The Way Of Love/1

by Bill Kauffman

The title "Dorothy Day and the American Right" promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of "Commandments We Have Kept" by the Kennedy brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo.

But there is more to the "right" than a dollar bill stretching from the DuPonts to Ronald Reagan, just as the "left" is something greater than the bureau-building and bomb-dropping of Roosevelts and Kennedys. Maybe, just maybe, Dorothy Day had a home, if partially furnished and seldom occupied, on the American right.

The Catholic reactionary John Lukacs, after attending the lavish twenty-fifth anniversary bash for National Review in December 1980, held in the Plaza Hotel, hellward of the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street, wrote:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

National Review, dreadnought of postwar American conservatism, occasionally aimed its scattershot at Day. Founder William F. Buckley, Jr. referred casually to "the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement"; of Miss Day, he chided "the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this goodhearted woman--who, did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us."

The grotesqueries he does not bother to itemize; nor does Buckley explain just what was "anti-Catholic" about a woman who told a friend, "The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel. They have given us the most precious thing of all--the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing The Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would."

If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:

I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land!

The program that so excited Miss Day was summarized in the statement of principles drawn up at the Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists. Mocked as reactionary for their unwillingness to accept bigness as an inevitable condition, the conferees declared (inter alia):

--The condition of individual freedom and security is the wide distribution of active ownership of land and productive property.

--Population should be decentralized as well as ownership.

--Agriculture should be given its rightful recognition as the prime factor in a secure culture.

Though Day was absent from Nashville, she was to speak the language of the Southern Agrarians, without the drawl, many times over the years. "To Christ--To the Land!" Day exclaimed in the January 1936 issue. "The Catholic Worker is opposed to the wage system but not for the same reason that the Communist is. We are opposed to it, because the more wage earners there are the less owners there are ... how will they become owners if they do not get back to the land."

Widespread ownership was the basic tenet of the Agrarians' Catholic cousins, the Distributists. The Catholic Worker published all the major Distributists of the age, among them Chesterton and Belloc, Vincent McNabb, Father Luigi Ligutti, and the Jesuit John C. Rawe (a Nebraska-born "Catholic version of William Jennings Bryan"). On numberless occasions Dorothy Day called herself a Distributist. Thus her gripe with the New Deal: "Security for the worker, not ownership," was its false promise; she despaired in 1945 that "Catholics throughout the country are again accepting `the lesser of two evils'.... They fail to see the body of Catholic social teaching of such men as Fr. Vincent McNabb, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Eric Gill and other Distributists ... and lose all sight of The Little Way."

Dorothy Day kept to the little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not always beautiful, at least it is always human.

The Catholic Worker position on economics was expressed quite clearly:

[W]e favor the establishment of a Distributist economy wherein those who have a vocation to the land will work on the farms surrounding the village and those who have other vocations will work in the village itself. In this way we will have a decentralized economy which will dispense with the State as we know it today and will be federationist in character.... We believe in worker ownership of the means of production and distribution as distinguished from nationalization. This to be accomplished by decentralized cooperatives and the elimination of a distinct employer class.

The American name for this is Jeffersonianism, and the failure of Distributism to attract much of a stateside following outside of those Mencken derided as "typewriter agrarians" owes in part to its Chesterbellocian tincture. "Gothic Catholicism" never could play in Peoria.

Nor could it stand upon the Republican platform. Garry Wills recalls this exchange during his first visit with William F. Buckley, Jr.: "`Are you a conservative, then?' [Buckley asked]. I answered that I did not know. Are Distributists conservative? `Philip Burnham tells me they are not.' It was an exchange with the seeds of much later misunderstanding."

Were the Distributists conservative? Was Day conservative? Depends. Herbert Agar, the Kentucky Agrarian and movement theorist, wrote in the American Review (April 1934), "For seventy years, a `conservative' has meant a supporter of Big Business, of the politics of plutocracy," yet "the root of a real conservative policy for the United States must be redistribution of property." Ownership--whether of land, a crossroads store, a machine shop--must be made "the normal thing."

"Property is proper to man," insisted Dorothy Day, though she and the Distributists--and much of the old American right--meant by property something rather more substantial than paper shares in a Rockefellerian octopus. "Ownership and control are property," declared Allen Tate, making a distinction between a family farm--or family firm--and a joint-stock corporation, the artificial spawn of the state.

Like Tate and the Southern Agrarians, Day was no collectivist, eager to herd the fellaheen onto manury unromantic Blithedales. "The Communists," she said, sought to build "a sense of the sacredness and holiness and the dignity of the machine and of work, in order to content the proletariat with their property-less state." So why, she asked, "do we talk of fighting communism, which we are supposed to oppose because it does away with private property? We have done that very well ourselves in this country." The solution: "We must emphasize the holiness of work, and we must emphasize the sacramental quality of property too." ("An anti-religious agrarian is a contradiction in terms," according to Donald Davidson.)

Day described the Catholic Worker program as being "for ownership by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and the ownership of property," and these were to be achieved by libertarian means, through the repeal of state-granted privileges and a flowering of old-fashioned American voluntarism.

During the heyday of modern American liberalism, the 1930s, when Big Brother supposedly wore his friendliest phiz, Day and the Catholic Workers said no. They bore a certain resemblance to those old progressives (retroprogressives)--Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson--who turned against FDR for what they saw as the bureaucratic, militaristic, centralizing thrust of his New Deal. The antithetical tendencies of the Catholic Worker and the 1930s American left were juxtaposed in the November 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker. under the heading "Catholic Worker Opposition to Projected Farm-Labor Party.," the box read:

Farm-Labor Party stands for: Progress Industrialism Machine Caesarism (bureaucracy) Socialism Organizations.

Catholic Worker stands for: Tradition Ruralism Handicrafts Personalism Communitarianism Organisms.

And never the twain shall meet.

An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers, as it did the 1930s right. But then as the late Karl Hess, one-time Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Wobbly homesteader, wrote, the American right had been "individualistic, isolationist, decentralist--even anarchistic," until the Cold War reconciled conservatives to the leviathan state.

The 1930s dissenters--the old-fashioned liberals now maligned as conservatives; the unreconstructed libertarians; the cornbelt radicals--proposed cooperatives and revitalized village economies as the alternative to government welfare. The Catholic Workers agreed. The holy fool Peter Maurin, Day's French peasant comrade, asserted that "he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state." Day, in her memoir The Long Loneliness, complained:

The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.

"Bigness itself in organization precludes real liberty," wrote Henry Clay Evans, Jr. in the American Review, a Distributist journal. The home--the family--was the right size for most undertakings. And so the home must be made productive once more. In the April 1945 Catholic Worker, Janet Kalven of the Graiiville Agricultural School for Women in Loveland, Ohio called for "an education that will give young women a vision of the family as the vital cell of the social organism, and that will inspire them with the great ambitions of being queens in the home." By which she did not mean a sequacious helpmeet to the Man of the House, picking up his dirty underwear and serving him Budweisers during commercials, but rather a partner in the management of a "small, diversified family firm," who is skilled in everything "from bread-making to beekeeping." For "the homestead is on a human scale"--the only scale that can really measure a person's weight.

The Agrarians and Distributists dreamed of a (voluntary, of course) dispersion of the population, and Day, despite her residence in what most decentralists regarded then and regard now as the locus of evil, agreed: "If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?" asked Day in September 1946. This revulsion against urbanism seems odd in a woman whose base was Manhattan, symbol of congestion, of concentration, of cosmopolitanism rampant. Yet she wrote of the fumes from cars stinging her eyes as she walked to Mass, of the "prison-gray walls" and parking lots of broken glass. "We only know that it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible." The Southern Agrarians would not demur.

World War II destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectnal life--just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money. Foes of America's involvement in the war, heirs to the non-interventionist legacy of George Washington, were slandered--most notably Charles Lindbergh, whom the Catholic Worker defended against the smears of the White House.

Despite Day's disavowal of the "isolationist" label, the Catholic Worker of 1939-1941spoke the diction of the American antiwar movement, which, because it was anti-FDR, was deemed "right-wing." Sentences like "We should like to know in just what measure the British Foreign Office is dictating the foreign policy of the United States!" could have come straight from the pages of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. So could the objection to the "English and Communist Propaganda" of the New York papers, and the reverence toward the traditional "neutrality of the United States" and the keeping of "our country aloof from the European war."

Bill Kaufman is the author of Look Homeward, America.

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The Reformers And The Reformed Are Alike/1

by Hilaire Belloc

(i) Of the Socialist Reformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?

(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is what most men would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is a right), and what all men would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case: Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance the expedient of "buying out" the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer's action. He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to "buy out") certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution, which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity, which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure."

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred: as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand, which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself away from his Collectivist ideal and towards a society in which the possessors shall remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile State.

(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the "running" of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department and possibly of the whole State but that is by the way.) But while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will "buy out" the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, "buying out" is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production tabulation, detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves "Socialists" are now less concerned with any scheme for socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating, "running," and drilling the protelariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist class.

The so-called "Socialist" of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. Today their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.

(2) Of the Practical Reformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on not being a socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man” ; and this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your "Practical Man" who says: "Whatever you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet you must admit that it does good. If you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones' family, or had done practical work yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen that a practical man," etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man whereever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and his first principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and insecurity. When he was "working" in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones's from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy man most was "unemployment" and "destitution”: that is, insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in England, how much more easily do you not think the "Practical Man" will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and short-sighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get him work "under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,"he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are "the ravages of drink": more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that "as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them."

