestrained capitalism, and you will see the difference. Sure, people over there gripe about taxes, but people gripe about taxes everywhere. 
 

Joanna  








See  
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