I have, in the past, used the terms “left distrubutism” and “right distributism” to explain to bewildered leftists that some of the people claiming the title of distributist hold ideas that are not true to traditional distributism.
I used the terms as a sort of shorthand, as distributism has always been “left” on the question of using the power of the State, ie, taxation, to limit the size of corporations, to encourage 
smallness and broad ownership, and in endorsing worker cooperatives for larger enterprises. And it is “right” in opposing the managerial, totalitarian State. That some seize on this “antistatism”-which they identify with subsidiarity- without any emphasis on solidarity lands them on the “right”. (As we have said here before, subsidiarity is a communitarian social virtue, one that cannot stand alone without acknowledging the primacy of solidarity.)
My good friend Tom Storck, a leading distributist thinker, objects to this, saying it is confusing, because distributism is at heart neither left nor right and that those who call themselves distributists while offering no real means of limiting the size of economic enterprises, are in fact not distributists at all.
He is right of course; it really is a question of real distributism and false distributism. Real distributists may protest an overarching bureaucratic State, but unlike libertarians and others on the right, they believe that the State is a natural good, like the family. The existence of dysfunctional states no more negates that fact than the existence of unhappy and abusive families negates that natural institution.
And who, exactly, are these fake distributists, who quote Belloc on the Servile State but never on using taxation to limit corporate power or transforming capitalist entities into worker cooperatives?
They are, overwhelmingly, the products of the handful of Catholic liberal arts colleges that pride themselves on their doctrinal orthodoxy, all the while harboring many dissidents on Catholic social teaching among the faculty. Having encountered the luminous writings of distributism’s leading lights- Chesterton and Belloc- and acknowledging their eminent place in 20th century Catholic thought, they selectively appropriate their thought, while holding to most of their received “wisdom” on economic individualism. So they present this strange thing, like the bastard child of Ayn Rand and Hillaire Belloc, and call it “distributism”.
It is not, and we must be clear that it is not. In an age where we see the likes of Congressman Paul Ryan and Fr Robert Sirico attempt to wrap themselves in the mantle of Catholic social teaching we must speak clearly when there are such attempts at dissembling.
From now on, I will call what I have called “right distributism” by its proper name: it is phony distributism.
I not only want taxation, I want hard borders. But ones with officially bribable guards- you should, for instance, be able to purchase a work permit at the county line, or pay a customs tax to take your goods across the county line. Or neighborhood, or whatever.
–And it is “right” in opposing the managerial, totalitarian State. That some seize on this “antistatism”-which they identify with subsidiarity- without any emphasis on solidarity lands them on the “right”–
One of the problems (or virtues, depending on one’s perspective) with distributism is its lack of political sophistication and the fact that it’s entire existence is essentially set upon a straw man – that of distributism supposedly being neither right nor left, which, as an assertion, begs some delineation regarding “right and left.” And you describe the basic parameters of right and left as I have heard and read every other distributist I have encountered describe them, and this description is, quite frankly, wrong. It may have some basis in popular political debates in the UK and the U.S., but it is wrong.
Belloc, and distributists since, attack socialism as somehow the great evil flipside of the coin upon which finance capitalism is the other side. But this is disingenuous. Marx opposed the managerial, totalitarian state, at least in the long run. Numerous socialists, indeed, most socialist intellectuals in the West, have opposed the managerial, totalitarian state (I love it when libertarians quote Orwell, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was a socialist). Take a look sometime at the writings of the guild socialists. The formative Distributist texts rely heavily on guild socialist thought, and guild socialism was in the political water that Belloc drank from. Look at their tenets – guild socialists can hardly be accused of wanting a managerial, totalitarian state.
When one looks at the labor movement, from say the 1880s until after the red scare in the 19teens-early20s, in other words, around the time distributist thought was being formalized, the vast, vast, vast majority of “leftists” did not want to establish a managerial, totalitarian state. Hell, the IWW, which was arguably the most influential producer of labor radicals during part of that period, was (and is) anarcho-syndicalist, and doesn’t even believe in using the state to secure power for workers, and is opposed to a large centralized state, or, for that matter, a state at all. Even the communists, before the establishment of the Soviet run comintern, advocated a balance of powers in which workers’ councils, trade unions, various branches of govt, and various community organizations shared political and economic power. There were some socialists who advocated for a huge managerial state, but these were very much in the minority until the 1920s, when the Soviet Union provided a statist model for (some) of the far left (keep in mind that in the West there were as many communists opposed to the Soviet model as there were those supportive of it, and there were still loads of anarcho-syndicalists, anarchists, and various types of socialists adamantly opposed to the Soviet model) and when Keynesian sorts of views began to hold increasingly greater sway with the champagne socialist set – though I believe such persons are more adequately described as “liberals” and not “leftists.” But among people who identified as leftists or left wing, the majority opposed notions of a managerial totalitarian state until at least WWII, and even after then, most self-described leftists opposed such. To this day anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, libertarian communists, anarcho-communists, and some types of socialists resist the managerial totalitarian state. I realize that a distributist could look at each of those categories of leftist and say, accurately, that these are small today and not what is commonly thought of as “the left” by most Americans who get their political ideas from things they see on mainstream TV, but considering the fact that there are many, many, many more persons in each of the categories mentioned than there are persons in the distributist movement, I hardly think distributists should discount them because of their size. Historically, those sorts of leftists were the left, and increasingly the left in most of the world is returning to its radical roots.
Further, many people on the right adamantly support a managerial totalitarian state. Movement conservatives in the U.S. desire this. Some far right groups in Europe have desired this. An honest movement conservative will admit to you that he uses “less state” language in reference to specific patterns of human affairs (homeschooling, corporate regulation and taxation, etc.) but they want a strong managerial state in other arenas (abortion policing, Homeland Security, border control, Dept of Defense, etc.).
So the point here is that various schools within the right are both for and against a managerial totalitarian state, and various schools within the left are both for and against a managerial totalitarian state. The distinction between right and left that distributists from Belloc to those today use to contrast themselves with is simply false.
Distributism is a leftist movement, or rather would be, were it not for one major distinction between it and every other leftist movement – distributists are either quiet with regard to the necessity of class conflict, or they state they are against it (in keeping with the “plain” reading of CST). Leftists, whether anarcho-syndicalist, anarchist, communist, lib-communist, or socialist (here speaking of socialism proper), all believe that there cannot be an overcoming of capitalism without class conflict. Aside from a few members of the European New Right who also assert that class conflict is at least a necessary part of the overthrow of finance capital, no one on the right believes this, and this is ultimately what makes distributism what we might call an odd sort of utopian reactionary thought. Sure, Belloc finally consented to the fact that ultimately govt would have to be the vehicle to force the re-distributism you will have to have to arrive at a distributism worth having, but he never, so far as I have been able to find, preached, or even mentions positively, class war and the cultivation of class conflict as a socio-political aggressor which will bring this about. Without a belief in the role of class conflict, you are basically left with a political vision in which you really hope most people, including most rich people, will, without a serious fight, assent to the desires of a society that on the whole wants to be oriented towards distributism. How can a thinking person can look at the history of capitalism and rationally conclude that this is possible? And so leftists such as myself believe that in order to confront the fight of those on the side of finance capital, there will have to be some serious fight on the other side, which includes class consciousness, and a desire of the working classes to overcome and expropriate the master classes. Insofar as distributism says it isn’t left because of such silly things as a rejection of the managerial totalitarian state (which the real left objects), it is avoiding its real issue with the left – a lack of principled and clearly articulated support for class conflict, something distributism cannot touch if it wants to stay with a straightforward reading of some passages in CST (ie people who think Rerum Novarum is wholly pro-worker often forget or are unaware of the manner in which it seeks to undercut the working class movements of its time – RN expressly condemns class struggle and promotes instead “class collaboration”, along with telling workers that they should join workers associations, of all things, headed by clergy so as to avoid too much class association on the part of working class persons! — talk about ecclesial and economic chauvinism, the workers must have clerical masters in their worker’s associations so as to be sufficiently “collaborating” with all classes — sigh) .