He does not, because he cannot, co-ordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership, which such a society spontaneously breeds. He "takes the world as he finds it" and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He would not produce any thing but a welter of anarchic restrictions, which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him.

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are making directly for the Servile State.

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that State Capitalist.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the, great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen twentieths of the population if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position, mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect, which that experience has upon character and upon one's view of the State is a very different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have my self spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct. use, and meaning of property is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage-earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life.

Taken from Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State

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Why Karl Marx Supported Libertarianism

by K. Bolton

The term “new Right” in New Zealand and other English-speaking countries is a misnomer and contrary to the way it is applied in Continental Europe. While the term is applied invariably to libertarianism in the English speaking world, it is neither “new” nor “right”.

Libertarianism, free trade, call it what you will, is the reanimated corpse of 19th Century Whig liberalism. The latter, far from being of the “right” or conservative, is antithetical to it. Whig liberalism, what we now call libertarianism, is the doctrinal manifestation of the Industrial Revolution. Its antecedents can be traced back to the Cromwellian Revolution of the 17th Century, a revolt by a newly emerging merchant class against the authority of the monarchy and gentry.

While in terms of our Western civilization it was the first such revolt to be undertaken in the name of the masses, but for the covert benefit of business interests, the French Revolution had the same purpose on the Continent. Both unleashed politically the desire of the merchant to be unfettered by the moral impulse of tradition, to pursue their business interests as they saw fit, without regard to any loyalty beyond profit.

Against these early manifestations of libertarianism stood the partisans of tradition. Conservatism stood for the estate and the rural community against the city, the machine, and the power of money. Conservatism upheld the moral authority of religion against humanism and the relegation of the human being to nothing but “matter in motion”. It defended the monarchy as a unifying focus against the destructiveness of class war. The ideals of noblesse oblige, of duty, of the chivalric concept of protection and obedience, were its basis of social relations rather than dog-eat-dog economics. Work as an ethic and a cultural manifestation, rather than as a mechanical function, was reflected in the old guild concepts.

With the rise of the city, the machine, the bank, and the expansion of the merchant class arose also the proletariat – dispossessed artisans and yeomen. The traditionalist forces represented by conservatism stood pressed between the workers’ movement from below and the plutocracy from above. The workers’ movement was a necessary response to the very real grievances of the uprooted urban proletariat under the libertarian regime of the workhouse, child labour, slum dwellings and cholera. Some traditionally minded individuals and institutions championed the workers’ cause.

The Conservatives, led by Joseph Chamberlain formed the Trade Protection League in 1903 to oppose the free market and champion the British worker. (In New Zealand 1930s Labour maverick John A Lee encountered the opposition of his “socialist” colleagues who thought that trade protectionism was contrary to “International brotherhood”, albeit more a “brotherhood of plutocracy”than of the worker).

Alternatives to both plutocratic libertarianism and socialistic nationalisation were proposed, including monetary reform (e.g. social credit). Catholic social doctrine (called ‘solidarism’) as exemplified by the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), posited a rejection of socialism and capitalism as materialistic, and advocated a wider distribution of property ( whence the Distributist movement of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton). The recreation of the medieval guilds was advocated as a basis for organic social harmony. Such doctrines found an influential voice in the Catholic press in Depression era New Zealand, yet today what prelate advances any socio-economic option beyond crypto-Marxism?

Unfortunately, the “alternative” that triumphed was, until recent years, Marxism, and variants of materialistic socialism such as Fabianism. That they did triumph against the alternatives that were gaining mass support should give pause for thought. For example, why did all the socialist movements from Fabianism to communism have such a ready flow of funds? That the so-called proletarian movements were in the pay of “big capital” was a phenomenon that has been commented on by sundry historians from conservative Oswald Spengler to liberal Carroll Quigley.*

Marxism was very much a product of English economics; the mirror image of the free trade school. It arose with the rise of Darwinism, which was taken from the strictly biological field and applied to economics by both the Marxists and the libertarians. Hence, this economic Darwinism posited history as nothing more than economic development along lineal-progressive (i.e. “evolutionary” ) lines. Both doctrines were based upon economic determinism, upon the materialistic conception of history and human social relations. The materialistic conception is antithetical to such organic bonds as family, nation, and culture. To the Marxist these are “bourgeois” concepts. To the libertarian they are expressions of “collectivism,” and stand in the way of the individual who is complete and sovereign unto himself. While today’s libertarians see themselves and are seen by their foes as the antithesis of socialism, they have this materialistic pedigree in common with the Left.

Marx looked favourably upon free trade capitalism, because it did indeed disrupt those organic bonds that had to be buried before Marxism could triumph. Thus Marx saw the subversive potential of libertarianism. The Marxist historical outlook is dialectical. It sees history in terms of a continuing dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The basis of Marxist dialectics is class struggle. Hence the thesis was the old order of ‘feudalism”; the antithesis was capitalism, and from the clash of these opposites would arise the new synthesis of communism.

This is why orthodox Marxist theorists hold that socialism can only arise from an industrialised capitalist country with a large proletariat. Hence the first stage in the dialectical march to communism is capitalism, which prepares the ground for communism. (The mainly agrarian nature of the communist revolutions in China and Cuba caused theoretical problems for communists).

Free trade is the crucial element of the Marxist dialectic, without which there can be no clash of opposites, and therefore no communism arising from the “class struggle”. Few Marxists are open about this seemingly paradoxical support for the subversive nature of libertarianism. Trotskyite publications can, however, be seen adhering to this line when they attack trade protectionism as preserving “national capitalism” and therefore delaying the dialectic that will lead to Communist revolution.

Marx wrote of the subversive role of free trade in the dialectical process when he stated in The Communist Manifesto: “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to the freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production, and in the conditions of life pertaining thereto.”

Previously, in 1847 (Appendix to Elend der Philosophie) Marx had written:

"Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the free trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between proletariat and bourgeoisie more acute. In a word, the free trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for free trade."

We see Marx’s prophecy being fulfilled increasingly in our own time. “Globalism” and a “new world order” is being heralded by the USA and its allies as the hope of mankind, and is being overtly propagated as the “natural development of capitalism” by books written by corporate advisers. People of differing national, cultural and ethnic backgrounds are becoming interchangeable economic units, an undifferentiated mass of producers and consumers. Banking and industrial corporations spanning the world transcend all such differences. The result is the emergence of an international economic system that can bypass national governments. A global consumer culture emerges from the boardrooms of advertising agencies transcending ethnic and national cultures that are hindrances to international mass marketing. What will arise is a new form of internationalised, rootless humanity: we might call Homo Economicus.

Of course what triumphed was not communism, but libertarianism. The plutocrats knew how to play their own dialectical game, and in many instances used the communists in the manner Marx imagined communism would utilise free trade in a dialectical process. Communism and free trade subverted the organic bonds of nationhood, nationality, and family. The communist bloc imploded in a mountain of bankers’ debt. Upon its ruins libertarianism marches largely unchallenged.

If the forces of tradition wish to reclaim anything of value in the world beyond that which reduces life to an economic tread mill, then it ill behoves the champions of traditional values to get hoodwinked into believing they are served by libertarianism. It can be argued that ACT, Libertarianz and the free trade doctrinaires who infest the Labour and National parties do not fundamentally represent anything other than unfettered money making for the benefit of a few predators and parasites in a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest”.

FOOTNOTE:

*Socialist movements in the pay of big capital.

This seeming paradox has been remarked upon by a number of well placed observers, among the earliest being officers and diplomats in the service of the Czar, whose intelligence network was aware of the nexus between certain plutocrats and Russian revolutionary movements.

Of recent sources, one of the most eminent was Professor Quigley, of the Foreign Service School, Georgetown University, also of Harvard and Princeton. His importance is not so much as an eminent historian and government adviser, but that he himself, as he states it, was close to the agencies of what he described as an “international network” of plutocrats. In his magnum opus Tragedy & Hope (Macmillan, 1966) Quigley describes the workings of this “network” and alludes to it as having “no aversion to co-operating with communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.”

Plutocrats have funded all shades of socialism, from Fabianism to communism. For example, the Fabian Society established the London School of Economics, with funds from the British branch of the Rothschild dynasty, Sir Julius Wernher, and Sir Ernest Cassel, an influential banker associated with the New York bankers Kuhn, Loeb & Co. This was related by Fabian leader Beatrice Webb in her autobiography, Our Partnership.

The head of Kuhn, Loeb & co. around his time was Jacob Schiff who had a large part to play in financing socialism. The NY Times of 24 March 1917 reported that at a meeting of US revolutionaries celebrating the victory of the first (March) Kerensky Revolution in Russia, a congratulatory telegram was read from Jacob Schiff.

At the time of the March revolution most of the Communist leaders were in exile, Lenin in Switzerland, Trotsky in the USA. Trotsky was able to return to Russia courtesy of the US State department. He left the USA for Russia aboard the SS Kristianiafjord in the company of a large number of fellow revolutionaries and Wall Street businessmen, according to Dr Antony Sutton, research fellow at the Hoover Institute, who has documented the relationship between Communists and plutocrats in Wall Street & the Bolshevik Revolution (Arlington House, 1974).

