All Dharmas Are Empty, Causal Efficacy Remains: Rethinking Alienation in Marxian Political Economy

This discussion paper develops a generative relational reinterpretation of alienation through a dialogue between Buddhist emptiness and Marxian political economy. Its starting point is a distinction between intrinsic substantiality and relational causal efficacy. A form may be empty of self-subsisting essence while remaining capable of producing stable, persistent, and materially consequential effects within a relational system. Recognition of emptiness therefore does not abolish causal efficacy. This distinction provides a framework for reconsidering socially generated forms such as the self, currency, and credit. Currency has no intrinsic monetary essence in its material carrier, while its socially stabilized relations can reorganize exchange and access to resources. Credit makes the structure still clearer: a relationally constituted claim upon a possible future can become causally operative in the present and participate in generating that future. The paper interprets such forms as relationally stabilized mediators that emerge from social relations and subsequently enter the reproduction and transformation of those relations. Alienation is then reconsidered as a pathology in which the causal powers of relation-generated forms are experienced or institutionalized as intrinsic powers of the forms themselves, while their relational provenance, dependence upon others, and conditions of revision become increasingly opaque. This interpretation distinguishes alienation from mediation itself. Mediating forms can function as practical upāya: they may be used without being granted intrinsic essence. The paper further applies this principle reflexively to Generative Relational theory itself. Relation, system, generativity, and GR are treated as provisional analytical means rather than final ontological substances. Emptiness thereby constrains reification, causal efficacy constrains nihilism, and generativity preserves the historical possibility of transformation.