Every self proclaimed distributist I have ever met has been one of two things in political reality – a libertarian (these you formerly called right distributists and now call phony distributists), or someone on the spectrum of anarcho-syndicalist to guild socialist (left distributists). You are in the latter camp, Daniel, you are a leftist at heart, I think it pretty clear from your posts that you don’t see capitalism ending without a cultivation of class consciousness and the will of working class persons to overcome finance capital, which will ultimately require the working class and their sympathizers in some fashion confronting, via conflict and a lack of collaboration, the masters of finance capital and their supporters.
FYI – Plenty of leftists over the years have taken fairly traditional views on social issues. In the 1950s Stalinists, of all things, were opposed to abortion and homosexuality and taught that both were decadent and either bourgeois or, in the case of poor people getting abortions, a bourgeois attempt to keep the poor subject to them. W.E.B. Dubious has a famous passage describing the sexual practices of young bourgeois people he encountered when he worked at a resort in his younger days which embarrasses many leftists today because he makes so clear his rather traditional views on sex.
@ocholophobist- Distributists are quiet on the subject of class conflict because they are against the basic idea of *class* at all- the idea that mere human beings can be separated by economic function instead of being brought together.
By distributism, the main thing the socialists get right is that private property can be abused to oppress others. The main thing the socialists get wrong is seeing it as a problem with private property, rather than with abuse.
By distributism, the main thing that capitalists get right is that men need to band together in competition with other men to encourage cooperation and achieve great things; the main thing that the capitalists get wrong is banding together in competition in such large groups as to prevent subsidiarity.
That’s why Distributism is seen as a Third Way, taking the best of both- leaving out the abuse.
Great response ochlophobist. I’m still learning about distributism and CST so I don’t have a position for or against what you say, but it certainly was interesting and provocative.
Thanks, Owen, for your thoughtful response.
I am well aware that there are authoritarians on the Right- from Nazis to Neocons- as well as the Left. I am much heartened by the Newest Left- the ragtag coalition of anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists that make up the Occupy movement- and their emphasis on direct democracy and distrust of bureaucracy. I might even join them, as their “socialism” is not far from the distrubutist ideal of worker cooperatives, were it not for the fact that they, by and large, are heavy into identity politics and hostile to traditional notions of family.
But we have seen this before: most of the Russian revolutionaries favored direct worker rule. Even your hero Lenin began with the slogan “All power to the Soviets! (worker councils)!” Before long, though, he dissolved the elected Assembly, created a secret police, and began offing his enemies (ie, his fellow revolutionaries). When he died and Stalin took over we saw the rise of one of the worst police states ever seen.
And there is your problem: whatever the nature of leftist dreams, where Marxism has been attempted it has resulted in a nightmare. We may never know the numbers, but just between the totaltitarianism of the Soviet Union and China tens of millions died, some directly murdered, countless others from slave labor and famine caused by various bureaucratic Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward and Cultural Revolutions.
And your other problem is that the most preeminent Marxist outfit in America, the Communist Party USA, were willing dupes for Soviet propaganda, and continued towing the Soviet line well after Stalin’s crimes were documented.
As an aside, when I lived in DC I stopped from time to time at a revolutionary bookstore in Adams Morgan. They had a whole section devoted to the writings of Comrade Josef Stalin. This, in the 80s!
While I am no conservative, I do share conservativism’s scepticism about human nature, as well as utopian dreamers.
As for class struggle, yeah, I am with the Church’s “Can’t we all just get along” line, but in reality I see the struggle as inevitable, especially in the current situation, which has seen a direct attack on the working class by the corporatocracy. I only hope it can be nonviolent, as violence begets injustice.
And no, distributists can hardly write anyone off for small numbers; small is still beautiful…
Daniel,
Thanks for the reply.
Your comment might be said to make my case for me. I don’t believe the red baiting is particularly useful in this conversation, but please allow me to respond to it nonetheless.
I’ve just outlined that the majority of leftists in the West, and in the U.S., were against the managerial state and totalitarianism. Your thoughts about CPUSA and a revolutionary bookstore you evoke the sense that you believe that CPUSA and a pro-Stalin bookstore are indicative of “the left” generally. Not so.
At best, maybe for 15-20 years of its century of history, has CPUSA been home to the majority of Marxists in the United States.
“continued towing the Soviet line well after Stalin’s crimes were documented” – and this, of course, involved rejecting Stalinism as the Soviet Union did following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956. CPUSA lost significant numbers of its members that same year due to the Soviet invasion of Hungary (a true and horrid atrocity of justice and solidarity), and today is only a tiny fraction of what it once was and is not even in the top ten communist/socialist parties in the U.S. in terms of size. Thus the period via which CPUSA was an influential mouthpiece of the Soviet Union, and a real “threat” in terms of advancing pro-Soviet ideology among American workers, is less than the length of one generation. And during that time there were many, many, many dissenting voices coming from leftists of various stripes – Trots, socialists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc.
One thing that should be kept in mind with regard to Stalin – his principle targets were themselves all leftists. When Stalin came to power his first targets were none other than the remaining leadership of the Bolsheviks who had played a part in the Red Army of the revolution. He then went on to slaughter anyone associated with leftist groups in dissent from his rule – and even his particular animus toward certain ethnic groups was often due (at least in part) because of their association with various leftist tendencies or organizations. For instance, the anarcho-syndicalists were very active in Ukraine and made so many inroads there that at a certain point it was just as easy to target Ukraine as to target syndicalists.
Prior to WWI and the Russian Revolution, anarcho-syndicalists were the overwhelming majority of revolutionary leftists. If you read nothing else I will recommend here, at least read the Wiki page on anarcho-syndicalism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism. This puts to rest the caricature of a homogeneous left (or anything close to homogeneous) that wants to use the state to kill people.
This is the point I want to make, and one which I think distributists and would be distributists might do well to consider – there has never been a significant advancement for labor which has not come about because of radical leftists. These advancements have come from one of two routes. The first route is the simple one – radical leftists fought for and won labor battles. The second route is a bit more complicated – politicians and capitalists made concessions with major unions in return for their forcibly deradicalizing their unions – it has been very well documented that many of the major concessions granted to labor in the early and mid twentieth century were done in order to keep the radicals at bay. Usually this involved politicians and corporations becoming (often secretly) involved in battles over union leadership, and a new non-radical leadership passing rules prohibiting radicals (say members of the IWW or CPUSA or other radical orgs) in return for major concessions from the company. The point here is that were it not for the threat of radical activity, those concessions would never have come. Now we live in a time in which radical activity in labor arenas is minuscule compared to, say, the 1920s, and thus the concessions of former generations are being quickly dismantled. We see this in virtually every union of size in the U.S., though some are exemplary examples of this phenomenon – say the history of the United Mine Workers, which was started by radicals and become powerful under radical leadership, and then went liberal/”collaborationist” and then as often as not worked against its workers, hence the great strike portrayed in the documentary “Harlan County, USA”, like virtually all the mining strikes post WWII, was a wildcat strike. Eventually because of public outrage after “Harlan County, USA” came out the UMWA supported the strikers, but only to fold the agreement that was eventually won by the miners into a global contract a few years later. The leadership of the UMWA was all about collaboration with other classes.
I would recommend some books for you and your readers that are very informative with regard to learning about the astounding significance of radicals within the labor movement:
Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States by Sharon Smith
http://www.amazon.com/Subterranean-Fire-History-Working-Class-Radicalism/dp/193185923X
The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit Downs by Sidney Lens
http://www.amazon.com/The-Labor-Wars-Maguires-Memorial/dp/1931859701/ref=pd_sim_b_20
Any book by Philip S. Foner. [His scholarship is sometimes questioned on the groups that he apparently plagiarized in a couple of his volumes, but I’ve never read anyone question the historical data he provides.]
