Posted on 03/03/2009 8:05:40 AM PST by stfassisi
You don't have to be a genius to realize the failure of Marxism. Even before 1989 one could have realized that Marxist regimes were not built on Marxist ideologies and theory, but were built on the rather strange foundation of tens of millions of bodies of the proletariat who disagreed with the regime.
The foundation of the Marxist governments of Russia and China was two cemeteries.
Dorothy Day left the left. She realized as a young woman that the world's economic problems were not solved by socialism and Communism. She resigned from the left because of its lack of profundity after her World War I experience with socialists. (See Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts, eds., American Catholic Pacifism, Praeger, 1996). Several years later, at the age of 30, she became Catholic, only to discover the papal encyclicals and personalism. Dorothy Day was influenced by great thinkers like Peter Maurin, Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., Emmanuel Mounier, Leo XIII and Pius XI.
Early editions of The Catholic Worker are full of references to the popes and their writings.
Dorothy was neither a socialist nor a capitalist. She was a Christian personalist like the present pope. Dorothy made clear her goal in starting the newspaper in its first editorial: "In an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the popes and the program offered by the Church for the constructing of a social order, this news sheet was started."
CAPITALIST SUCCESS
You don't have to be a genius to realize the success of the global market. Twentieth- century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant at creating new capital. Truly it is wealth creation at its best.
With the global market we have seen the global gross national product grow by 40%, even in the '70's and '80's.
ACHILLES HEEL
This pattern of great wealth creation, accompanied by great want, has long been the Achilles heel of modern capitalism.
The United Nations Development Program found that in 1996 the assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceeded the combined incomes of countries with 45% of the world's people (358 people would not fill St. Anne's Church in Houston in one sitting).
The U.N. declared that "Development that perpetuates today's inequalities is neither sustainable nor worth sustaining."
Unfortunately, the gap is accelerating. It is much worse. Houston Chronicle, "Outlook" section, Sept. 27, 1998)
CAPITALIST DOCTRINE AND THE CENTER FOR ECONOMIC PERSONALISM
Encouraged by this success, capitalists have shown an interest in a theology of wealth creation and have targeted students, seminarians, religious and professional leaders, paying their way to seminars and buying books for them, to form them in better understanding the free market economy and to encourage them to promote its growth.
Under the leadership of Father Robert Sirico, a center called the Acton Institute has been founded to guide people in the way of this new theology. More recently, the Acton Institute has developed what they call a Center for "Economic Personalism." While Fr. Sirico may be well-intentioned in trying to do good as a priest, he comes down on the side of those only interested in personal gain and profit. When his groups emphasizes liberty and creativity for capitalists, what they are defending turns out to be liberty and creativity only for a few.
Lord Acton, after whom the center was named, was the leader in the last century under the direction of Father Iguaz Von Dollinger in attacking the church's definition of infallibility in 1870, even after the decree was issued. Father Dollinger, his mentor, was excommunicated. Lord Acton felt that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to "reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism (including economic liberalism i.e., laissez-faire capitalism) and modern civilization." (Syllabus of Errors) Lord Acton despised Pius IX and the Vatican and barely remained in the Church.
Lord Acton coined the famous phrase, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He was prophetic in his description of the global economy.
NEGLECT OF PAPAL TEACHING
It appears that the people at the Acton Institute have the same attitude towards the Vatican teaching as Lord Acton. They neglect completely the papal teaching on economics, except out-of-context references to Centesimus Annus. They quote the popes in their condemnation of socialism but omit their call for solidarity with the poor and for justice.
We are especially appalled, rather outraged, that they use the words "economic personalism," which for them really means individualism like the rugged individualism of the American frontier. What they describe is not the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Peter Maurin, which concentrates on respect for all persons and their vocations in life..
Fr. Sirico spent a semester at the London School of Economics. He recommends further dialogue between Personalism and free market economics, the Austrian, Chicago and Virginian schools (the authors attended the University of Chicago and know the Chicago school and Milton Friedman, a hero of Fr. Sirico).
CALVINIST ECONOMICS
The Acton Institute and the Center for Economic Personalism rely heavily on the teachings of John Calvin, who emphasized that the outward appearance of material comfort signified God's grace and approval. In Calvin's teaching and preaching, the poor were thought to be visibly damned.