At the time Russia was still in the war against Germany. The Bolshevik policy was one of separate peace with Germany. Not surprisingly, the Canadians detained Trotsky at Nova Scotia. Lt Col J B MacLean, publisher of MacLean’s Magazine, himself having had a long association with Canadian army intelligence, commented that Trotsky was released, “at the request of the British Embassy in Washington, which acted on the request of the US State Dept., who were acting for someone else.”

With the triumph of communism in Russia, the American business establishment was quick to urge US recognition of the regime. In a letter to Pres. Wilson, for example, William Sanders, chairman of Ingersoll-Rand Corp. a director of the Morgan American International Corp. and deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, stated (17 Oct 1918): “I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as best suited for the Russian people.” The Red Cross Mission to Russia was utilised as a cover by the American business establishment. .

The mission was funded by International Harvester, according to Sutton. The mission’s director was William Thompson , director of the NY Federal Reserve. Sutton states that the majority of the mission comprised lawyers, financiers and their assistants, rather than people from the medical profession.

According to the Washington Post (2 Feb 1918) Thompson gave the Bolsheviks a personal contribution of $1 million for the spreading of propaganda in Germany and Austria. He stated to the media that the Bolshevik cause had been misunderstood. Sutton states that Thompson joined up with Thomas Lamont of J P Morgan and went to London to persuade the British War Cabinet to halt its anti-Bolshevik policy. Thompson then toured the USA campaigning for US recognition of the Soviets.

From Europe the principal channel of funds to the Bolsheviks was Olof Aschberg, of Nya Banken, Stockholm. A message from the US Embassy in Norway, 21 Feb 1918 states that “Bolshevik funds are being deposited in Nya Banken.” In 1922, when the USSR formed its first international bank, Ruskombank, comprised of German, Swedish, American and British bankers, it was headed by Aschberg. The London Evening Standard (6 Sept 1948) noted of Aschberg’s career when visiting Switzerland, that he was known among diplomatic circles as the “Soviet banker” who “advanced large sums of money to Lenin and Trotsky in 1917. At the time of the revolution Mr Aschberg gave Trotsky money to form and equip the first unit of the Red Army.”

The USSR and the rest of the Eastern bloc subsequently became so enmeshed with debt and reliance on Western technology that the supposed “Soviet threat” was largely a fiction, but served a useful purpose in dragooning nations into the American orbit. China has opened up to Western capital, while even North Korea has recently been forced to come to terms with capitalism as the result of a combination of famine and economic blockade.

THE BEST UNDERGROUND PRESS - CRITICAL REVIEW

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Man, State, Economics

by Fr. Kenneth Novak

Economics begins with the "management of the household" and deals primarily with the family. Only secondarily is it concerned with "Political Economy," that is, the relation of the family to external goods, with the wealth of the nation and how that wealth is produced, distributed, exchanged, and consumed. The modern economist holds Political Economy to be a physical or natural science with rigid laws, comparable to physics or geometry, which can be methodically studied and empirically tested. The point for these moderns is that the "natural" law which governs economic science is not normative (i.e., consisting of moral laws that govern what man ought to do in this or that situation) but it is rather analytic (i.e., based simply upon conclusions drawn from observation and analysis). But, believing that Economics works the same as gravity works is nuts. The law of gravity is a property of physical nature that cannot be denied without serious consequences. "Laws" of economics which demonstrate that the big firm "must" always swallow the small firm may seem irrefutably true in a society in which laissez faire (literally, "let people do [as they please]") is the law of the land, but the idea that I must conform to a "law" of this kind simply because this observed "swallowing phenomena" is likely to repeat itself—barring any moral, customary, or legal restraint—is nuts, too.

The "scientific" approach to Economics is based upon basic truths and observed behavior. Well and good, so far. For instance, it is not "economical" to undertake a productive activity if it consumes more wealth than it produces, or, men stranded on an island will immediately look to build shelter. Catholics often conclude, however, from considering this "scientific" aspect of Political Economy, that Economics is a science like math and chemistry are. But thinking of Economics only in this way leads Catholics to forget that Economics is governed by laws of justice and morality. No Catholic who understands Economics in a Catholic way would say selling pornography is an "economically valuable" activity any more than it was a moral one, or that just because America can be efficiently stocked with slave-produced Chinese junk (49 hours a week at 30-40 cents an hour), it is therefore "economical" that Wal-Mart be allowed to run every family retail and craft shop out of business.

Modern economists come to their "economic" conclusions by saying that they are "compelled" by "economic law" to argue for this and that proposition. Hilaire Belloc says that if Economics as a science is truly independent of morality, it cannot propose certain courses of action but only explain how the economic process works.

The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called "Economic Wealth," and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong. Making people as happy as possible is much more than Economics can pretend to. Economics cannot even tell you how to make people well-to-do in material things. -Economics for Helen

Belloc writes that "economic law" provides no excuse for violation of the moral law, because though the two are independent one is subordinate to the other. Economics must be kept in its place in order to prevent its trumping the moral law:

The only difficulty is to keep in our minds a clear distinction between what is called economic law, that is, the necessary results of producing wealth, and the moral law, that is the matter of right and wrong in the distribution and use of wealth. Some people are so shocked by the fact that economic law is different from moral law that they try to deny economic law. Others are so annoyed by this lack of logic that they fall into the other error of thinking that economic law can override moral law. (Ibid)

Laissez faire Economics is practically laissez faire morality.

Moral philosophy is a "science" no less scientific than the next. Modern Catholics tend to think, however, of "science" as based upon natural observation and physical fact, and some other discipline as telling us how to behave. On the contrary it is very "scientific" to understand, based on first principles, how normative laws governing human action regulate not only private activity but also the public pursuit of wealth.

Knowing to what degree the science of wealth creation is ultimately subordinate to moral science would help clear up the confusion perpetuated by writers—among them even traditional Catholics—who refer to Economics as an exclusively "positive science" which is a "value-neutral, scientific discipline" and not the normative one of Political Economy which regulates human conduct. Once we skate on Economics as "value-neutral," we are on thin ice. Whereas Fr. Denis Fahey explains, "As the Mystical Body of Christ was accepted by mankind…economic thought and action began to respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church" (The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, 5), we hear a woodpile of Catholic thinkers today deliberating that Church teaching of cardinal points of doctrine on man, society, and economic life are "an indefensible extension of the prerogatives of the Church's legitimate teaching office." On the contrary, it is from moral and social philosophy itself that economics as a social science must derive its essential concepts (Fr. Heinrich Pesch, Ethics and the National Economy)! From this foundation certain principles of moral rectitude in economic practice (beyond just theft and dishonesty) can be derived that are not the less true because the Magisterium has sought to authoritatively teach them for the common good.

On "Economics," the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) says:

The best usage of the present time is to make political economy an ethical science, that is, to make it include a discussion of what ought to be in the economic world as well as what is. This has all along been the practice of Catholic writers.

Happily it also remains the practice of writers Christopher Ferrara and Dr. Peter Chojnowski. In this issue of The Angelus, they explain why we should reject modern schools of economics which fail to take root in a truly Catholic understanding of what justly guides and limits economic thought, namely, the moral and social philosophy that is the patrimony of the Church and her scholars. Actually, let me now pass the buck to them.

©Angelus Online

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Catholic Whiggery: The Neo-Conservative Betrayal Of Church Social Teaching

by Dr. Peter Chojnowski

In the past 20 years or so, we have witnessed, especially here in the United States, the emergence of what some authors have termed, "Catholic Whiggery." This movement, best exemplified by such authors as Michael Novak and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, is but an attempt at a Catholic version of the more encompassing "Neo-Conservative" movement, which has its origins with anti-Stalinist Trotskyites, who came to be considered "conservatives" during their years of opposition to Soviet Communism during the Cold War.

Led by such intellectuals as Irving Kristol, the "Neo-Cons," as they are called, embraced the "Whig Tradition," which found its modern-day expression in the social and economic writings of Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek, a Libertarian and northern European secularist, attempted to revive and promote the Whig tradition, which advances laissez-faire economics, secular democracy, and religious and cultural pluralism. This Whig tradition could be said to have its ideological origin in the writings of the defender of the English Revolution of 1688, John Locke. (This so-called "Glorious Revolution" was the which overthrew the legitimate Catholic Stuart monarch James II and placed James's Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange jointly on the British throne.)

