A very simple definition, from the pages of Chesteron’s newspaper K’s Weekly:
There are many readers of this Paper who are not members of the League. All who believe that ownership in the means of livelihood is normal to man, and necessary to liberty, and all who dislike and distrust the concentration of
control advocated by Socialists and practiced by Monopolists, should join the League. There is no other tenet for membership, and no other obligation…although active work is welcomed from all who can give it.
Elsewhere on the page, one could find this sidebar:
THE LEAGUE offers the only practical alternative to the twin evils of Capitalism and Socialism. It is equally opposed to both; they both result in the concentration of property and power in a few hands to the enslavement of the majority.
That doesn’t sound like much of a definition. I’ve recently found a bunch of self-described distributists who are extreme libertarians about government and argue that “Catholic distributism” is just a way of running one’s business activities. I would think there ought to be some additional statement like, “It is the role of government to inhibit or prohibit excessive concentration of capital and to enable and facilitate the wide distribution of capital.” Though again, some Austrians claim that governmental noninterference is the best way to achieve that. Can one really be a distributist just by saying, “I’d like it if most people owned the means of their own production,” and taking it no further?
I like the theory behind distributism. But I don’t think it could work in our times. Like it or not, what runs our economy, despite the myth of small businesses, are the income, etc. from the big multi-thousand employee companies. Most small businesses fail or make very little. The true middle-class wealth came from big manufacturing and other businesses.
I think the only practical way it would work would be to have substantial employee ownership in big businesses, including an active say in the how the company is run. Though the owners of Microsoft, Facebook, etc. would severely object to giving up their control.
It is this sort of shared ownership, of “economic democracy” in large enterprises, where the vision of a certain kind of “socialism” and distributivism” meet. The cooperative corporation in Spain, Mondragon, is usually the poster child for this.
Also, while the relationship is perhaps less direct, I would hold up the structures of large enterprises found in Germany to be examples as well.
You’re confusing disease and cure. The capitalists’ having monopolized the means of production is the reason one usually has to be aligned with them in order to get anything for oneself.
And why should worker ownership and control be merely “substantial” and have merely “a say”? Why can’t a worker function equally well as an owner of capital? (It requires so little effort as to barely qualify as a function anyway, which is kind of the whole point of the current system.) Once shares are equally distributed and management is democratically elected the distinction between capital and labor will vanish, and capital will be remembered as the expropriative hoax phantom that it is.
Of course, there is another aspect to this, one that is very rarely discussed, and that is the need to democratize, in whole or in part, the process of capital formation and investment. This, of course, goes beyond the democratization of large enterprises, as important as that is.