The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? by Steve Early
http://www.amazon.com/The-Civil-Wars-U-S-Labor/dp/1608460991/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pdT1_S_nC?ie=UTF8&coliid=I32FW8MNVWL86F&colid=23KTZBPY93J45
Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s
http://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Rank-File-Militancy-Revolt/dp/1844671747/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342547338&sr=1-1
Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise by Robert Fitch
http://www.amazon.com/Solidarity-Sale-Corruption-Destroyed-Undermined/dp/B000VYVXSS/ref=pd_sim_b_7
[one of the things you learn in Fitch’s work is that the “corruption” at hand nearly always corresponds to under the table deals between “collaborationist” labor leadership and politicians and capitalists — the corrupt labor leadership seen in the last 2-3 generations is a direct result of the deradicalization of unions.]
Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present by Ness and Azzellini.
http://www.amazon.com/Ours-Master-Own-Workers-Control/dp/160846119X/ref=pd_cp_b_1
Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History by Grubacic and Lynd.
http://www.amazon.com/Wobblies-Zapatistas-Conversations-Anarchism-Marxism/dp/1604860413/ref=pd_sim_b_8
And for those of your readers who prefer more visual content:
Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World
by Paul Buhle
http://www.amazon.com/Wobblies-Graphic-History-Industrial-Workers/dp/1844675254/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342547244&sr=1-4&keywords=Paul+Buhle
And lastly:
LABOR CONFLICT IN THE UNITED STATES: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/082407968X/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00
[the above book is indispensable and as I write this there is a used copy on Amazon for $2.07. – I cannot more highly recommend this book at that price.]
I am convinced that after reading the above titles a would-be distributist might very well be more inclined to assent to the fact that without radicals who believed in class war, the working classes would have made virtually no gains in the last century and a half (the period of time that overt class war has been existent). This will then beg questions regarding the potential efficacy of political programs which do not invoke a clear class war schema.
It is very easy in hindsight to dismiss all that came from the Russian Revolution with red baiting Stalin rhetoric. But keep this in mind – in 1919 in the U.S., one in five American workers went on strike. One in five! Almost every single labor concession that came in the decades after was riding on the wave of that red scare. Of course most of those one in five were not communists, but they were inspired and led by radicals of various sorts – commies, socialists, syndicalists – and those radicals were able to garner a huge lift in confidence among the working classes because of the Russian revolution. Russia may have gone terribly wrong (it undeniably did), but any worker here in the States who works today under a union contract which involves union protections and a pension might consider the debt they owe to the Russian revolution and to the red scare that followed here in the States.
Lastly, I would like to address one thing – “where Marxism has been attempted it has resulted in a nightmare”. Cuba is not a nightmare. Only a few thousand deaths occurred during its revolution (far less less than the number of workers who died from brutal work conditions during Batista), there was not much akin to Stalin’s purges (certainly not to per capita scale), and despite the propaganda coming from petit-bourgeois Cuban reactionary types, the “boat people” leaving Cuba are not indicative of life there (and are countered by the number of immigrants to Cuba from other Latin American and Caribbean countries). Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the United States and its suicide rate among males matches the U.S. exactly. And this all managed despite a brutal decades long embargo of Cuba maintained by the imperialist U.S. which does more than anything else to keep Cuba in poverty (though still with better medical care on average than the U.S.). Cuba recently granted 400,000 more permits for small businesses to operate, doubling the number of small businesses allowed in the country. Cuba allows small family businesses but does not allow corporations. There are few countries on earth that are more “like” a left distributist vision of economics than Cuba is.
But even were one to still call Cuba a “nightmare” for some reason, we need to keep in mind that part of the reason that we don’t see “successful” Marxist societies is because we (the U.S.) have made damn sure there were none. Perhaps the most spectacular case of this is the U.S. backed assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, to be replaced by the brutal dictator Pinochet, supported by the likes of JPII and Pinochet’s old buddy Friedrich Hayek. For those who want a good glimpse of the man who was probably the greatest martyr for democracy in the 20th century and was a serious Marxist, use the free 24 pass the London Review of Books gives you on its site to read this article: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n14/greg-grandin/dont-do-what-allende-did
Cheers.
Thanks, Owen. I ordered that book on labor conflict and look forward to reading it.
You are right about Cuba; but that makes it the exception to the rule. Russia and China were the biggies and were horrid police states. Cambodia was no picnic, either…
I am sympathetic to labor radicals you know, and even consider the excesses of communists to be understandable errors in the context of the times. But violent revolution plants seeds of oppression.
I know you are sympathetic, and I didn’t mean to sound snarky at all.
Allende was resolutely committed to non-violent democratic revolution. This is why it was so important for the U.S. and its reactionary allies to kill him and end his democratically elected Marxist govt in Chile. He didn’t fit the propaganda concerning Marxists that the American govt wanted the people of America and the world to believe. Allende insisted on several occasions that workers not use violence to take over their industries, or to attack reactionary interests. The result was a bullet in Allende’s head and then Pinochet. This is analyzed well in that London Review of Books essay I linked to. That said, I agree with you in this regard, in the years to come I believe Allende will be heralded far more than the men who claimed to be “for the people” but loved to have blood on their hands. There are plenty of radical leftists today who are either pacifists or argue against lethal violence for various reasons. Staughton Lynd, coauthor of the Wobblies and Zapatistas book I link to above is an ardent pacifist. I would only note that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Whether violent or non-violent, the end of capitalism will only come (aside from capitalism destroying the planet) via mass action against it, and if you have enough people engaged in actions, you don’t have to try to kill people in order to shut down or take control of a lot of industries and banks and the like. Whether or not violence is likely is another matter.
One of the most important things that it seems most of the radical left already believed (in the case of anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists, and marxist-humanists) or has learned via the 20th century is that a gnostic-like vanguard acting on behalf of the people is not going to work, and naturally leads to abuses of power. There must be broad based distributions of power in any way out of mass finance capitalism, and no closed elite group making decisions for the whole, whether a communist vanguard or a “reformed” capitalist cabal.
Ochlophobist and Daniel,
Are the reports of human rights abuses in Cuba then largely untrue or exaggerated? For instance, as reported here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba
I am not making any point. I simply don’t know what the truth of the matter is.
Christopher, I would say the truth is probably somewhere in between “largely untrue” and “exaggerated” though we would have to break down each claim one at a time.
The Communists in Cuba have not been the nicest people in the world. But keep in mind that this was a country where poor workers could be shot in the fields for talking back to a landowner under Batista and where blacks were not allowed on public beaches until the day after the victory of the revolutionaries. Today in Cuba every adult of able mind is required, unless given permission not to attend by a medical professional, to attend what are essentially local neighborhood caucus meetings to discuss and vote on govt matters. Each local meeting reports to a sectional which reports to a regional which reports to the national which forms national policies on the basis, at least in part, of what comes up from the caucuses. I’ve heard this process described by several Cuban citizens (including one who talked about how a resolution from his local caucus was included in the recent legislation expanding small business permits), and I consider the capacity for the average Cuban citizen to alter govt policy on a given matter to be greater than the capacity of an American citizen to do the same. Is the Cuban govt repressive? Yes. Getting on facebook won’t be easy for a Cuban citizen. Does it restrict human freedom in ways offensive to us Americans and in a manner not in keeping with human dignity? Yes. But when making an honest assessment and comparison, I’m not sure viewing Cuba as lacking in freedom and viewing the U.S. as a bastion of freedom is at all accurate.