To understand the "world vision" of these contemporary Liberals (i.e., Libertarians), we must first remember that they themselves trace their ideological origins to the 18th- century Enlightenment. Michael Novak has described the scheme of these Enlightenment theorists and political leaders as follows:

One of the great achievements of the Whig tradition was its new world experiment, the Novus Ordo Seclorum (the New Order of the Ages). Its American progenitors called that experiment the commercial republic. The Whigs were the first philosophers in history to grasp the importance of basing government of the people upon the foundation of commerce. They underpinned democracy with a capitalist, growing economy.1

That such a Liberal ideology could prevail amongst secularists and non-Catholics groping for an alternative to post-World War II Soviet Communism and Fabian Socialism is not terribly surprising. What is surprising is that such an ideological view could be defended by Catholic thinkers who, subsequently, attempt to "discover" a "Catholic Whig tradition" running back in time to St. Thomas Aquinas. That such Catholic Whigs are claiming to base their circumvention of the entire Catholic Social Teaching on the "Whiggery" of certain "late Spanish Scholastics" is well known. Novak himself attempts to make the Angelic Doctor a precursor of this "tradition" by claiming that St. Thomas's belief in "ordered liberty," mixed government (i.e., several different bodies of the State exercising the various powers of Sovereignty and serving as a hindrance to the emergence of tyranny), and his belief in man's powers of "reflection and choice," puts him firmly in the camp of Democratic Capitalism. The untenable nature of this claim, especially in light of St. Thomas's condemnation of usury, his understanding of the common good, and his unequivocal position that monarchy is the best form of human government, causes Novak, in various places in his writings, to rely on the more standard Whig philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith to ground his ideological defense of democratic capitalism, American-style. His laudatory rhetoric in praise of these thinkers and the System they spawned often descends to the level of the blasphemous and the absurd. In an article entitled, "A Theology of the Corporation," Novak cites the memorable and moving last words of the young Abbe d'Ambricourt, "Grace is everywhere," to offer "signs of grace in the [multinational] corporation." In this regard, Novak finds seven such "signs," which he states is a "suitably sacramental number."2

In an appendix to this same article, Novak acknowledges that the Capitalist Idea, which is part and parcel of the Whig ideology, owes its origins to the Enlightenment thinkers Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith, and the "economic development," which they uniquely initiated, was brought about first with the "white race and the Anglo-Saxon peoples, and, indeed, of a few philosophers."3

We can fully understand the inflated claims of this advocate of the enlightened Liberal New Age, when we read that, "The notion that poverty could be diminished was born with John Locke and Adam Smith."4

Those who were against these "few" enlightened, poverty-hating thinkers were "many Continental philosophers and theologians-Latins, Germans, Slavs-[who] opposed 'Manchester liberalism' all through the 19th century, disliking it intensely."5

What is heartening for those who seek to uphold the Catholic Church's Social Teachings against this new Capitalist Messianism of the Catholic Whig is Novak's dismissal of those social teachings with his statement that, "The papal encyclicals treat it [meaning Liberal Capitalist theory] as a Protestant heresy."6

What is at the core of this Liberal ideological view, shared in full by the "Catholic Whigs" of our own time, are the ideas of social, political, religious, and economic individualism and the subsequent non-interventionism of the State. It was the task of John Locke to philosophically ground this Whiggish Liberal world-view, while it fell to Montesquieu to formulate the exact nature of the Liberal Commercial Republic of the post-Enlightenment period. The descriptive part was easy. Montesquieu understood the Liberal regime to be a union of fellow citizens, bound together, not so much by ties of friendship, as by contract. This alliance of contracting parties was intent upon maximizing their freedom of choice through a confederation of convenience. In such a socio-political order, men found themselves cut off from one another or, at best, linked through a market mechanism. What would happen if this Liberal Republic was realized, would be a world in which everything had its price and, accordingly, its sellers and buyers. A marketplace of arms' length transactions would replace political community.

As we can surmise, religion is of no importance in such a commercial republic. This is why Locke restricts religion to the private sphere. Couldn't we say that it is exactly this restriction that distinguishes the Liberal regime from the regimes of Old Europe? This Whig view, which understands government to be constituted by contracting individuals and whose sole purpose is to insure the execution of the contracts made between individuals, cannot but alter Christendom's understanding of what the purpose of civil society is. In his first Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke argues for the civic toleration of all religions (except the intolerable anti-liberal Catholic one) by making the following claim about the nature of civil society itself:

The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.

Locke is even more explicit as regards his understanding of a Liberal political order when he states, in his Second Treatise on Government, that,

The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting.

Any idea of a common end of all the members of society and of society as a whole is completely lacking in this political view. The religion of the people, along with their growth in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity are certainly not the concern of the rulers of such a Liberal State. As Locke states in the same text,

If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate and the estates of the people may be equally secure whether any man believe these things or no. I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd. But the business of the laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man's goods and person.

According to this analysis, then, government is only delegated the task of guaranteeing the private relationships and agreements initiated by the individual citizens themselves. Society does not have a corporate task, responsibility, or goal. Any goal which transcends the one of material acquisition and psychophysical contentment is considered beyond the legitimate realm of State interest and concern. "Providing the conditions necessary for the advancement in virtue and the ultimate attainment of Heaven" is out. Christendom is nullified. The past, made up of completely non-Liberal societies, is to be initially vilified and then forgotten. All the Whig theorists advance this same goal, whether Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Lord Acton, or Michael Novak. Indeed, this rejection of the idea of socially and economically significant State intervention in the affairs of the commonweal is the very essence of the ideology of the Whigs, whether neo-Catholic or non-Catholic. Novak himself states this when he writes,

The foundational concept of democratic capitalism, then, is not, as Marx thought, private property [which it would be, of course, for Distributism]. It is limited government. Private property, of course, is one limitation on government. What is interesting about private property is not that I own something, that I possess; its heart is not 'possessive individualism'....Quite the opposite. The key is that the state is limited by being forbidden to control all rights and all goods.7

What is little realized by those who attempt to stand up to the steam roller of Whiggery, whether in its Catholic or non-Catholic versions, is the fact that Locke constructed an entire theory of human knowledge for the express purpose of bolstering the Whig theory of government and society. This theory is called "empiricism" and has shaped the minds of most men in the Anglo-American world since that time. It can be understood as the theoretical foundation of all the Liberal claims about man and the world of men. Fundamentally, this theory claims that human knowledge is limited to the external appearances of things in the world. The very "substantial being" of things, the essence of created things and structures in the natural world, cannot be known by the human mind. Substance, according to Locke, is "I know not what." The importance of this basic philosophical stand cannot be overerestimated. If man, and, more importantly, the embodiment of the society of men, the State, cannot know the "what" of things, he certainly cannot know the "why" of things. Locke allowed that individual men could know the "why" of things by blind faith alone. The State, however, has not the authorization or the competence to speculate as to the "why" of things. Therefore, any theological or philosophical teachings that answer the question "why" are strictly beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse. The State is simply relegated to keeping the individual citizens, who come up with their own private "whys," off each other's back and, most importantly, out of each others wallets!


Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and another in Philosophy from Christendom College. He also received his master's degree and doctorate in Philosophy from Fordham University. He and his wife, Kathleen are the parents of five children. He teaches for the Society of Saint Pius X at Immaculate Conception Academy, Post Falls, ID.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Taken from Thomas Storck, "The Social Order as Community" in Caelum et Terra, Fall 1996.

2. Michael Novak, "A Theology of the Corporation," in The Corporation: A Theological Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Reseach, 1981), pp.206-207.

3. Ibid.,p.225.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 209. Cf. For a complementary view, see Paul Johnson, "Is There a Moral Basis for Capitalism?" in Democracy and Mediating Structures: A Theological Inquiry, ed. Michael Novak (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), pp.49-58.

©Dr. Peter Chojnowski

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Crucified Between Two Thieves:Catholic Social Thinking vs. Right and Left

by Anthony Basile, Ph.D

I. The Rhetoric of Freedom: "Free" Market and "Free" Sex

If I received a penny each time someone suspected me of having far Left sympathies, I would be a rich capitalist today! And why? Because I introduce considerations from Catholic social teaching into my arguments. I am sorry to add that often these accusations come from none other than my fellow Catholics! Yet, even when I point out the encyclical where the idea was first introduced, the result is predictably the same: with much guile and little critical thought, the insights of a century old Catholic tradition are dismissed outright. What is this? Are we still laboring under the spell of McCarthy's paranoia? Does questioning the justice of a market system that holds laissez-faire economics as its ideal automatically earn you the stigma of being a Marxist intellectual? What's going on here? We may be demoralized by the frequent dismissals, but if we Catholics don't speak out for economic justice, who will? It seems that "liberal guilt" has not yet moved the upper middle class to legitimate the "economically challenged" by including them in their politically correct pantheon of marginalized minorities. Certainly the rich have nothing to gain by speaking out for social justice. The media, a small set of very large corporations, reports that the economy is always getting better, but hardly clarifies the issue. Better for whom? Large corporations like the media?

Is it surprising that a profit-making company in the business of disseminating public information does not report that you're suffering while they prosper? Economic indicators are made public information by various academic or government organizations, but we hear little public debate regarding their significance. Just what do these numbers mean in terms of our everyday life? How should we act on the information they give us? Consider the following subtlety that is typical of statistical information: the price of computers goes down by 50 percent, but the price of cheese goes up 10 percent; so, on average, prices are dropping. OK, let them eat computer chips! It is difficult to respond to our current situation if we don't know the facts and we can't see how those facts are relevant to ourlives.I don't want to foster any false paranoia, but look around. We don't need an official report to let us know that the dignity of our fellow man is affronted every time he can't afford to send his children to college, or can't afford children in the first place, or has difficulty paying the gas bill, or getting decent housing, or, in the extreme, has to scavenge through garbage cans for empty bottles and half eaten bags of potato chips. This is not an exaggeration! Rummaging through garbage is a daily activity for the street people on Elmwood St. in Buffalo. And, in response to that legion of "concerned citizens" who politely inform me that I can always leave the country if I don't like it here, I remind them that these poor souls will not digest their food any better if I do. Yet, the very people that are indignant of my criticisms have no qualms complaining about how poorly they are treated when employers warn them in no uncertain terms,"well, if you don't like your job, you can work elsewhere."