Ads placed in both Catholic and Protestant journals feature the Acton Institute programs as a celebration of the legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper, a neo-Calvinist, presenting the themes as "100 years of Christian social thought."
Unfortunately, their programs have precious little to do with the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, and are rather a distortion of it.
Fr. Sirico, endorsing this thinking, advertising the programs as a synthesis of Calvinist and Catholic thought, doesn't sound like he belongs to the same church as the Pope, who speaks so strongly about solidarity and the terrible gap between rich and poor and even suggested when he last visited Poland that some capitalists came close to excommunication because of the terrible injustices.
INTOLERABLE CONTRAST
On September 27, 1998, John Paul II, recalling the day's liturgical celebration of St. Vincent de Paul, drew our attention to "one of the great challenges which confronts our conscience, the truly intolerable contrast between that portion of mankind which enjoys every advantage of economic well-being and scientific progress and the enormous masses of those who live in conditions of extreme need."
The Holy Father added that, "in the strident contrast between the indifferent rich and the poor who need everything, God is on the side of the latter. It is not licit to resign ourselves to the immoral spectacle of a world in which there are still those who die of hunger, who do not have a home, who lack even the most basic education, who do not have the necessary help when they are ill, who cannot find work."
THE CEMETERY AGAIN: ECONOMIC PERSONALISM IS A FRAUD!
You don't have to be a genius to realize that the global economy (international free market) now solidly in control and flourishing, has been built on the bodies of Third World people who have worked for practically nothing to fill the coffers of First World companies. We meet these people every day at Casa Juan Diego. (See the Houston Catholic Worker, January 1998, "The Neediest and the Greediest," e.g., Wal-Mart, Disney, Nike, the May Company (Foley's), K-Mart, J.C. Penney, etc.)
The foundation of the tremendous success of these companies is slave wages.
Again, we have a very healthy economy built on a cemetery filled with poor workers who have died not with a bullet to the head or a firing squad but death from malnutrition, overwork, slave wages, poisoned water, inadequate housing or trying labor union organizing.
The global market has re-invented serfdom. Economic structures that should facilitate a better life and a better environment have facilitated slavery. A recent column in the Business section of the Houston Chronicle on the renewed need for labor unions exposed local chicken factories where workers must wear adult diapers because they are not allowed time off to go to the bathroom.
The devil of the industrial revolution of the 19th century has returned with seven more, worse than the first.
SUCCESS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Twentieth century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant in creating wealthy capitalists, but very poor at expanding the number of capitalists. Even in the United States, where the economy is thriving, the net worth of the top one percent is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent.
It is incredibly ironic that global free-market advocates would call their ideas economic personalism when, as William Greider reminds us, "In the global marketplace defined as free trade, everyone is free, it seems, but the people. Multinational enterprise can come and go from one market to the next, investors may insist upon terms for the use of their capital, governments may demand concessions in exchange for commercial opportunities. These contractual rights do not extend to the citizens, however" (William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 388).
When Fr. Sirico says that "Economic prosperity through free trade is the most effective distributor of wealth and power," ("The Public Square," First Things 75 (Aug./Sept. 1997) perhaps this terrible disparity is what he means.
HOW CAN THIS BE?
Emmanuel Mounier, father of modern Christian personalism, would be shocked by the falsity of the concept of economic personalism as expressed by the Acton Institute. Any personalism espoused by the Acton Institute is, by their description, a definition of individualism instead of personalism. Individualism is what Mounier called "personalism's dearest enemy." (Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1952,)
Mounier understood the problem of neoconservatives who have never had to live in poverty or never had any contact with the poor: "Intellectuals unaccustomed to the crudity of certain realities, men of too great lesiure who do not understand the force of material constraints… forget that the initiatives of individual are embodied in institutions, both their short-comings and their determinisms, that new objects call for new knowledge. Such institutions, be they good or bad, always contain a menace of oppression for the person."
MOUNIER'S PERSONALISM
Mounier's blueprint for a personalist economy asks everyone to lay aside greed and materialism. It is in harmony with the Beatitudes:
"On the plane of individual ethics we believe that a certain kind of poverty is the ideal economic rule of personal life. But by poverty in this sense we do not mean an indiscreet asceticism or a shameful miserliness. We refer rather to a contempt for the material attachments that enslave, a desire for simplicity, a state of adaptability and freedom, which does not exclude magnificence or generosity, nor even some striving for riches, providing such endeavours are not avaricious.." (The Personalist Manifesto, Longmans, Green and Co., 1938p. 192).