Also, note that the first line in the Wiki article you link to is “Human rights in Cuba are under the scrutiny of Human Rights Watch” and then read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watch
Ochlophobist,
I do not hold the U.S. up as the standard to which one should compare Cuba or anywhere else. And I did read the link you sent me after I read the article on Cuba, which left me feeling more out at sea. It is very hard to sort out what one hears about anything, but especially matters such as the conditions in Cuba. The corporate media want, it seems, to paint as black a picture as possible. The left, I fear, want to paint a roseate picture and ignore the horrors. I used to listen to the once-Maryknoll-priest-turned-Sandanista, Blaise Bonpane, wax enthusiastic about Castro’s Cuba without once balancing his account with any criticism; and I continue to hear the same sort of paens to Communist Cuba on Pacifica radio, which I listen to frequently. On the other hand, the “conservatives” condemn Castro but say nary a word of censure about the Bautista regime. They offer no context and thus provide no understanding. And one is left wondering whether it is “human rights” that they care about at all.
I do not think freedom is the standard by which we judge the goodness of a regime. A good government, I think, is one that so orders society that citizens through living socially are able to most easily achieve the integral human good — the common good, which is many faceted and includes the subsidiary goods of the body but most eminently the goods of the soul: moral and intellectual virtue. I wonder what you, as a Marxist, would define a good government to be?
Christopher,
“I wonder what you, as a Marxist, would define a good government to be?”
As long as my comments have been in this thread already – I’d have to go far longer to get into this in due detail. So suffice it for me to just say at this point that I believe economic democracy (see the Wiki page on economic democracy – I mean the term in the cooperative sense of the “shift in decision-making power from corporate shareholders to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, customers, suppliers, neighbors and the broader public”, and not in the classical liberal sense of this being achieved through free markets or in the Mises sense of “consumer democracy” actually being economic democracy) is at least slightly more important than political democracy and other freedoms (freedom of the press, of association, etc), though all of those are important. Insofar as a country like ours has “consumer democracy” and a supposedly democratic political process, but lacks economic democracy, it gravely diminishes the value of these other democratic forms and freedoms. The ideal govt starts with economic democracy as its highest social organization goal. That said, a country which has economic democracy, but say, outlaws religion, renders its achievements moot. I believe there needs to be a baseline of democratic forms and of freedoms, but I believe the most important of these to be economic democracy. You can have freedom of religion, as we do here in the United States, but without economic democracy you inevitably see religious forms becoming the slaves of market forces, as we see in most of American religion. Thus I would argue economic democracy actually helps secure authentic religious freedom, so long as religious freedom is not disturbed by other factors. It is for reasons like these that economic democracy is the starting point of good governance in my mind.
“along with telling workers that they should join workers associations, of all things, headed by clergy so as to avoid too much class association on the part of working class persons! — talk about ecclesial and economic chauvinism, the workers must have clerical masters in their worker’s associations so as to be sufficiently “collaborating” with all classes — sigh”
When I read this another very similar quote ironically came to mind:
“It is unthinkable that priests should govern entrepreneurs!” – Ludwig Von Mises.
Which I think proves Belloc’s and other distributist’s point of the similar philosophy and assumptions of both modern leftist and rightist economists.
Over all I blame the emergence of the “right” brand of distributism on other factors. I have criticized this blog for its support of Ron Paul and it seems to me this is the common factor among many of these “libertarian” distributists. Most just seem to be anti-war libertarians (look at John Medaille’s cold reception at Front Porch Republic). All the ranting here about “Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand” well Ron Paul too recommends Rand. The problem is that thanks to Tom Woods many Catholics who are actually well informed about Social Teaching now simply reject it- and these people coalesce around the Paul movement. I always saw the Santorum people as just largely misinformed or ignorant people, people usually (and rightly) solely devoted to the pro-life movement.
Um, I guess, yes, both Right and Left tend to agree that the Church should not govern economic affairs directly and administratively. The only people I know who think otherwise are a minority of integralists. Mises was talking about the Church, via CST, declaring hyper free market mechanisms inconsistent with Catholic belief. I am talking about actual flesh and blood clerics being placed in charge of worker’s associations because of the fear that if working men govern their own associations they will be too class oriented. If you see those two things as commensurate, well, bless your heart.
Which was precisely what i and Belloc was saying.
Belloc does not assert that the Church should govern economic affairs directly and administratively. I’m not sure I follow you. What is it that you and Belloc are saying?
Sigh. As I have tried to explain to you many times, my support for Ron Paul was highly qualified; while i appreciated that his was the only voice in the public square to suggest that America actually has done evils, that there are many reasons why so much of the world hates us, I have always denounced his toxic economics, as well as the silly explanations he offered for his racist newsletters.
And not least, I met way to many Paulistas that were raving lunatics, which greatly tempered any support for him.
I may vote Green or Socialist in the fall; I suppose to you that means I support everything in those planks. Really man, making a choice politically is rarely going to be with any enthusiasm these days.
I wasn’t calling you out now or anything. Being the graduate of a Catholic liberal arts college i felt i was in a good position to comment. What I saw there was an avid support for Paul which tended to translate into many of the maladies you speak of here (the obsession and sole emphasis on subsidiarity). Tell me do you consider me to be a “right distributist”?
Its all well and good to write post after post condemning Paul Ryan and Santorum buy to then come out and support Paul is at best inconsistent. Ron paul is not prolife he too recommends Ayn Rand and his movement attracts the highest profile Catholic dissenters. I
Come out and support Paul? Four years ago, maybe, and it was highly qualified. You make it sound like I was some sort of Paul enthusiast. This time around I posted a highly critical post about his shortcomings. I admit I did vote for him in the Ohio primary. Big deal. It was a “least of evils” vote. Just look at the rest of the pack….
ocholophobist,
You are right that not all leftist or socialist thought is overly managerial or bureaucratic. I know that many present-day socialists advocate economic measures similar to distributists – small firms, cooperatives, etc. You may be aware that Pius XI recognized this about socialists back in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno. He wrote:
113. The other section, which has kept the name Socialism, is surely more moderate…for it cannot be denied that its demands at times come very near those that Christian reformers of society justly insist upon.
114. For if the class struggle abstains from enmities and mutual hatred, it gradually changes into an honest discussion of differences founded on a desire for justice, and if this is not that blessed social peace which we all seek, it can and ought to be the point of departure from which to move forward to the mutual cooperation of the Industries and Professions. So also the war declared on private ownership, more and more abated, is being so restricted that now, finally, not the possession itself of the means of production is attacked but rather a kind of sovereignty over society which ownership has, contrary to all right, seized and usurped. For such sovereignty belongs in reality not to owners but to the public authority. If the foregoing happens, it can come even to the point that imperceptibly these ideas of the more moderate socialism will no longer differ from the desires and demands of those who are striving to remold human society on the basis of Christian principles. For certain kinds of property, it is rightly contended, ought to be reserved to the State since they carry with them a dominating power so great that cannot without danger to the general welfare be entrusted to private individuals.
115. Such just demands and desire have nothing in them now which is inconsistent with Christian truth, and much less are they special to Socialism. Those who work solely toward such ends have, therefore, no reason to become socialists.”
But you’re probably aware that right after this passage the Pope condemns all forms of true socialism on the grounds that their ideology is anti-religious and rooted in atheism. I think you can see this in many of the European socialist parties which, while abandoning any interest in economic justice and often embracing the worst kind of finance capitalism, never let up in their war against Christian marriage or the family. Spain is a telling example of this kind of socialists whose economics have become little different from capitalism, but who have legalized same-sex “marriage,” eliminated the designation father or mother from birth certificates, etc. This is why “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
Interestingly, in Centesimus Annus, 13, John Paul takes this argument of Pius XI and shows that it applies equally to the ideology of capitalism.
“The atheism of which we are speaking is also closely connected with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which views human and social reality in a mechanistic way. Thus there is a denial of the supreme insight concerning man’s true greatness, his transcendence in respect to earthly realities, the contradiction in his heart between the desire for the fullness of what is good and his own inability to attain it and, above all, the need for salvation which results from this situation.”
For some reason Tom is unable to post here, so I copied and pasted his reply in an email. However, because I cannot shake my Gravatar thing, that is my picture in the corner. That is NOT Tom Storck, who is much more distinguished looking than that.
Mr. Storck,
Thanks for the reply.