Apparently, injustice is easier to recognize when it happens to you than when it happens to your neighbor. But, this is not a question about the American way vis-a-vis other ways of life. Indeed, it has been a growing global problem ever since the early '80s when First World leaders like Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, among others, began to implement polices in their respective countries which, if they did not actually send us down our present economic path, certainly did little to prevent it. Nor should we limit our vision to the First World only; the Third World has suffered far greater injustices at the hands of the same economic system that now hits close to home. Economic exploitation knows no national boundaries.Let me begin by characterizing the problem, grosso modo. In a nation as rich as the US (or any First World country), it is difficult to believe that the economic hardship encountered by the average person and his family is due to scarcity. A more reasonable explanation points to the process by which the wealth is distributed. That is, it is not the case that the nation lacks the natural and human resources to, say, provide good housing for everyone; rather, these resources, as they are allocated by the economic rules of "fair play," are not directed towards addressing human needs, but towards increasing profit margins, and these two ends are not necessarily compatible; in fact, they are often blatantly contradictory.

Trickle down economics would have us believe otherwise, but it is hard to understand exactly how this would work. What magic connects the individual's needs to the profit margins of large corporations? Lower cost for products and services is the answer offered. But, consider the otherside, namely the now famous scenario of corporate downsizing-famous because it offers an excellent example of why trickle down economics fails. It is perfectly legitimate in the business world for a company to lay offworkers in order to increase its profit; however, doing so means that someone will have to pay by loosing his job. If these unfortunate individuals have a mortgage or other financial commitments, hardships are sure to follow. The lower price of computers will make little difference in their lives if they don't have a steady income; although, it may make a big difference in the pockets of other companies that do use computers. So the "magic" of trickle down economics does not benefit the workers; indeed, the environment created when every company simultaneously tends towards downsizing is an economy which is capital intensive and labor scarce. How can this possibly meet the need to include more people into the labor force? We can't just fool ourselves into some fantasy by saying, "well, somehow things will work out," because they don't. We can easily produce counter-examples and so can banks which foreclose on mortgages. There is no "invisible hand" within the system miraculously making things work out.

We must resist deluding ourselves with non-existent phantoms that transcend the sphere of human activity and appear just in time to save the day. The economic system in place is a result of the human actions, and any injustices to be found there point to individuals and the decisions they make. God promised us a world that could sustain us. The rest is our doing. Economics is essentially a matter of morality. If, then, the problem is not scarcity, but how the wealth is distributed,why are so many people resistant to questioning the "free" market system?

If things are really rough, and it seems to me that they are because many of my hard working friends and colleagues are experiencing similar financial hardships, albeit to varying degrees, why is there this uncritical commitment to the very system which they find oppressive? This is a difficult question with a very complex response. I cannot pretend to answer it completely, but there is this vague sense among the general public that the "free" market forms part of the "freedom" of the "Free World" which opposes itself to the totalitarianism of the old Soviet bloc, and now even the Muslim nations-the old good guys versus bad guys theme which still finds its expression in popular cinema. So, to question the "free" market is to question "freedom". I am well aware that this is just a caricature, and many people rise above it. Nonetheless, at the unconscious level, there are some very strong associations connected to the word "freedom" which have much more formative value than they should. In this way, many questionable cultural habits can be justified by simply affixing the word "free" in front of them, like "free" sex. But anyone who justifies the "free" market solely on the basis that it is "free" can have no argument against "free" sex; one wonders at times how different the political Left and Right really are in the US. Once the notion of a "free" what-have-you has entered the popular imagination, the logical argument is an uphill battle against people's emotional responses. Try to convince them that this sort of "freedom" is an illusion which, upon closer examination, reveals itself as enslavement, and you will see what I mean!

Catholic morality grows out of a wisdom that understands why "free" sex is really enslavement to passions and a loss of something very precious to our humanity, just as it can see why a "free" market is tantamount to near slavery. But do either criticisms get a sympathetic hearing? (Incidentally, if you doubt the second statement, that a "free" market tends to enslave, please read "Rerum Novarum" by Pope Leo XIII.) The remainder of this article is not aimed at expounding Catholic social teaching.

For this, I refer the reader to Rupert J. Ederer's fine book, Economics as if God matters, published by Fidelity Press. In it, the author comments on six major papal encyclicals that were central in forming the teaching, and he makes them accessible to the lay reader who wants togain an appreciation for their spirit. For those who want to jump directly into an encyclical, I recommend Centesimus Annus by John Paul II, since it commemorates the 100th anniversary of the incipient encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and refers back to important earlier work.

Rather, in this article, I want to limit myself to clearing a path for Catholic social teaching by showing that it is radically different from either Marxist or Liberal social theories. In doing so, I hope to resolve any scruples the reader might have, for reasons stated above or for other reasons, and assure him that the teaching does indeed grow organically out of Catholicism. In sum, I will show below that both the Marxist and Liberal traditions,which have their origin in the Enlightenment, share a defect that Catholic social teaching not only avoids, but addresses directly. Namely, both attempt to give an account of society on the basis of some underlying "amoral" dynamics, and in so doing, eclipse moral considerations from economic and political decisions. Historically, this has left a moral vacuum in society which has been filled by all sorts of injustices and resulted in countless suffering. We still live one particular version of that disorder today, what below I call "consumer-driven capitalism."

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism.

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism. Instead of moral reasoning, Enlightenment thinkers opted for procedural reasoning which they believed was morally neutral in the same way that the laws of physics are morally neutral. Their unlimited love for the natural sciences led them to appropriate scientific reasoning far beyond its proper limits and extend it to humans in society.

This project was bound to fail because humans are irreducibly moral creatures, and no amoral theory can possible describe them or prescribe norms for them. The only effect an amoral theory has if it is taken on as a complete understanding of our nature, is that it obscures moral awareness and leads to disordered behavior.

For this reason, I will call Marxism and Liberalism "theory" because they purport to be positive sciences like physics, and I will call Catholic social teaching a "teaching" because it unabashedly integrates a normative prescription with our social and economic world. In fact, Catholic social teaching, properly understood,belongs to moral theology and aims at responding to the mess created by the Enlightenment. My scope here is limited. If I succeed in awakening in the reader, especially the reader who has a position of responsibility within the community, a desire to seriously understand what scholars and popes have said about economic justice and to integrate that teaching into their lives, then this article has fulfilled its purpose.

II. Orthodox Marxism: The Material Dialectic and Morality Lost

It is important to distinguish Communism as the actual political movement that took power in Russia under Lenin in 1918 from the social theory that was invoked to justify it, namely Marxism. The relationship between what Marx said and what the Revolutionary Party picked up as the jargon for its propaganda is an uneasy one at best; so, I will take the accusation that some people have made against me, namely that Catholic social teaching is close in spirit to Communism, to mean that it is close to Marxism.

Otherwise, comparing theory and teaching on the one hand with an historical event on the other would be like comparing apples and oranges. But even with this distinction, Marxist social theory and Catholic social teaching are so different that the whole project of contrasting the two seems a little silly. In truth, the people who made the accusation did not know what they were saying; still, it was sufficient to hear any criticism of the "free" market for them to jump to conclusions, so I want this response to go on record. Moreover, my discussion of Marxism will bring out its essential defect so that its similarity to Liberal economics, despite the popular belief that these are polar opposites, will become obvious. The central doctrine of orthodox Marxism, the sine qua non, if you will,is the doctrine of the historical dialectic which aims at giving a total understanding of the human condition through an understanding of our history. Curiously enough, this aspect of Marxism ultimately derives from Christianity, if not in content, then at least in form. St. Augustine, in the City of God, gave Christians our lasting understanding of history as the succession of ages in which God's plan for the salvation of mankind unfolds. Unlike the mythical sense of time that the ancient Greeks possessed, in which archetypal events inaugurated by the gods in illo tempore were forever repeated, Christ came once and for all, and he came in history, as one who dwelt among us.

So, whereas pagan time was cyclical, Christian time is linear, with a definite beginning at Creation and the Fall, a definite middle with the coming of Christ and a definite end at the Final Judgment. This historical structure was first appropriated by Hegel, who emptied it of its Christian content and put in its place a pantheistic version. He saw history, not as the unfolding of God's plan, but as the unfolding of the World Spirit, and incarnations of this spirit were to be seen in the historical events and people of his day, like Napoleon. Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws of physics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws ofphysics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

On this account, human history is driven forward by the interplay of a society's natural resources, means of production and means of distribution. From a primitive state, we evolved first into a slave economy, then a feudal economy, and now, a capitalist economy. But, there will be one final stage to the dialectic, the revolution, after which we will enter our socialist phase, history will end and we will live in the workers' paradise. That the dialectic must inevitably reach this critical point is demonstrated as follows: as capitalists get richer, the competition between them becomes fiercer, and the weaker members of their rank are forced into the working class, which in turn gets poorer. (Incidentally, if you hear something of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" in this, you may not find it surprising that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to him. One wonders just how different Marx's thought is from that of a good bourgeois Victorian!)

Eventually, the suffering of the working class leads them to realize their common condition and a class consciousness forms where the workers begin to act cooperatively. In one final decisive moment, the workers simply take over the means of production and private ownership is abolished. The creativity of the worker, which was once alienated from him in the form of wage-labor, is unleashed and becomes reintegrated into his life; he lives blissfully ever after, spontaneously producing and sharing wealth. I think the similarities to Christian eschatology are obviouse nough to not need comment. Since Marx was aiming at a total understanding of our social condition, he had to account for other institutions, like politics, law, philosophy, art, literature, religion and so forth, besides economics. To include these in his system, he posited a duality in society between the economic infrastructure, which is made up of the natural resources and the means of production and distribution, and the superstructure, which comprises the politics, laws, and so forth. The former is the material base which essentially drives society forward, while the latter, the conscious activity of society, is simply the "after effect." This has very important implications in terms of our nature.