Mounier felt that the biggest problem of modern capitalism has been proclaiming the primacy of economics over history, over the life of the people, over community, over living out one's faith and one's values. The "extreme importance attaching today to the economic problem among human preoccupation is a sign of social disease."
We can readily understand what Mounier means by the primacy of the economic when we think of the tremendous pressure brought upon people to buy and posssess things, live a certain life style and always reach for the highest level of comfort. Social consideration and display are priorities. Even among church people we must let the economic factor dominate or be considered odd. No one in the U.S. is unaware of what putting the primacy of economics in the medical field has done to the availability of good medical care to all.
CONTEMPT FOR WORKERS
You don't have to be a genius to realize the attitude of First World companies towards their Third World workers. It is clear by the amount of money paid to them-a few cents an hour.
We were very saddened recently when we heard a prominent theologian say that his brother who lives in Latin America says that it's great that the multinationals give jobs to these people, jobs they wouldn't otherwise have. The slave wages paid in Third World countries are even slave wages among slaves. To say that no other jobs exist except maquiladoras is to admit that the "structural adjustment" programs required by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the behest of the richer nations have created such economies in poor countries and are a complete failure.
Mounier felt that the system of factories "is based on contempt, conscious or implicit, of the laborer." He reminds us how this was expressed by one businessman, Taylor: "We don't ask you to think. There are others who have been paid to do that." The economics of the business world "tries completely to ignore the person and to organize itself for a single quantative and impersonal goal: profit."
According to Mounier, "profit recognizes no human criterion and no limits. If it does accept a criterion, it is that of the bourgeois values of comfort, social consideration and display, and it remains indifferent equally to economic well-being as such and to the good of the person it contacts." (p.180).
Mounier echoed the teachings of the popes on the primacy of labor over capital. He emphasized that profits do not have rights, but workers do. For many workers the invisible hand of the market had a knife in it.
JP II'S GREAT TRILOGY
Writing in the New Oxford Review in September 1998, and quoting Laborem Exercens, Rupert Ederer expresses these same concerns, pointing out that for Pope John Paul II, "the payment of the just wage is 'the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system….'" Ederer contends that "that proposition strikes at the very heart of liberal capitalism, in which labor is just a disposable commodity that is left to the mercy of the 'free market.'"
In a summary of Catholic social teaching of the last 100 years, Ederer emphasizes the great trilogy by John Paul II: Laborem Exercens (1981), Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991), stating that these three writings alone would be enough to earn him the title Doctor of the Church and that they "contain whatever critique is needed for confronting the dire consequences of our present return to Victorian capitalism and they offer us the moral principles according to which a saner social order can be constructed.
EMMANUEL MOUNIER AND JEFF GATES
It is very interesting to read The Personalist Manifesto, published in the 1930's, (brought to the United States by Peter Maurin, who persuaded the monks at St. John's Abbey to translate it), and find how exactly pertinent it is to today.
It is also fascinating to read Jeff Gates' The Ownership Solution (Addison Wesley, 1998), and discover so many of the same ideas-a writer today expressing Mounier's ideas about capital. Based on a decade of experience in developing worker ownership in ESOP's (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), advising companies and advising governments in twenty-five countries on involving workers in ownership, Gates' book is one of the best practical interpretations of modern papal social teaching.
WHAT IS OUR REAL RELIGION?
When Gates writes, "We are all now buffeted by a global economy in which key actors are encouraged, even mandated, to maximize financial returns in a worldwide auction of sorts in which financial values have become a substitute for the values of ethics, religion and community," and that "Money, not man, is fast becoming the measure of the common good" (The Ownership Solution, p. xxi.), he sounds very like Mounier.
When Gates names as worship, a "secular sanctification of market forces" the attitude people worldwide are developing toward financial returns, he reminds us again of Mounier, who understood that it was the lack of a "philosophy of life" which allowed people to accept the primacy of economics over all else. Mounier insisted that "the problem of economics cannot be solved independently of the political and the spiritual problems, to which it is intrinsi-cally subordinate" (p. 165).