I suppose I might begin with the notion expressed with “in many of the European socialist parties which, while abandoning any interest in economic justice and often embracing the worst kind of finance capitalism…”
Recently in Mexico there was a national election, as I am sure you are all aware. The two major parties involved were PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). Both of those parties are members of the Socialist International. Heck, both have ‘Revolution’ in their names, which indicates a pedigree not just of socialism but of revolutionary socialism. But as anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of Mexican politics knows, PRI is a center right party, and PRD is a center left (trending ever more leftward) party. No one in Mexico who refers to herself as a socialist belongs to PRI. Moderate socialists in Mexico may belong to PRD, or to another leftist party.
The same phenomena is found throughout Europe – there are many political parties with “democratic socialist” or “socialist” or even “christian socialist” in the name that are full of members who would never personally refer to themselves as socialist and the policies of these parties are center right or center left (the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands is a classic example). The origin of these parties sometimes has to do with a de-radicalization of the party over time (and here again, as with unions mentioned above, and particularly in Spain where the state made being a radical illegal for a long period of time, we see state and corporate interests involved in the deradicalization of parties), as well as the creation of parties with names invoking socialism that were never socialist at all – they adopted the name socialist because in some European countries that was the only way to cultivate a mass appeal.
Thus I don’t think it is fair, especially in Spain, to suggest that “true socialists” are willing to compromise on economic matters but not on identity politics issues. Real socialists, people who identify as socialists and with the socialist movement and with socialist causes in the past, are generally not keen on supporting neo-liberal policies or political parties. Spain has a number of actual socialist parties, as well as anarchist, syndicalist, and commie parties, for radicals to choose from. These parties (most of them anyway) are part of a broader leftist coalition and they have representatives at all levels of the Spanish govt.
But they too advocate positions on identity politics which are contrary to those socially conservative Catholics will find acceptable. Given the history of the Catholic Church in Spain, one can hardly be surprised.
Obviously, I disagree with Pius XI. I would contrast his statement that “Those who work solely toward such ends have, therefore, no reason to become socialists” with my assertion above that every substantial gain workers made from the 1870s through to the legal establishment of unions and the beginning of enfranchised power on the part of labor unions by the 1950s (in Europe and in the U.S.) came about because of the two ways I note above that radicals forced advancement for the working class. You can look at the Catholic left during the same period (say Catholic Action in Italy or in Mexico) and it pretty much always followed the ground that the radical left had already laid. Hell, Catholic Action in Mexico became essentially a legal support wing of the Zapatistas in the 70s. In Italy Catholic Action wasn’t willing to work directly with the radical left as much as Catholic Action in Mexico, but everything it did was following precedent and pressure already established by the radical left.
From Rerum Novarum until the 1950s, Catholic statements on labor are playing catch up, and they have the note of desperation in them that is found in the quote you provide. Catholic hierarchies were very, very afraid of radical movements within the working classes, and so on paper concessions had to be made.
I say on paper, and for good reason. The same Pius XI who wrote the words above was the man who pinned a Church medal onto Franco’s breast and who was an ardent supporter (both materially and rhetorically) of the fascist forces in Spain.
When considering the innate atheism, or, at least, anti-Catholicism found in all of the radical political groups I mention it is very easy to try and consider some quotes from Church documents and contrast them, say, with quotes from radicals that seem to irrationally disparage the Church. The problem with this is that it loses all sense of context.
Let’s stay with Spain.
Prior to the democratic election of the Republican govt in Spain in 1931 the Church had, much more often than not, been an ardent defender of the interests of a brutal bourgeois and landowning class. The hierarchs and senior clergy all came from the economic elite of Spain, and acted as its servants. When there had been peasant uprisings or clamoring coming from leftist agitation, the message that came from the Church to peasants and workers was very forthright and simple – “obey and accept your station in life.” We should be very clear what obedience involved for peasants and working class persons – 60+ hour weeks on property that wasn’t theirs, the right of landowners to have police arrest and jail peasants/workers without trial, the right of landowners to refuse payment of money, goods, or housing on whim, the forced removal of peasants and workers from their homes without notice, the confiscation of foodstuffs, domestic animals, and other items from peasants/workers without an ability of the peasant/worker to seek legal or some other arbitration recourse, lynchings, summary “trials” of groups of peasants with executions with no ability of the peasants to obtain a fair trail in front of a jury of peers, I could go on. That, and other horrid things, was life for the peasants and working classes of Spain prior to the election of the Republicans. The Church defended that system, and one can so, “oh, well that was not in keeping with Church teaching” but that would be to sidestep the fact that it was in keeping with the Church’s relationship to the bourgeois in nearly every traditionally Catholic locale in the world at that time. Perhaps a few words about reform were said here and there, but there was no substantial movement within the Church to put a stop to this horrid exploitation of persons.
Along come the anarcho-syndicalists who preach that peasants/workers should take control of the properties they work on (whether farm or factory) – that they do the work, so they should control the property. This is the “attack on private property” that the Church has so diligently fought since Rerum Novarum. That message results in many priests (not all, as we shall see) preaching against the moral horrors of theft and insurrection and the like. These priests had not in notable numbers (one would be hardpressed to find more than an instance or two) preached hellfire and brimstone sermons to the landowners and bourgeoisie about the horrors of their practices, but throughout Spain it was common by the late 20s and 1930-31 to hear priests lambasting the perceived moral errors of the Syndicalists and other red groups and even peasant sympathies for such.
So yes, the Syndicalists in addition to preaching that workers take possession of the properties they work on/in, also have some union tunes that refer to rejecting the gods and kings of the capitalist class, and some other general anti-religious sentiments. But in the context of the above, wherein the name of Christ and the Church is so integrally tied to collaboration with the bourgeois class, how can we not see how such a rejection would be attractive? When you’ve held dying children in your arms who could not get medicine or proper nutrition because of social conditions brutally created by your devout Catholic landowner (and the Church treated such persons as devout and worthy of respect for their faith), while you may keep some bits of folk religion, you are not going to be very loyal to the Church as in institution.
Much is often said on the Catholic side of, for instance, the expropriation of Church properties by the Republicans in 1932, making the Church pay rent and taxes in order to use Church properties, but this occurs in a context of the Church having already been using its resources to undermine the Republican govt. In short time, the Church would be using its clerical networks to funnel money into Spain – money used to help arm Franco’s army. Is it no wonder that Spanish Reds shot at the huge statue of the Sacred Heart ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SpanishLeftistsShootStatueOfChrist.jpg )? The Church bred the contempt for it.
The radical left in the late 19th century included Christians, even if the original theorists had been agnostics or atheists. I don’t see why a theoretical foundation crafted by an atheist would be a problem for a Christian. A Christian might well trust an atheist to perform brain surgery, I don’t know why he should not trust an atheist to formulate economic and political policy if the policy is sound. There are many instances in which radical leftist subcultures were dominated by Christians. To note but two, please consider reading:
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin Kelley Hammer
http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Hoe-Communists-Depression-Morrison/dp/0807842885
and
Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920 by Jim Bissett
http://www.amazon.com/Agrarian-Socialism-America-Jefferson-Countryside/dp/0806131489/ref=la_B001KHMHBW_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342637693&sr=1-1
In my reading, it seems that the most anti-religious expressions among the Left were found in those places wherein the Church was most aligned with right wing / reactionary forces.
On JPII, a man whose irrational anti-marxism led him to sometimes depart from his written and stated words about justice. The following is from Rubén Dri’s La hegemonía de los cruzados: La Iglesia Católica y la dictadura militar. (The hegemony of the Crusaders: The Catholic Church and the Military Dictatorship) Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2011. The book deals with the many ways that the Vatican and local Church officials were complicit with the right wing regime in Argentina. Unfortunately the book is only published in Spanish. The Pope, of course, didn’t want to have his own imaged soiled with the unpopular regime, but his own sentiments couldn’t be entirely hidden.