For Marx, man is not homo sapiens, a reasoning creature, but homo faber, man the producer, an economic automaton whose functioning merges with the blind dynamics of material dialectic. On this view, one should not think of the poor working conditions of late capitalism as offending some "natural" sense of justice which is grounded in "reason"- that's Catholic talk - rather, these conditions are simply the origins of the workers' consciousness.

(The comparison can be made to the picture of the mind arising from the material functioning of the brain. Individuals in a Marxist society are like neurons in the brain: no single individual has much awareness, but collectively they do.) The class consciousness of the workers, as it is emerges from the material dialectic in the late stages of capitalism, results in a consciousness of the revolution; in contrast, bourgeois consciousness is the system of philosophy, religion, art, politics, laws,etc., which serves to justify the privileged position of the capitalists.

These are the so-called "ruling ideas" of society which, in Marx's language, attempts to instill a "false" consciousness in the workers so that they are distracted from a "true" consciousness of their condition and of the revolution.

III. The Opium of the Masses

It is at this point that the fatal flaw of Marxism reveals itself in full force. In his endeavor to develop a theory which would be truly "scientific," Marx separated the dynamics of society, which he represented as amoral and impersonal laws, from the living individuals who make up that society and are moral beings. Let me expand on this. Impersonal laws are fine in physics. It is absurd to think of the underlying constituents of a table, say, as deliberating over their condition, weighing their possible choices, considering the consequences of each, and paying the price for any immoral behavior afterwards. The dynamics of electrons is totally determined by the laws of physics which constrain them to behave in one and only one way, and they have no "choice" in the matter. Because of this, we would hardly think of treating electrons as moral creatures. We would not appeal to their freedom, discuss possibilities with them, feel that they should be punished for doing the "wrong" thing, and so on. It is simply the case that electrons cannot do the "wrong" thing, because they blindly follow set rules; so, one is justified in talking about them in an amoral fashion. But, humans do have an inner freedom and they can consciously choose among different possibilities. So, in so far as Marx reduces society to amoral laws, his theory can no longer speak to moral creatures.

Marx can no more tell an individual what he should or should not do than a physicist could tell an electron what it should or should not do. Or, put another way, I, as an individual, have no idea what to do with Marxism because nowhere does Marx ever say what I ought to do, only what I will do as an integral part of my class and its place in the dialectic. But this offends my sense of inner freedom. Do I not have some awareness of my situation and of the possibilities it entails? Can I not freely choose among these possibilities? And if I can, how should I choose? On the moral question, Marx is absolutely silent. As far as he's concerned, my behavior is determined like that of an electron.This problem manifests itself most forcefully in terms of the question of the revolution. First, consider it from the workers' perspective. Since the material dialectic proceeds to its critical point by an impersonal dynamic, the revolution is inevitable. But then, the workers might reasonably conclude that they need not work to bring it about because, after all, there is no possibility that it will not happen. Thus we arrive at an absurdity where the workers will inevitably revolt, but need not do anything for that revolution to occur! A similar absurdity is encountered when one consider the effect that Marxism would have on the capitalists. Now that they are aware of the material dialectic and the coming crisis,they could work towards resisting the revolution or even preventing it.

Either way, one could argue that the workers are better off if the dialectic is kept secret, not only from the capitalists, but also from themselves! In fact, pushing this ironic twist of reasoning further, one might speculate that we are not living in the workers' paradise today because awareness of the dialectic has already undermined the dynamics of the dialectic itself! Marx never considered what consequences an awareness of his theory might have because consciousness for Marx was only an "after effect" and had no causal efficacy. But, as we can see, only absurdity follows from such a position. In sum, we might find Marxism an elegant and sophisticated social theory, but what, pray tell, do we do with it?! How do we act on the basis of the knowledge it imparts? Do we sit by our windows and watch the inevitability of history unfold itself, or do we go into the streets and participate?

This is a subtle, but serious, flaw that is not limited to Marxism. As soon as one tries to construct any social theory based on an amoral dynamic, one succeeds in producing a theory which not only has no normative value for us, but is meaningless because we cannot resolve how it fits into our lives. How can an essentially amoral theory speak to essentially moral creatures? Nonetheless, the mind can fall under the spell of this amoralism, and when one does, it is not the case that one begins to act amorally, which is impossible for moral creatures; rather,one loses touch with the moral law and begins to act in a disordered fashion. So, in so far as Marxism aims at being purely an amoral description of society, it is utterly useless as a normative prescription for action. And in so far as one tries to internalize it as such, one looses touch with one's moral nature and acts in a disordered fashion. Injustices are sure to follow. Is it any wonder that Marxism was so easily picked up by the Communist party as propaganda and used to justify anything? As ideology, it lulled people into a moral slumber that allowed Stalin to commit atrocities against the people in the name of the People!

But I will not dwell on these sins because the media in the West has neverlost an opportunity to discredit Communism with them and we are all well informed about Soviet atrocities. But much to the media's chagrin, a proper analysis of the situation shows that Liberalism is equally implicated in the sins of its Enlightenment sibling! Below, I will turn my tactics around. Rather than dwell on Liberal economic theory, I will quickly expose the principle of amoralism in it and then turn to a longer discussion of just how that moral vacuum has been filled by disord in theWest. Whereas Marxist theory is little known here, but its effects well known, the situation with Liberal theory is somewhat reversed: the connection between its amoral principles and the resulting disordered social practices has not been brought to the foreground. Just how Liberal economics lulls us into moral slumber in our world is not discussed, or if the criticism is raised, it is easily dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration in the public forum.

IV. Liberal Economics: The Commodification of Everything and Morality Sold

Let me begin with a distinction similar to the one I made above. On the one hand we have Liberal economics, the exponent for which below will be Adam Smith who is considered its father, and on the other hand, we have the historical event which we are living today and which I will call capitalism (or the "free" market). Again, the relationship between theory and practice is a difficult one because, although the former is taken as the justification for the latter, the degree to which the practice truly reflects Smith's intentions is a matter of scholarly debate. But, it is not important for us to sift through this relationship because it will suffice to show that the theory is based on a central principle of amoral dynamics and so, regardless of what Smith intended, in so far as it is taken as justification, it eclipses moral awareness and leads to disorder; all else is just details. Below, I will show precisely what this principle is and how it has led first to labor-driven and now to consumer-driven capitalism. The second manifestation of this monster has succeeded to an historically unprecedented degree in absorbing life into economics. If the celebration of the life God gave us begins when economic necessity ends, it is little wonder that capitalism contributes to a growing cultural malaise. We have forgotten that work is for man and meant to dignify him, not vice versa.

Much of the Enlightenment can be understood as the appropriation of Medieval thinking, made "scientific." Marxism, as we have seen, takes the idea of linear history, empties it of God and puts in His place the material dialectic. Similarly Liberal economics adopts Natural Law from moral theology, but empties of its moral content, and applies it to economics. Natural Law, as it is generally understood, is God's intention for how man and society ought to operate. If a society goes against this law, then harm follows of its own accord, that is, it follows naturally and not as fire and brimstone from heaven. For instance, if the members of a society have made their peace with theft, then they must also pay the price because wherever there are thieves, there are also victims, and the society's collective misbehavior becomes its own punishment. But, this state of affairs can lead people to an awareness of their error and so there is the possibility of self-correction: when people start to realize that stealing is not such a good idea, laws are enacted, enforced, and so forth.

Adam Smith, in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, appropriated this structure to explain the dynamics of the marketplace. According to Smith's account, the market is guided by laws of its own that naturally adjust the production and exchange of goods so that everyone in society benefits in the maximum way possible. These are not legislated laws, but in analogy to Natural Law, they are the "invisible hand" that guides the economy to meet the needs of society. The worst of all possible sins, then, would be to interfere with their workings; rather, one should always follow the rule of laissez-faire, "leave it alone". When a society acts against the Natural Law, it puts into play its own punishment; similarly when a society interferes with the free market, it falls short of meeting the needs of the people. The central principle operating here is the law of supply and demand which Smith formulated as follows:

1) If there is a demand for a particular product, then there will be a market for it. The product is at first scarce and its price high. But this will attract other manufacturers which want to compete and the net effect will be to reduce scarcity and bring down the price to a "fair" range.

2) If there is no demand for a particular product, then there will be no market for it. The product is in abundance and its price low. Manufacturers producing it will switch to producing other products for which they get a better return.

So, both the human and natural resources of society are shifted away from products not in demand to ones that are and any scarcity is alleviated. The system isself-correcting.The law of supply and demand, as it has been sketched out so far, is the amoral dynamics of Liberal economics and it aims at describing how the economy will adjust itself through the workings of an "invisible hand" (by"invisible" read impersonal, unconscious and amoral); but, again like the material dialectic or the laws of physics, it does not give us any normative prescription for action. Smith, as a good bourgeois, was not as radical in this respect as Marx, and he did recognize that there must be some deliberations going on in the decision making process of individuals.