INSTITUTIONS IN CONTROL, NOT PEOPLE
There has been a major change in capitalistic ownership, another facet of the growing concentration of wealth. "Almost half (47.4 percent) of all outstanding shares of U.S. corporations are now held by institutions. America's institutional insurance investors-pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, banks, foundations and university endowments held $11,100,00,000,000 ($11.1 trillion) in assets as of 1 July 1996."
As Gates points out, "Money management focused on maximizing financial returns is now new. What is new is the vast scale and the skyrocketing growth of contemporary 'disconnected' capital'"-money and investments totally unconnected to persons. (The Ownership Solution, p.2)
HOW COULD ALL THIS HAPPEN?
How could we, a people committed to opportunity for all, allow such terrible disparities between rich and poor to develop?
Gates' analysis is similar to Mounier's: capitalism as we know it has a very poor feedback system. The market is only interested in money. Its figures do not relate to human concerns.
MARIE ANTOINETTE CAPITALISM
Free market advocates try to give the impression that their system is open to all. Gates describes the reality for the person who does not already have large quantities of capital: "Policymakers routinely claim that capitalism is an 'open' system because anyone can purchase shares. It's a free market-anyone (i.e., anyone with money) can buy those new equities.
"Expecting a broad base of wage earners to buy their way into significant ownership (i.e., from their already stretched paychecks) is what I call 'Marie Antoniette Capitalism,' only instead of urging 'Let them eat cake,' the modern refrain is 'Let them buy shares.'" (The Ownership Solution, p. 23)
Of course we are not thriving now,but I think you will understand the point of the article
We can't prevent it! Only free and open governments around the world provide the opportunity for people to develop to their own upper limit. Where there is oppression there is always grinding poverty.This may be coming to a country near you very soon.
I don't have figures handy but I'm given to believe that more Americans own stocks now than ever before -- which would indicate strides toward the tempering of an ownership imbalance.
The proletariat have recently come to understand that ownership of capital involves risks -- something that doesn't sit well with many of them.
The distortion of ownership is, it seems, the other side of the coin of the concentration of political power. This concentration can warp the nature of the title of ownership in such a way that the risks inherent in it are shifted toward labor and away from capital, a perverion if there ever was one...
JPII called for "modifications" and I daresay, he's getting his wish. We appear to have another chance to get things right, as the wholesale disruption of concentrations of power and wealth continues in our midst.
Danger~Opportunity and all that sort of thing.
Wage slavery, as bad as it is, is not the same as real slavery, as the wage slave has the chance to accumulate property. After our civil war, blacks were unjustly denied their civil rights, but they were immeasurably better off than before. Many southern whites thought blacks as feckless as children, and expected them to "vanish" without the "safety net" of slavery. Instead, they began to raise themselves up economically in the South to much the same level as poor whites. Segregation was an effort to prevent any further rise, but it could not prevent the growth and development of a black community, albeit, at a lower level than the whites. The increased wealth of blacks beginning in 1942 was an important cause of the civil rights revolution of the '50s.
On the face of it, Obama seems to welcome the destruction of so much wealth. But the American South did not profit from the destruction of its accululated wealth by the 13th Amendment. The money invested in Confederate bonds added the loss of trade revenue caused by the (illegal) Union blockade during , caused relative poverty all classes in the South.
Obama is clueless.
I don't understand how you came to that conclusion?
The article points out the distortion of Centesimus Annus that brings light to the encyclical Rerum Novarum,libertas etc... All of which offer plenty of solutions of improvement
“”The Pope's approach in publishing Rerum novarum gave the Church “citizenship status” as it were, amid the changing realities of public life, and this standing would be more fully confirmed later on. In effect, to teach and to spread her social doctrine pertains to the Church's evangelizing mission and is an essential part of the Christian message, since this doctrine points out the direct consequences of that message in the life of society and situates daily work and struggles for justice in the context of bearing witness to Christ the Saviour. This doctrine is likewise a source of unity and peace in dealing with the conflicts which inevitably arise in social and economic life. Thus it is possible to meet these new situations without degrading the human person's transcendent dignity, either in oneself or in one’s adversaries, and to direct those situations towards just solutions.””