Pg. 133 in a footnote – ”A Mother of La Plaza de Mayo Nora Cortiñas relates that in December 1979 Pope John Paul II refused to receive photos of a disappeared child and of Azucena Villaflor de Vicenti, a disappeared Mother, and when she said to him, “Holiness, they are killing, torturing, and disappearing people in the name of God”, the Pope responded: ‘There are disappeared people in all parts of the world. Even children, everywhere.'”
JPII’s anti-Marxism which created an occasional indifference to suffering humanity (so long as it was the right people suffering, apparently) isn’t the only side of the story of the RCC and radical leftists, however.
Much is often said of all the Catholic priests and religious that the Republicans killed in the Spanish Civil War. What is mostly forgotten is that there were priests on both sides. In the 1920s Catholic worker priests began to work in Spanish factories and Spanish farms and the majority of these staid on to work (and in a few instances fight) with the Republicans during the war. They disobeyed orders from their hierarchs in doing so. When the Republicans finally surrendered to Franco’s forces those worker priests who had lived through the war were rounded up and summarily executed by Franco’s forces, with the blessing of Church officials. This is all noted in the superb historical trilogy The CNT in the Spanish Revolution by Jose Peirats. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604862076/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
I believe that those worker priests who remained with the working people fighting for their life and survival against bourgeois “devout Catholic” forces in the Spanish Civil War are the face of Christ, far and above the unfortunate record of men like JPII or Pius XI. I believe that if we are to side with the suffering and brutalized on this planet, we must side (even if provisionally) with the forces of the radical left. I understand that because of identity politics some are not able in good conscience to make this decision. I respect that choice, even if I do not agree with it.
Ochlophobist,
First, if one has to understand the historical background of socialist reaction to the Church, one has also to understand the historical background of the Church’s reaction to socialism — namely, its roots in the anti-supernatural Enlightenment political and social theories. I do not defend the alliances between many bishops and popes and the wealthy that stained the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet, it is important to remember that according to the Church’s self understanding, the basic presuppositions of Liberalism and socialism are inimical to her mission. It was not always justifiable for churchmen to ally themselves with the social elites as they did, but it is humanly understandable why they did. They likely should have chosen martyrdom by speaking out prophetically against both sides.
I think you are right that much of the social amelioration of the past century was spurred by fear of leftists. It may be that, without leftist groups, things would not have turned out as they did. It may be, too, that Catholic social thought would not have developed as it did without the goad of socialism — but it might have; Bishop Emanuel von Ketteler, it seems, was not motivated by a desire to derail socialism as much as he was by a genuine love of the poor. Frederic Ozanam felt challenged by the Saint-Simonians, but he was motivated to address the social question by far deeper motivations. Likewise, Adolf Koelping. But, let’s assume, at least that, socialism was necessary — just as Arianism was necessary to move the Church to a more precise definition of the Trinity. To say socialism was necessary, as a goad, is not to say that the prescriptions of socialism were right or that it would have been desirable for socialism to triumph. A heart attack might move me to care better for my health, but that does not make heart attacks desirable or even helpful.
Finally, the Church might have been “playing catch up” with Rerum Novarum; but the principles enunciated by that encyclical are not fabrications of the moment. They are found in Church tradition; especially, in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, it was to St. Thomas that Bishop Ketteler turned when he sought to formulate a response to the social question.
Christopher,
Ha! For the second time this week I have been party to a conversation wherein a context of actually existing social conditions is mentioned by a leftist, and a context of “roots in the anti-supernatural Enlightenment political and social theories” or the equivalent phrase is mentioned in an attempt to balance things.
Frankly, I know this only confirms my own commitments, but I am slightly disturbed that someone would weight a context of correct theory (especially that deemed correct by collaborators with the oppressors) as equivalent to or even more important than a context of social conditions as above described. That the Catholic Church taught (and yes, Aquinas most certainly would have approved) a stringent take on property rights in light of the social conditions as I describe them – and that they (sometimes de facto, sometimes explicitly) taught that suffering obediently under current conditions was better for the souls and lives of peasants than rising against landowners and taking control of properties (and this aspect of CST remains to this day) is not a matter of dispute. I believe this, taken as a universal principle and in the particular situation of Spain in the 20s and 30s, to be heinous, despicable, and wrong, and it is an aspect of CST which I believe persons of good will must reject, as many modern Catholics, including a number of clerics, have. I recognize that the whole goal and purpose of distributism is to operate under a more literal approach to CST (or at least most of it) and thus they are not interested in following me. Note that I am not trying to assert that distributists can espouse class war / class conflict and remain in their position of adhering to what we might call “tight” readings of CST. My point in the initial comment I make above is that what makes distributists not leftist is not what they generally speak to with regard to why they don’t fall on the left. In my experience (and this goes back to Belloc’s long hesitance to articulate how property was to be RE-distributed), most distributists (unlike Daniel, who is not so afraid) want to downplay anything that hints of class conflict and redistribution schemes (which is to say, the forcible taking of property), yet many of the economic stated goals of distributists are shared by other leftists groups, and any movement toward those goals actually achieved in history has been achieved by people who had no moral qualms with class warfare (meaning the working class going on the offensive) and by people who did not adhere to the RCC’s teachings on property rights. Again, I believe distributist to be utopian to the extent that it actually thinks we could get from point A to point B without the mechanisms that the radical left embraces but CST (in “tight’ reading) rejects.
For 1850 years of Christianity, whilst there was certainly occasional moderate improvements for the poor and for women because of Christianity, social conditions akin to those I describe above continued almost entirely unabated, often with the blessing of the Church. Yes, the Church here and there condemned certain activities towards women, the poor, and slaves, and defended some of their very basic rights, in theory always, in practice occasionally, but those reforms were rarely enforced and relatively insignificant in comparison to the improved lot of the working classes, minority races, and women due to the actions of radical leftists in the last 150 years. The improvements of those three categories of human persons over 1850 years of Christianity do no compare to the improvements after 150 years of radical leftist pressures and demands and the increase in class consciousness, at least in the West, the birthplace of both Christianity as a world movement and radical leftist thought.
There were plenty of saints who genuinely loved the poor and spoke on behalf of the poor prior to modernity. Thank God. None of them brought about any significant social transformation with regard to the lot of the poor that compares to what has been wrought by radical leftists. It is nice that they cared for the lot of the poor, but nice doesn’t save a lot of lives and end a lot of suffering in the long run. And we need to consider closely what those social conditions were before we make a glib comment about how what really matters is just charity in the particular and not a mass movement toward social transformation. My oldest daughter who had an appendectomy paid for by a state subsidized program a few months ago would likely not be alive today were it not for a former mass movement toward social transformation, a mass movement initiated and largely carried out by radical leftists, even if liberals signed the various laws and policies into place.
Throughout human history, most of humanity has lived in social and economic conditions that were (and are) an utter living hell – not much amenable to faith, to reflection, to prayer, to a life that one can build upon and that is stable for families over time. It is radical leftist efforts which have lifted significant human populations out of that misery, which has granted workers rights (even if moderate in much of the world today – far better than 200 years ago), has granted women the capacity to leave men who abuse them, has granted people with dark black skin living in the West the ability to not be treated as property or chattel, and so on and so forth. We can play alternative universe and ask whether such could have been achieved had there not been radical leftist phenomena in human affairs, a question we can never answer with more than a shoot from the hip guess, but I see no reason why without the existence of a radical left Catholic saints and important figures who care about the poor would have achieved much more than the nominal achievements seen prior to the advent of a mobilized and powerful radical left. And considering that nearly every CST document that deals with the working classes and the poor since RN has used some leftist language and addressed leftist concerns, I hardly see evidence that the working classes and the poor would have been much of a priority to modern Catholicism without the aggravating and agitating presence of the radical left.