To flesh out his theory, then, Smith described this behavior as the enlightened pursuit of self-interest and so implicitly prescribed it as normative-enlightened because the reasoning individual would recognize that violating the common good was not to his benefit. This pursuit leads to the law of supply and demand because, in pursuing their own self-interests, manufacturers are continuously competing to get ahead, and so adjusting the supply side to match the demand side. But it is rather clear that Smith's moral prescription is custom-tailored to fit his law, and is only secondary to it.

He simply answered the question of how to make his amoral law have the semblance of normative prescription by constructing that prescription which would make it work; so, like Marx, he put the amoral dynamics before any moral considerations and came up with a formula that can be summarized as "private vice equals public virtue."

But how does one sympathize with such a norm? How is the dignity of man guaranteed if this consideration is not brought in from the start? One answer Smith might put forward is that the protection of our dignity emerges as collective behavior through his law; but, it does not take much to construct scenarios which are consistent with the law, and yet affront our dignity. The history of capitalism is the history of such refuting scenarios. He might add that the pursuit of self-interests must be enlightened, that it must take into consideration the common good. But then he will not be able to justify the rule of laissez-faire. If the pursuits are not "enlightened," are we justified in interfering with the free market? Despite Smith's poor attempt to make his theory prescriptive, it remains essentially amoral, and in so far as it is used by our society to justify the "free" market, it leads to disorder. The suffering of marginalized individuals is explained away, or worse, simply dismissed on the premise that the law of supply and demand guarantees "fairness," and these individuals have no right to complain. In sum, it becomes ideology.

First in the history of capitalist disorders is the one that is now best understood. It set in around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and by the 1840s was inspiring Marx to formulate his theory. By the turn of the 19th century it had reached revolutionary fury and in 1918 this fury burst forth in Russia. In the US, it did not entertain a revolutionary hope, but it still manifested itself in the formation of labor unions and the violence that attended them, especially because of the involvement ofthe Mafia which remained a problem well into the '50s and early '60s.

Smith's laissez-faire economics was a naive hope at best,but when it was combined with the bourgeois dogma of absolute property rights (the belief that one can do whatever one wants with one's own property), it became downright immoral and an immediate danger to the average worker. Not factored into Smith's considerations was the fact that at least one way in which manufacturers could operate in their own self-interest was by lowering labor costs. Individuals were not only the agents in society that created demand by purchasing products, but they were also the labor force and, thus, a integral element of the supply side that could be purchased at an ever decreasing price as labor became available in abundance. And far from competing for labor resources, manufacturers quickly discovered that people were quite desperate for money and were forced to sell themselves at less than a just wage-a dramatic instance of Smith's law failing to set a "fair" price.

Collective exploitation of this situation by the capitalists led to inordinately poor working conditions, long hours in sweatshops, child and woman slave labor, and a general degradation of the masses of humanity that had nothing other than their labor to sell-we enter here the world of Charles Dickens. The advent of unions and collective bargaining somewhat protected the worker who otherwise stood naked before these industrial giants; but, the problem remains with us today and shows no sign of relief. Once again, we have an instance of the impossibility of founding an economic system on an amoral principle and expecting the dignity of man to be protected. The origin of the second major event in the history of capitalist disorders, at least here in the US, is located with Calvin Coolidge and his generation. If we call the first phase of capitalism labor-driven in that exploitation was concentrated on the labor force, we may call the second phase consumer-driven because attention was shifted onto the consumer. Although we inherit both problems today, each surfacing in turn, consumer-driven capitalism is much more insidious in that it has been largely successful in absorbing our culture and churning it into mush.

Let's see how this has come about. The '20s saw the first industrialists who realized that the very factory workers they employed were also the consumers of their products. So, the industrialists were undermining their own interests by paying the workers too low a wage: if the workers could not afford the products, the markets would remain restricted. Instead, the industrialists calculated that by increasing the workers' wages by a certain amount, the latter would have a surplus income and want to own items of "luxury." If wages and prices were balanced just right, and the workers instilled with a desire for these luxuries, the industrialists would increase their overall profits. Overnight, the mass consumer was born, caught in a vicious circle where still more labor was needed to obtain the very items the worker desired. As time progressed, society became dependent on these "luxuries," like the automobile, and we became enmeshed in our present economic monster.Advertising was instrumental in this shift. Beginning in the '20s and with increasing frequency, advertisements were used to entice consumers by presenting them with a vision of the good life as one with filled with luxuries. Fashion magazines gave the public the latest designs which, ofcourse, were always changing; and, for the first time, women were shown as obsessing over their looks in the mirror. The depression disrupted much of the economy's activity, as did the war, but as the US recovered, capitalism became ever more consumer-driven.

In the '50s, the business of advertising became a major industry in its own right, shaping our culture through the icons it injected into the popular imagination. When one considers that the mere symbol of a soft-drink, Coca-Cola, has won international recognition, one is struck by the absurdity of the situation! Today, there is a certain cultural current which ridicules the emptiness of these icons and recognizes their facile attempt at manipulation, but this has not stopped manufacturers from finding other ways of exploiting consumers. We are told that marketing surveys are for our benefit, so that manufacturers know what the public wants and can better serve us. But, this is just a front; what they really want to know is our spending impulses. Frugality is not a capitalist virtue.Thus, the brave new idea of consumerism expanded Smith's amoral law to cover, and hence disorder, a whole new dimension of society. When Smith proposed his law of supply and demand, he did not consider the possibility that demand could be generated out of whim by the enticement of manufacturers; rather, he was thinking of average needs and wants.

Of course, with the moral nature of human beings eclipsed, this sort ofconsideration is no longer available to the exponent of Liberal economics who is forced to respond that it is the individual's "free" choice and responsibility whether or not to consume a particular product. This, of course, presupposes that the individual's sensibilities are formed in the private sphere previous to his becoming a consumer in the public sphere, and that he has the moral strength to avoid continuous temptation; but, as we well know, this is exactly what advertising aims at undermining. It wants to form a consumer that acts on whim as often as possible and is given over to impulse. Here we must resist the tendency to put the blame squarely on the individual and his lack of frugality. Remember, as fallen creatures, we are all weak to some extent. A more charitable outlook recognizes that guilt also lies in the hands of those who take advantage of that weakness without shame. Individuals in a society depend on one another when moral strength fails them. Consumer-driven capitalism betrays such a trust. So, whereas labor-driven capitalism preyed on those who only had themselves to sell on the labor market, consumer-driven capitalism preys on our moral infirmities. Either way, the weakest member of society always pays the most.

But, consider how unique an historical situation this is. Unlike most social orders in the past or elsewhere in the world today, which require a certain amount of self-restraint and sublimation of base desires, capitalism is a social order which thrives off of the opposite! Not "private vice equals public virtue", but "private vice equals public resilience" - injustices abound, but the system is too rigid to allow for correction. Capitalism only bottoms out at dangerous decivilizing forces which are curtailed either by our innate sensibilities or by intervention of the state. Other than this, consumer-driven capitalism seems able to pick up any aspect of human life, make it into a commodity, and sell it back to us as a product, a simulation of the real which becomes the only reality we know. We enter the world of Andy Warhol; life becomes a stroll through the department store, with the isolated narcissist at the center and all of life as commodity stretched out before him. Like an infant which still identifies the whole world as an extension of itself, the consumer experiences pain when his wants are withdrawn and numbness when he is satiated.

The highest and best in man, his God-given existence and the celebration of that life in art, literature, spirituality and so forth, is swallowed up in the abyss of consumerism. Our senses are packaged and sold back to us: taste is commodified in the mass-produced food we purchase at supermarkets, sight is commodified in TV images, and sound is commodified in pop music. Even Gregorian Chants are no longer the special occasion of a religious celebration; they are the digitized sounds whose aura has been striped; they are spliced in with alternative music, as the group Enigma did, and even make the top 40s list. Love is commodified in sex and sex in its mechanical reproduction as pornography. Children are commodified in artificial contraception or abortion; there is a whole money-making industry around the elimination of the "unwanted." World events are commodified in the news; you won't see it if it doesn't sell commercial time. Time is commodified in interest rates; if you want today what you can only afford tomorrow, you must pay for the intermediate time. Health is commodified in medical insurance; peace of mind carries a cost.

Spirituality is commodified in therapy and self-fulfillment. The mind is commodified in skills that are sold on the job market; gone are the days when education was "food for the soul." The freedom these various activities and entities once had, to be for their own sake, has been taken up within an economic system which only returns them to us for a price, and then only as a simulation of their original reality. In consumer-driven capitalism, economics strives for ontology: an entity exists only to the extent that it can be made into a commodity and sold on the market. It is difficult to minimize the extent to which consumerism has chewed up our culture and spit it out as mush. An interesting illustration is afforded by the fate of certain counter-cultural movements in our society.

Consider the hippies, which began as a reaction against the materialism of the '50s and preached an anti-establishment gospel. Yet, while their music aimed to create a new consciousness of "peace and love" which would "overthrow the establishment," the sale of their records turned the music industry to a political force mandating the very things the music protested. It seems that even attempts at overthrowing consumer-driven capitalism are co-opted by it and sold back to the"revolutionaries"! Today, the "counter-culture," or "alternative" as it is called, is a well-established market. To be clear, I have little sympathies for the hippies; it was before my time and the whole affair strikes me as something short of pure silliness, but neither do I sympathize with what they were reacting against. Nor am I preaching asubversion of the system-heaven knows what injustices will follow. But failed attempts at subversion do reveal the resilience of the system: one wonders if other cultures would have survived the level of decadence introduced by the hippies into ours. Today my students bring me the lyrics of popular alternative, rap and heavy metal bands. One of them, Rage against the Machine, has for its album cover a collage of various revolutionary books, like The Anarchist Cookbook. The lyrics are filled with misdirected anger and incite us to "rage," to "fight the system," and so forth. This is not a danger to capitalism, it is a celebration of it!

