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No, and thank God for that! Islam — and Morocco’s unique approach to Islam — is at the heart of what makes the country and its incredibly rich and vibrant culture so unique. Many Western visitors don’t understand this. They think religion is a private matter and it is mainly about belief. Any Religious Studies scholar will tell you that’s just not true. Religion is, always and everywhere, the glue that holds a society together—the shared worldview and sacred values that make communal life possible. It is not private, it is the basis of public life! And it is not so much about belief, it is mainly about actions and especially ritual, activities that both nourish the individual soul AND bring people together.In the West, the dominant religion today is secular materialist humanism. Its ritual activities include shopping and consumerism, cookie-cutter mass education, entertainment, the work-leisure dialectic, etc. Its sacred cows include official narratives of the Holocaust, 9/11, etc. (You can have your career destroyed, or even be locked in prison, for publicly doubting these sacred stories.)The secular materialist grand sacred narrative of what life is all about is something like: “It’s just a random cosmic accident, we are just globs of matter randomly evolving, but despite the complete meaningless of it all, you must worship the human being and his or her potential for liberation and self-development, i.e. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and you must accept scientism (especially Darwinian evolution) as well as secondary sacred narratives like the official versions of the Holocaust and 9/11 or you will be reviled as a heretic.”Islam offers a very different worldview and very different rituals. It says life is a test created by God, and we will be judged on how well we respond to that test. We are souls/spirits having a brief physical experience in the dunya, the material world.Islamic rituals reinforce this worldview. Muslims enact ritual self-surrender to God five times daily, and the God-consciousness or taqwa this fosters forges bonds of communal solidarity and a shared commitment to morality and ethics, while reminding the individual to keep responding well to life’s test.The Ramadan fast creates a state of consciousness in which we get a taste of what consciousness is like without a physical body (and its all-devouring desires). This is the state we will all enter after death. So it is a reminder of what is coming, as well as a reminder of what hungry and suffering people experience.Frankly I think Islamic culture is light-years beyond Western secular materialist culture in terms of its richness as well as its ethical and spiritual advancement. I could go on about the wonderful particularities of Moroccan Islamic culture, which has a strong Sufi component, but I already wrote a dissertation on that and have other things to do right now, may Allah and the reader forgive me.

Work, as in capitalism works, is a bit ambiguous. Syphilis works. Cancer works. Capitalism works. All of these nasty things “work,” in a certain sense, but they are far from working well or for the benefit of most human beings and the survival of the planet. Insofar as capitalism does not work well for human beings or the planet, it does not work at all. At this late-stage, capitalism is, like cancer, destructive.So the question could be better formulated as:Does capitalism destroy human lives and the planet because humans are inherently greedy?Or, less provocatively:Does capitalism reproduce itself, as a mode of production, because humans are inherently greedy?No.Of course, we could point to instances of greed in capitalist society, make a list of all the sundry instances of greed, tell stories about how all the greedy little capitalist pigs in the pharmaceutical industry jacked up prices on life-saving drugs….or how they created an opioid epidemic…or how the weapons manufacturers knowingly sold the public unnecessary wars that have killed and displaced millions of people…or how the airline industry and car companies have covered-up their dysfunctional products…or how the animal agriculture industry has packed innocent animals into godawful, cramped and claustrophobic spaces…or how the oil companies buried climate science research that demonstrated the apocalyptic consequences of extracting and burning fossil fuels…all for the sake of making higher profits.We could say it was greed that made them do this. But, by this reasoning, it was the natural human inclination towards sociopathic levels of greed that caused those greasy little pigs in the arms industry to prefer the deaths of a few hundred thousand children in the Middle East to a profit of rate of less than 100%. So, we can’t really blame them for something they can’t control. They’re actual the real victims of human nature. Rest assured, if it weren’t for this damned inherent greed in our human nature, then those greasy little pigs in the arms industry would’ve been honest to the public and preferred a more modest 50% rate of profit over killing innocent children.Needless to say, such explanations are asinine. Positing greed as a personal failing or as a natural internal compulsion springing from some supposed ahistorical human nature ultimately boils down to an ex-post behavioralist description, not an actual explanation of the socio-economic phenomena we aim to understand.Marx is incredibly helpful here. His analysis focused on the ‘economic law of motion’ of capital and how the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ shape the behavior of social individuals. Notice, Marx deals with the social individual not the fictional, abstract, isolated, ahistorical individual posited by bourgeois economics.Accordingly, Marx’s individual is placed within the actual social relations of production of a given historical period, our period, where ‘the capitalist mode of production prevails.’ This methodological approach discounts evil intent or greed from being a characteristic that emanates from human nature or individuals in the abstract. His method actually explains how greed (as an empirically verifiable phenomena) emerged with the peculiar social form of organization found in capitalist societies; that is, Marx explains the conditions for the possibility of greed through a socio-historical analysis of the economic forms of capitalism (value, exchange-value, capital, wage labor, etc.).In short, Marx drew on a distinction between production for use and production for exchange. The logic of the former, predominantly found in precapitalist societies, was not conducive to producing social individuals who were driven towards accumulation for the sake of accumulation, greed as such, or the type of greed found in capitalist societies. This is because slave and feudal modes of production were geared towards subsistence living and producing tribute in the form of use-values, wealth in its natural form, perishable wealth. The drive for wealth in the abstract, exchange-value, money, was not possible within societies of personal domination. It was not until the direct producers of use-values were separated from the land and the their own means of labor that the material and social conditions for indiscriminate greed emerged. Under such conditions — ie, with the emergence of the social relations of wage labor and capital— production is no longer directed towards the subsistence of the direct producers or towards direct tribute to churchmen or lords or masters. Production is colored with an impersonal indifference towards the object of labor and the immediate needs of human beings. Wage laborers are driven by the need to make money to purchase back the products of their own labor as a class. Capitalists are driven by the pressure of other capitalists with whom they are in competition. Production, under such conditions, is driven by the imperative of accumulation: turning money into more money.Thus, the only thing that matters is making money in capitalist societies. Whether or not this or that individual has the internal disposition of greed is somewhat irrelevant. If individuals do not act as if they were greedy, they will not survive. And, in the final analysis, the surface level appearance of greed that some moralizers condemn as the real problem with capital —making capitalism theoretically reformable— is nothing more than the essential logic of system manifesting itself through social individuals “ruled by abstractions” (ie, value, exchange-value, money.)Marx was not a moralizer. References to greed are few and far between in his works. He even mocks some of the classical economists for appealing to greed as an explanation of economic phenomena (as opposed to the mere surface description of underlying economic forms).One place where Marx does discuss greed at some length is in Notebook 2 of the Grundrisse. It is extremely insightful. Worth the read (follow the link below for more context):(It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness [22] as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)(The relation of the individual to science may be taken as an example here.)(To compare money with blood – the term circulation gave occasion for this – is about as correct as Menenius Agrippa’s comparison between the patricians and the stomach.) [23] (To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity, like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language. Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy; but the analogy then lies not in language, but in the foreignness of language.)(The exchangeability of all products, activities and relations with a third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for everything without distinction – that is, the development of exchange values (and of money relations) is identical with universal venality, corruption. Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use. The equation of the incompatible, as Shakespeare nicely defined money. [24] Greed as such impossible without money; all other kinds of accumulation and of mania for accumulation appear as primitive, restricted by needs on the one hand and by the restricted nature of products on the other (sacra auri fames [25]).)(The development of the money system obviously presupposes other, prior developments.)When we look at social relations which create an undeveloped system of exchange, of exchange values and of money, or which correspond to an undeveloped degree of these, then it is clear from the outset that the individuals in such a society, although their relations appear to be more personal, enter into connection with one another only as individuals imprisoned within a certain definition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf, etc., or as members of a caste etc. or as members of an estate etc. In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc, are in fact exploded, ripped up (at least, personal ties all appear as personal relations); and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion and it is more correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact (and these conditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by society, appear as if they were natural conditions, not controllable by individuals). The definedness of individuals, which in the former case appears as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in the latter case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual by relations independent of him and sufficient unto themselves. (Since the single individual cannot strip away his personal definition, but may very well overcome and master external relations, his freedom seems to be greater in case 2. A closer examination of these external relations, these conditions, shows, however, that it is impossible for the individuals of a class etc. to overcome them en masse without destroying them. A particular individual may by chance get on top of these relations, but the mass of those under their rule cannot, since their mere existence expresses subordination, the necessary subordination of the mass of individuals.) These external relations are very far from being an abolition of ‘relations of dependence’; they are rather the dissolution of these relations into a general form; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the general foundation of the relations of personal dependence. Here also individuals come into connection with one another only in determined ways. These objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence (the objective dependency relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed, of course, only in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age, and have identified the creation of free individuality with the overthrow of this reign. This error was all the more easily committed, from the ideological stand-point, as this reign exercised by the relations (this objective dependency, which, incidentally, turns into certain definite relations of personal dependency, but stripped of all illusions) appears within the consciousness of individuals as the reign of ideas, and because the belief in the permanence of these ideas, i.e. of these objective relations of dependency, is of course consolidated, nourished and inculcated by the ruling classes by all means available.