I agree with the assertion that just because x, y, and z could not have occurred without socialism does not make socialism right. I believe that radical socialism is right on other grounds than its fruit. I will though again say that in light of the social conditions which socialism addressed when no one else did seriously, that history of socialism should not be discounted. I assent to radical socialism because every stream of reactionary thought I have considered ends up in service to what I believe are intrinsically dehumanizing forces (and I believe that the notion of private property as generally outlined in CST is dehumanizing, at least as taken at face value and as applied in the manner it has been, and involves a collaboration with forces which I believe to be intrinsically evil). If there were a resurgence of radical leftist activity in my lifetime, and if the RCC continues to head in the direction it is heading worldwide with regard to its affinity with right wing movements (Hungary, Latin America, etc.), then were the RCC to say to me, we will excommunicate you if you do not reject your radical leftist views, I would have no choice but to follow my conscience and stand in solidarity with my comrades. A las Barricadas. I rest assured some old lefty Catholic priests will be there with me, just as they were with the Republicans in Spain.
We have to be careful when we measure the value of the saints based on how they improved the world socially. When you think of establishing justice, we must remember that Peter himself rejected the thought of Christ dying, thinking rather that Christ as earthly king would ensure a fair and just society. Instead Jesus knew that through the heart’s reconciliation with God society would change through God’s grace. We are stewards and servants, not masters. If all lived as Christ taught, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion on social justice. If we say that the change of hearts will never happen, and that the thing required is my political action, possibly against the church, THAT is the immovable mountain that faith can move. The heart that would not trust in God but rather think like men to solve the problems of the world. We should focus on what we have control over – ourselves. And we will find that the more difficult task. Be careful what you ask for.
Ochlophobist,
The Church’s experience with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment political and social theories was more than theoretical — as the murder of Catholic priests and religious in the Paris Commune in 1871 bears witness — not to mention the countless similar events throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. That socialism is a child, or at least a grandchild, of the Enlightenment is a fact I think anyone who has studied political thought would not deny.
I think your reading of RN and of the CST regarding private property is highly inaccurate. Your comments indicate that you know next to nothing about Aquinas’s social thought. To say why would require the both of us to commit to a discussion of the pertinent passages, so I will say no more about it here. As for general prescriptions as to how property should be redistributed — couldn’t it be that such general prescriptions are not possible, given the variety of cultures and situations? I think CST teaches that such a redistribution is desirable and even necessary, though not by violent expropriation, the history of which is not exactly sterling. It is true the Church has predisposition against violent revolution, which any rational man does, especially given its track record in history.
You still assert only that leftist were instrumental in getting the reforms you favor across. You have not shown that they were leftist reforms. As Daniel has pointed out, the examples of truly leftist reforms, say in Russia, China, and elsewhere, are not encouraging, to say the least. Too, to deny that anyone else but leftists promoted ameliorating reforms is historically false. Yes, rulers such as Bismarck established social security in Germany to undercut the socialists; but the reforms he established had already been proposed by the Catholic Zentrum Partei, and not out of fear of socialists. And they were not socialist reforms. Universal health insurance is not a leftist idea per se. The Papal States, at least in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (before Pius IX, even) provided free medical care to its people.
Finally, I cannot touch on everything in your exceedingly long post; but in his History of the German People, Johannes Janssen describes social and economic life in Germany from the 12th to the 15th centuries, drawing on the Sachsenspiegel, which was a codification of customary practice. It was far from Hell. And that the Middle Ages could be included among the periods “not much amenable to faith, to reflection, to prayer, to a life that one can build upon and that is stable for families over time” is, I am sorry to say, absurd. Is it the case that the period was devoid of faith, reflection, prayer, stability, and artistic expression? There were no folk arts? No folk devotion? No stable families, save among the aristocracy? Did we achieve these, too, only in the last two centuries, and that because of leftists?
For the record, I believe there is class conflict. I believe, too, that if the wealthy class carries it out against the poor, the poor have the right to resist. But, with the popes I think, I also believe that classes are natural to man and that it is not written into the nature of things that they be in conflict. To say otherwise is to deny the common good and replace it with the good of the greatest number, which further resolves down into the assertion of might makes right — a quintessentially Enlightenment way of thinking, by the way.
Well, the murder of Catholic priests and religious in the Paris Commune in 1871 doesn’t begin to compare to the death and brutality blessed by the Church that inspired it.
“I think your reading of RN and of the CST regarding private property is highly inaccurate. Your comments indicate that you know next to nothing about Aquinas’s social thought.”
The only thing that I asserted is that RN and CST (and Aquinas) would not allow peasants and workers forcibly taking control of farms and factories, expropriating the property of landowners and the bourgeoisie and placing it under worker control. To assert otherwise is utter nonsense. It should be noted that in Spain a democratic govt was elected that began expropriating the property of landowners and factory owners and giving it over to worker control. The local hierarchs and Pius XI asserted that this was contrary to Catholic teaching.
“You have not shown that they were leftist reforms.” It hasn’t been my intent to. It is irrelevant. I don’t believe that radical leftist thought is possible outside the trajectory of Christian history. Radical leftist thought and action is in many ways a culmination and fulfillment and bringing together of disparate and previously unorganized (for the most part) sentiments and occasional reforms prior to radical thought in European history. I have only stated that from RN on CST, when talking about worker’s rights, takes its cues from radical leftist language and is instigated because of the social phenomenon of radical leftism. This, it seems to me, is undeniable.
“Too, to deny that anyone else but leftists promoted ameliorating reforms is historically false.” I have not denied this. I have stated that I see no evidence that those non-radicals promoting ameliorating reforms would have accomplished anything remotely close to the achievements made for workers in the last 150 years due to the efforts of radical leftists and the broad scale social consciousness that came about because of the presence of radical leftists.
Your seriously going to note the thoughts of an ultramontanist on the non-hell of medieval Germany as if this should sway a thinking person? You may as well tell me that Thomas Woods would rather live in the medieval papal states than in Soviet Russia. That every sane American living today would consider 13th-15th century German life a living hell is not a matter mature minds dispute, and I mean that not just in a technological sense (50% infant mortality rates, etc), but also a social one. The rights of workers, the rights of women, then vs. now. Please. Of course there were folk arts and folk devotions. But the idea that the peasantry normatively practiced anything remotely close to what a conservative Catholic today would condone is ridiculous. Superstition was rampant. Pagan activity/witchcraft/necromancy/etc. was rampant. Incest was rampant. Sexual deviancy from Church canons was much more on par with today’s standards than pious pseudo-historians would have us believe (I know he is hated in these circles, but a little bit of Foucault & Co., at least in terms of socio-sexual history, goes a long way), and rape commonplace, in and out of marriage. Relations between workers and employers in most cases would be considered brutal by most American workers today, even with declining standards for U.S. workers. Prayer, reflection, spirituality that is more than lighting a candle here or paying a witch-doctor or priest there – this takes leisure, and not until modern social movements was there the demand that all workers deserve leisure time. In medieval society the best one finds are nice reformers insisting the poor ought to have enough time to attend to their own basic, immediate needs. I think I’ll take my social history of the family from Andre Burguiere (see his two volume A History of the Family) and such works as Phillipp R. Schofield”s Peasant and Community in Medieval England, works more or less in the Thompsonian tradition of social history, works that focus heavily on actual social conditions and usual social relations. Any honest assessment of actual social conditions and relations in any European community of the middle ages would leave a sane female reader of today under the firm conviction that she would not want to trade places with the wife of the best of peasant husbands in the 13th or 14th centuries. The changes which brought about that conviction are changes do to social transformations which took more than just some folks and groups occasionally “promoted ameliorating reforms.” It took the radical left.