The CDs and related cultural fetishes, like body piercing, sell; there is a market to be exploited here. Alternative is the mainstream. If these students are really seeking an alternative to the culture of death theyhave inherited, they might try Catholicism.The same resilience and ability to deflect criticisms is found in our public domain discourse, in particular, as it is carried out in the media. Economic concerns encompass a major portion of our public debates, to besure, but these remain so far in the abstract as to be of little value to us; that is, we cannot act on the information we are given.

Why are economic injustices not reported as such? Why doesn't the media tell us what particular decisions were taken by what particular companies and what effect these decisions had? (We hear lots of noise when it comes to issues of ecology. Why not the same volume when it comes to the concerns of the workers?) We know companies downsize, but why is there no follow-up on just what happens to those individuals who have the misfortune to experience it? Do they find a new job? If they do, does their pay decrease? Or, work hours increase? Do they find it harder to make ends meet? And just where are we going with all this economic activity? Where do we want to go? How does it all fit into what constitutes a good life, a life worthy of the existence God has given us? These essentially moral questions are generally excluded from our public discourse. The question of why this is the case and the role the media plays is profoundly complex and I cannot pretend to answer it here.

Nonetheless there are at least three criticisms which are worth mentionining because each has enough truth in it as to alert us to the dangers. The first comes from the political Right and is not always very probing in its analysis. It simply points to the fact that the news has a certain Left-wing bias and tends to set the agenda for public discussion accordingly. There is some truth to this, particularly when it comes to issues of sexuality, but less so when it comes to economics per se. For instance, it is not often that we hear a debate about how couples are punished economically for having a family.

The sacrifices parents must make today are substantial given that they must guarantee their children will properly integrate into society; among other things, they must worry about giving them a college education. At a cost about $50,000 per child for college alone, this is not a trivial expense, and it is sufficient to put a real economic wedge between DINKS and families. DINKS (couples with Double Incomes and No Kids) live in a different economic world, and therefore cling to different values, than families with children. Yet, one often hears arguments in accord with their values: it is the responsibility of the couple to limit their family within their economic means. This is true; but what limits the economic means of families? An economy of mass consumption and profit margins. Is it any wonder that so many of our youth feel displaced in a world that puts such a heavy price on their heads?

Their very existence is pitted against the profit margins of companies and the consumerism of the previous generation. But how often is this argument put forward in the public arena? Its mere elimination shows a biasing of certain values.The two other criticisms of the media are more probing because they show precisely how the media has merged into the functioning of consumer-driven capitalism: in effect, even our perception of the world as it is given to us by the news is caught up in commodification where what counts as the reality of our situation is only its simulation, packaged and sold back to us. The first criticism comes from Chomsky and other Leftist critics. As capitalism discovered its new vocation in advertising, newspapers increased their profits by augmenting returns from sales of the paper with returns from advertising. Soon newspapers became dependent mostly on the latter,and were co-opted by consumer-driven capitalism. Papers which resisted sales of advertising could not compete and folded. The Daily Herald affords an example of this. As a Left-wing British paper, it once had more than twice the circulation of The Times, The Financial Times and The Guardian combined; but, refusing to sell advertisements for ideological reasons, it collapsed in the '60s.

So, asks Chomsky, what kind of news would one expect to come out of a media that is comprised of, and responsible to, large corporations? Clearly, it would be dedicated primarily to their interests and act as an effective filter for challenging ideas. Chomsky gives a disturbing example of this filtering process. Two simultaneous and comparable atrocities occurred in the mid to late '70s in the South East Pacific; one in Cambodia, the other in East Timor. While the first was intensely covered by The New York Times, the other was not. Why? Because the first was committed by Communists (the Khmer Rouge), who were not very good business allies of American companies, and the second by the Indonesians, who were, especially when it came to the sales of arms. East Timor, a largely Catholic and egalitarian country, was simply expendable. Only "off-beat" media, like those run by Catholics committed to social justice, reported much about East Timor. They still do. The December 1996 edition of The Catholic Worker has a short article on the small island; it reports that the Nobel Peace Prize this year is shared by Bishop Carlos Belo of Dili, capitol of East Timor, and Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister in exile.The final criticism of the commodification of the media comes from radical pessimists, like Baudrillard, and does not look to vested capitalist interests as an explanation. On this view, the commodification of everything has reached such a critical degree in our society that reality itself has been leveled. We see this in a totally apathetic society which simply absorbs whatever is thrown at it. After years of simulated reality on television, commercials of happy people with fake smiles, implicit promises of outrageous proportions, the general public has totally succumbed-its only reality is the commodity. For instance, given the choice between watching a political debate or a football game on TV, most people opt for the latter. Both are judged strictly as commodities for consumption. And why not? Watching the evening news, we see daily stories about famines in Africa juxtaposed with stories about how Scruffy the dog saved Fluffy the cat from mortal peril: one naturally wonders just what the reality of television is! Unlike Chomsky's account, critical discussions in the public sphere do not happen, not because it would upset those who control the means by which the discussions would occur, but because such discussions simply do not matter. The only reality such debates have is their value as commodity, in which case, Scruffy and Fluffy are on par with major famines, and both are equal to one minute of air time. This is a rather hopeless view of things, but again, there is some truth in it. And the extent to which it is true, is the extent to which Adam Smith's amoral law of supply and demand has absorbed our world.

V. Towards a Culture of Life: Catholic Social Teaching and Morality Restored

It is time to move past the Enlightenment's vision of the human being as the duality of private and public sphere, the latter being merely the nexus where impersonal and amoral laws meet. This distorted view of our nature has opened up a crack in our world that has been filled by the monsters described above. The rise and fall of Communism and the present disorder in the East, the culture of death in the West, these are not trivial matters and they reflect the devastating effect of the amoral view we have adopted towards ourselves and our society. (Even Fascism and Nazism can be understood in this context, but as reactions against the Enlightenment rather than offsprings of it.) And the danger is still with us. The next round of economic nightmare may be just around the corner. Today, multinationals operate beyond any nation's power to curtail their excesses and truly are Titans that need not have any concern for us ordinary mortals. We tolerate them to the extent that we hope that, in their indifference to our humanity, it is our neighbor they will step on, and not us. Even our citizenship and the rights it entails cannot effectively protect us; multinationals intimidate their host countries with economic retaliation by threatening to withdraw to countries where labor or natural resources are cheaper. There are some very real dangers here in terms of the dignity of man, both in the First and Third Worlds.

The first step, then, towards addressing this problem is to regain what was lost by the Enlightenment, namely the view of ourselves as essentially integral moral creatures. We have lost sight of the fact that it is we who make the decisions that have repercussion on ourselves and on our fellow man. We are responsible, not some impersonal force like the law of supply and demand; and, we must not give credence to conclusions based on the workings of these ghosts, like the injunction not to interfere with the "free" market. The place of Catholic social teaching in all of this should now be clear: it is directed squarely at the eclipsed moral questions that are not being asked by our society and it unabashedly puts forward norms for the limits of economic, political and social decisions in the aim of protection our dignity. Needless to say, this approach is sorely opposed by our society, with its gut reaction that any moral considerations, especially if these originate in religious thought, are partisan and would unfairly privilege one set of values over another. It is not considered possible that such considerations might benefit all. Rather, the preferred modern solution is to lull ourselves into slumber with the belief that there can be some morally neutral procedural rules in the public domain which guarantee "fairness" to everyone. The evidence is now in, and we can safely conclude that nothing of the sort has occurred: the "system" does not insure justice, people of good will do.

Finally, I would like to end with a caveat. Today, there is a very negative sense associated with the word "morality" and the criticisms made above do little to bring out its positive side. (Sometimes the word "ethics" is used, but this does not always help.) It is true that much of our concern in economic justice regards the responsibility of those who have power before those who do not; for instance, it can be concluded that capitalists act immorally when they take advantage of desperate workers by offering them less than just wage. But there is a positive sense to "morality" beyond the self-restraint we are expected to take on ourselves to do right by our neighbor.

As Catholics, we look to the next world as our true home, but not at the expense of degrading this one. We value the life God has given us and the wonderful things in it that make it meaningful and worth living. There is deep satisfaction the many walks of life and we are called to these things for our own fulfillment, each in his own way. When we are young, we are educated and take on the wisdom of our society; we express our creativity in work; we marry, raise our children and grandchildren and see that they pick up where we left off; some of us dedicate ourselves to the service of others and God in various ministries. All these things are good; they make life worth living and the moral law is meant to guarantee them for us. It is not some empty legalistic code which renders life dreary, but the means by which we may have a culture of life.

Instead, having lost sight of this end, we now have a culture of death, one in which life is mostly a dreary matter of survival-just ask the GM worker who screws in the same bolt eight hours a day, six days a week. To the extent that morality has been vanquished from the social sphere, economic concerns have returned with a vengeance to frustrate life and fill it with needless anxiety. If we are to surpass our culture of death and regain life, we must reintegrate morality in our public sphere. Against the Enlightenment's social theories, we need Catholic social teaching.

Culture Wars
©Copyright 1998

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