TWorking masses have practiced meditation for centuries to survive the constant alienating challenges of patriarchy, feudalism, and various forms of capitalism. Meditation has become a coping mechanism to confront the challenges of capitalism that routinely produce various forms of alienation, inequality, and exploitation. However, meditation has been co-opted into capitalism’s consumerist and therapeutic culture, where mind-body disciplines have taken a central place in taming and controlling the working masses.
Commercialized and medicalized meditation centers function as instruments of a social system where individuals discipline themselves in the name of self-development under the guidance of experts (gurus) in order to ensure a social, spiritual and cultural order that conforms to capitalist requirements. Monetized processes such as homogenous institutionalization, standardization of practices and marketization have destroyed the collective foundations of meditation as a social and spiritual practice. Nevertheless, many European academics still promote meditation as unashamedly anti-capitalist. Such uncritical justifications promote neo-traditional values in the name of meditation.
Meditation contributes to capitalism in many ways. First, the atomization of the individual self and consciousness is essential for capitalism to expand, as it dismantles the shared basis of individual life and collective consciousness, facilitating a profit-driven commodity market. Meditation, as a tool for atomizing the “individual self,” aids in the process of deconditioning the individual’s experience and consciousness from the social and shared experience of collective consciousness. It aids in the normalization of capitalist alienation. Meditation supports the conditions that reconcile people to an unnatural, aberrant, and exploitative capitalist system. Meditation training for mindfulness is a tool of governance in the name of self-optimization in the service of capitalism.
Meditation, in the name of building resilience, personalizes suffering and silences conditions of collective and radical consciousness by domesticating individuals to face challenges alone. Meditation under capitalism functions as a mode of self-governance, allowing individuals to attribute their misery to themselves and overcome it independently through the power of meditation alone. This conditioning gives carte blanche to capitalist institutions, structures, and processes, allowing them to continue their unrestrained exploitation of both humans and nature. Capitalism creates loneliness, mental health issues, and various other forms of vulnerability. In response, capitalism promotes meditation as a means for individuals to address and reconcile these issues on an individual level.
Global, regional, national, and local luminaries tout meditation as a mindfulness revolution, suggesting that it will spark a universal renaissance and be a panacea for all of today’s social ills. But this naive culture of mindfulness only promotes capitalism by individualizing choices and eroding the radical consciousness people gain from their labor and working conditions. Individual alienation is not just a consequence of individual actions; rather, it is an inherent consequence and an integral aspect of the capitalist system. No amount of meditation will solve the problem of alienation within capitalism. Promoting meditation as an alternative is therefore merely a naive diversionary tactic.
The commodification and standardization of meditation practice has led to the booming market for mindfulness. This industry is rapidly expanding as a low-investment, high-return service sector that makes profits based on the alienation of individuals. In this way, capitalism and the meditation industry complement each other: one creates alienation, the other provides temporary relief from alienation. Meditation has become a lucrative and fast-growing business. In this cycle of profit-driven therapeutic religiosity between capitalism and meditation, alienated individuals continue to harbor false hope in life. Neither capitalism nor meditation offers lasting solutions to problems of alienation and other vulnerabilities in capitalist society.
While meditation evangelists and capitalist saviors work together to normalize and naturalize the devastation of capitalism, workers seek an inner, elusive happiness that is like seeking salvation only after death. It is therefore time for workers to go beyond the market-driven logic of therapeutic culture within capitalism and reclaim the collective practice of meditation.
Bhavani Shankar Nayak, London Metropolitan University