I agree with the general drift of the article. Whatever merits the libertarianism of the Acton Institute had as it defended capitalism against socialism in mid-20c, they are outdated in today’s global economy, which is as antithetical to Catholic distributism as the command economy of the USSR.
Neither Marx nor the popes could foresee what material abundance could be created by capitalism. Marx therefore concluded that the proletariat might use any means necessary to overthrow their exploiters. The popes underestimated the amount of material gain by the underclasses as the economy grew. Indeed, John Pope Ii observed that that was precisely the problem. At some point the material evil stops being starvation and becomes obesity. Social democracy prides itself on its “moderation,” as though it represents itself as aiming for a kind of Aristotelean mean. But it as much as capitalism succeeding jading people’s appetites, and persuading them that there is no greater good than personal comfort and ease. Dorothy Day never comfronted the scene that is before us, but my guess is that she realized that both socialism aimed at nothing but satisfying people’s material wants, that this was a hollow achievement, because it does not fill the human being with what he ultimately needs.
This Catholic distributism is simply third way socialism. It respects no one’s rights, except those self annointed and appointed experts in charge of the game.
Mounier was also friendly towards the totalitarianisms of his day. That doesn't absolutely discredit him -- his views shifted over time, and he was never a wholehearted supporter of communism or fascism -- but he was naive and enough of a fellow traveller at some points in his development to make him unsuitable as a model for thinkers today.
I think the popes knew the false understanding of Liberty by calvinistic puritan's would lead to error from the onset.
Just read a few encyclicals by Blessed Leo XIII
Excerpt from Immortal DEI
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01111885_immortale-dei_en.html
“”So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature itself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only way to heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the State is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the license of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the practice of virtue. To exclude the Church, founded by God Himself, from life, from laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error.””
And from Libertas
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas_en.html
“fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth. Hence, these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license. The end of all this it is not difficult to foresee, especially when society is in question. For, when once man is firmly persuaded that he is subject to no one, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is not to be sought in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man's individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs. Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the greater number, and that all right and all duty reside in the majority. But, from what has been said, it is clear that all this is in contradiction to reason. To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.
16. Moreover, besides this, a doctrine of such character is most hurtful both to individuals and to the State. For, once ascribe to human reason the only authority to decide what is true and what is good, and the real distinction between good and evil is destroyed; honor and dishonor differ not in their nature, but in the opinion and judgment of each one; pleasure is the measure of what is lawful; and, given a code of morality which can have little or no power to restrain or quiet the unruly propensities of man, a way is naturally opened to universal corruption. With reference also to public affairs: authority is severed from the true and natural principle whence it derives all its efficacy for the common good; and the law determining what it is right to do and avoid doing is at the mercy of a majority. Now, this is simply a road leading straight to tyranny. “
Pope Leo and others foresaw the error's of false Liberty,Dear Brother
No one, even the materalists of the 19th Century, could have guessed what a cornacopia of goods would be created by the capitalist system, or what an impression it would make on the ordinary soul, so that ordinary people close to the earth would be swayed by the “magic” of modern production. so that people today think nothing of the extension of the life-span—or the practice of killing old people because their “quality of life” is notgood enough.
Dear Brother, before hitler came to power in Germany there were many thousands of mentally ill, elderly etc..who were put to death and experimented on because they were deemed life unworthy of life,so there is nothing new under the sun in our modern world pertaining to error that Holy Mother Church is surprised by
The point is that regardless of technology and production the Church knew that greed based on failure of capitalism based upon false liberty would lead to grave error
I wish you a Blessed evening
for later
What the author said does have some merit. I oppose illegal immigration not because I hate the guys sneaking across looking for a job, but because often they are treated very badly. A recent raid on a kosher kill plant here in Iowa is a perfect example, and another raid on a plant that used mentally challenged men to do the work while housing them in horrible conditions.
Unbridled free trade and capitalism ends up the same place that unbridled socialism does, slavery for the greater part. The trick is to remember that each person and employee has worth as a human being, beyond the balance sheet.
Another commentary posted which has implausible assumptions, gross distortions and blatant inaccuracies. First, the Acton Institute and many of its members understand economics as an expression of freedom, in a Milton Friedman way, not as some sort of Calvinist expression of acquisition and materialistic entitlement. In fact, I could go second, third, et seq., but this article is so pitiful as to just leave it be.
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