(As regards the illusion of the ‘purely personal relations’ in feudal times, etc., it is of course not to be forgotten for a moment (1) that these relations, in a certain phase, also took on an objective character within their own sphere, as for example the development of landed proprietorship out of purely military relations of subordination; but (2) the objective relation on which they founder has still a limited, primitive character and therefore seems personal, while, in the modern world, personal relations flow purely out of relations of production and exchange.)The product becomes a commodity. The commodity becomes exchange value. The exchange value of the commodity acquires an existence of its own alongside the commodity; i.e. the commodity in the form in which (1) it is exchangeable with all other commodities, (2) it has hence become a commodity in general, and its natural specificity is extinguished, and (3) the measure of its exchangeability (i.e. the given relation within which it is equivalent to other commodities) has been determined – this commodity is the commodity as money, and, to be precise, not as money in general, but as a certain definite sum of money, for, in order to represent exchange value in all its variety, money has to be countable, quantitatively divisible.Grundrisse 03

No he was not anti-Western. This may come as a surprise to lot of Indians, but Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was actually inspired to a large extent by Western ideas.A common belief in India is that values like simplicity, non-violence, equality, communal sharing are quintessential Indian values. And that the Western world on the other hand stands for Industrialization, Capitalism, Hedonism or pursuit of material gains, relentless push for progress. While it’s true that the West stands for all these things, but not all the Western people have aspired for them. The West has produced greatest thinkers who despised such values and believed in the opposite.Few years ago, I recall visiting the Gandhi Smriti and they had a museum store where they were selling books. Interestingly, the titles on sale had more to do with Yoga, Naturopathy, writings of Gandhi himself (his Autobiography is a big seller), but none of the writings that Gandhi was influenced by. There was a board somewhere in a corner listing out the people Gandhi was inspired by, but the air around the whole shop and museum was as if this was core Indian ideology, which is opposite of the Western ideology.While Mahatma Gandhi read extensively and was impressed by works of Socrates, Plato, Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, Max Mueller, Charles Dickens, Edward Gibbon, Madame Blavatsky, Jonathan Swift, Edward Carpenter, Sir Edwin Arnold, Thomas Henry Huxley, following 3 Westerners (an Englishman, an American, a Russian) had the deepest influence on him and their ideas are what Mahatma Gandhi’s ideological foundation was built upon -John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. The book that had made such an immediate and profound impact on Gandhi was John Ruskin’s seminal work Unto This Last. The focus of Ruskin’s work was on the nature of economic inequality in society which was seen to be morally wrong because it generated, in large sections of the population, deprivation and hardship. The solution, he thought, was a fairer distribution of wealth to alleviate this suffering. “ There is no wealth but life.” Ruskin wrote, and life incorporated everybody, there were no exceptions. Human life itself was the only real value in society. He also launched a critique on industrialization and its methods of production which were considered to be harsh, unjust and demeaning for the workforce involved. His view was that work should embody spiritual virtues that contribute to the full development of the individual, as well as the intrinsic value of the finished product. Soon after reading Unto This Last, Gandhi set about establishing the Phoenix community which was based on the values that Ruskin had promoted. Gandhi also published a Gujarati translation of the work so that it could receive wider readership.Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), the famous Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. His writings had a deep influence on Gandhi, especially the essay The Kingdom of God is Within You. Around 1879 Tolstoy experienced a deep emotional/spiritual crisis in his life. He emerged afterwards with radically different precepts for living, that included … embracing simplicity, undertaking manual work, becoming a vegetarian, accepting pacifism, giving away large amounts of his considerable wealth because he felt no need of it, and publicly dismissing his former literary work as aristocratic art because it failed to touch the lives of ordinary Russian peasants that he had increasingly come to identify with. Gandhi was so inspired by Tolstoy’s teachings that he started writing to him in 1909. In 1910, along with his friend Kallenbach, Gandhi started a community settlement where he lived with his family and other community residents. The settlement was named Tolstoy Farm and became an experimentation community living that was to build on the Phoenix experience.Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. In 1845 Thoreau built a log cabin to live in, on the edges of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. It was to be the start of a two year experiment in which he would engage with a simple life of silence and solitude that involved: growing and cooking his own crops, observing nature, reflective study and writing. It was a romantic notion that had inspired him for some time and the fruits of his endeavours were expressed, in what was to become a classic of American literature, Walden. After leaving Walden Pond Thoreau wrote an essay, On Civil Disobedience, where he advocated the doctrine of peaceful resistance. He thought that if any law was felt to be unjust, or unnecessary, it was incumbent on the individual to refuse to obey that law in any nonviolent way that they could harness. Gandhi felt this essay to be a masterly treatise. He said “I read Thoreau … I read Walden first … and his ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence … There is no doubt that Thoreau¹s ideas greatly influenced my movement in India.”Mahatma Gandhi also read, and appreciated, deeply religious works; in particular the Bible, the Koran, and the Hindu classics the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. All of them served to nourish Gandhi’s philosophical and spiritual outlook, yet it was Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau, with their pragmatic idealism, who came to have a special place in Gandhi’s heart.Source - Writers That Shaped Gandhi