I was once in a class wherein the prof waxed eloquently about the social relations of the various social levels, from village leader up to king, in pre-Norman England. Some student in the class made a comment about how appealing that all sounded. The prof then spent 5 minutes describing the typical life of a peasant in that society – one that had a social order considerably more egalitarian (in the balance of powers sense) than many others found in Europe during that time. In addition to the disease, caloric intake, and other technology related points, he pointed out what life was like in terms of social freedom and the role of women and the subservient role of peasants and the real choices available to them, and their real access to protest the actions of their superiors. After he was done nobody thought it would be cool to have lived back then. You often hear things about the Papal States providing “universal health care” or the Byzantine Empire starting the first hospitals, but when you actually study what those institutions actually did, and whom they actually served, and the % of the population that actually had access to those services, and the actual amount of resources the state (or lords, or landowners) devoted to them, you realize that the phrase “universal health care” applied to such an instance in history is the worst sort of anachronism, because these former “social services” were not even remotely the shell of their modern counterparts, the modern programs being a response to mass radical demands and the threat of the radical mobilization of whole (or nearly whole) populations, resulting in something of a much more comprehensive scope.
“To say otherwise is to deny the common good and replace it with the good of the greatest number” — That the working classes ought to, and have the right to, take their yokes off via a deliberate conflict with the master classes does not depend upon the size of the working classes.
Ochlophobist,
I see you read the Wikipedia article on Janssen — “Janssen was a stout champion of the Ultramontane party in the Roman Catholic Church” — and, seeing the word “Ultramontane” decided he was not to be trusted. I suppose that if he were a leftist, it would be different. Leftists always write objective, unbiased history. They are committed to truth, not ideology.
Not enough is known about medieval peasant life for you to claim that “incest was rampant.” The documentary evidence on such particulars is sparse at best. As for Janssen, he was not even addressing such matters but the economic life of the medieval peasant in Germany in the Middle Ages, and he drew on the Sachsenspiegel and contemporary accounts.
As for Spain, from my reading (and not from Catholic but secular sources), of the 80,000 or acres seized by the Republican government, most did not belong to large landowners but to small and medium-sized farmers — the hated “bourgeoisie.” This is the danger of classifying the enemy as “bourgeois” and disregarding their good. It is the danger of embracing the greatest good for the greatest number ideal rather than the idea of the common good. It is typical of the Liberal (and I use the term in a strict sense) reforming movements that they tend, in the end, to serve the rich or to form a new elite that is just as or even more brutal than the old elite. It happened in Mexico under Juarez. It happened in Russia under Lenin and Stalin. It happened in China, Eastern Europe, and many other places as well — except for, maybe, Cuba, as you have asserted.
I understand the sense of rage at injustice that would lead one to call for such measures as mass expropriation and redistribution of property. But history shows how such measures just as much harm the people they are designed to help. The application of such measures based on an a priori ideology ignores the complexity of human society and results in injustices that no one can tolerate. It turns out to be meeting injustice with injustice, and the Church and no rational man with a moral sense and an ounce of prudence can tolerate it. Realizing justice is a far more difficult task than you wish it to be. There is no easy fix.
By the way, I am not what most would term a “conservative Catholic,” nor do I think traditional Catholic populations were made up of rosary guild members whose women wore muslin frocks and sipped raspberry cordial. But, it seems, you can only imagine of world of stark dichotomies, where justice lies on the side of one class alone, and everyone besides the “worker” is an enemy. You seem to think there is only one way to achieve justice, and fail to see that wherever it has been tried (with the possible exception to Cuba) it has only resulted in injustice. And, finally, you seem to think that if one rejects your alternative he is on the side of the oppressor. In short, what seems your worldview lacks all the complexity of human society as it is.
Anyway, I’ll have done with this discussion. It has been lovely.
Christopher,
I too have appreciated this conversation. Thank you for your time, your seriousness, and your courtesy.
Perhaps we might say that of all the historians of medieval economics you could have pulled from, to choose as your one mentioned source an example who happened to adhere to an ideology infamous for its intellectual combat against modern strains of historical thought and its efforts to censure modern historians (particularly Catholic ones), might be taken as either a surprising move in a conversation with a Marxist, or a telling one. I don’t believe I have written anything which suggests that I reject a historian on the basis of his or her not being a leftist. One of my very favorite historians is Maurice Cowling, the archconservative historian if ever there were one (a self-professed archtory), though his method, it seems to me, is inconceivable without the development of social history by Marxist scholars. In my opinion Cowling’s social histories of modern England are obligatory reading if one wants to understand particularly religious aspects of modern English culture, and though he is a conservative (perhaps because of his erstwhile and idiosyncratic reactionary tendencies) his method and level of work are impeccable. I’d venture to say that one might be fairly safe in making assumptions about the methodology of a 19th century German ultramontane historian, but if someday I find that my assumptions regarding Janssen are incorrect, I will repent.
With regard to Spain let’s keep in mind that the Republican govt still had all sorts of political contingencies to deal with. There were forces within the govt against expropriation on a large scale, there was the threat of civil war and then civil war, and finally, there were the Soviets who refused to sell arms to the Republican govt unless it ceased to expropriate bourgeois and petit-bourgeois (I won’t go into the reformist left issues here, I will assume everyone has at the very least read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and has at least some knowledge of the evils of the Soviet manipulation of the Spanish Republican govt). I’m not of the opinion that smaller landowners are generally less worthy of having their property expropriated than larger ones – from Eugene Genovese dealing with slavery in the American South to E.P. Thompson dealing with smaller factories and landowners in early modern England, there is plenty of historical record which suggests that the smaller factory owner and the smaller landowner is often enough more brutal to his slaves or peasants or renters or workers than the larger ones were – it’s not a safe generalization perhaps, but it is certainly true that the relative obscurity of the smaller capitalist/landowner often actually increases his relative power over those under him. I don’t see that the manner in which expropriation occurred in Spain (both by the govt and later by anarchist forces) follows from some general hate-the-bourgeoisie notion getting out of hand or misapplied. Small landowners exploited the labor of their workers and were a part of a brutal establishment that needed to fall. That political expediency led to them, and not larger landowners, being the first to be expropriated is not something I consider a significant moral problem.
“It is typical of the Liberal (and I use the term in a strict sense) reforming movements that they tend, in the end, to serve the rich or to form a new elite that is just as or even more brutal than the old elite.”
Looking at the overall trajectory of the West (in particular) since, say, 1848, this is unequivocally false as a generalization. Workers in Russia in, say, 1965 were working and living under far better social conditions than the aggregate of workers were under the Tsars. Workers in China today face horrible brutality, but on the whole it is less so than that which the vast majority of Chinese peasants faced 100 or 200 years ago (though the left can’t really take simple credit for that, the larger part is simply a transition from brutal feudal to brutal capitalist economy and social order, a transition which normally leads, despite periods of intense disruption, to an improvement in the lives of workers over time at least until capitalism has no use for those workers anymore — in China it seems a very backwards and unsophisticated radical left facilitated a capitalist transformation – it is interesting to note that some Chinese communist theorists today argue that, following Marx, capitalist forms had to be introduced on a massive scale in order that a real socialism could develop in China). Eastern Europe same as Russia – I have a Romanian friend, who is both Orthodox and communist, who talks about how despite all of the pro-agrarian rhetoric coming from the Legion and other fascist groups, the communists actually radically transformed the lives of the Romanian peasantry for the better, which is perhaps why even though the neo-fascists in Romania today, as the Legion in previous generations, is so associated with rural Romanian culture, rural Romanians more than urban Romanians tend today to have a higher regard for the old communist order. Life expectancy increased, infant mortality rates declined dramatically, and peasants become accustomed to electricity, paved roads, pensions, modern health care, and the like. Setting technology proper aside and just considering the level of shared total resources available to peasants and the expansion of social franchisement and certain protections from economic and natural contingencies, only a madman would choose the life of a typical Romanian peasant in 1875 over the life of a typical Romanian peasant in 1975. And again, there would almost certainly be more examples of radical leftist regimes which expropriate vast amounts of property on mass scale incrementally and without very much bloodshed were it not for the fact that the U.S. was so fiercely determined that such not happen (ie Allende, etc.).
We might also here take a look at some countries other than Cuba that have made use of at least some forced expropriation but who do not have the negative connotations associated with failed communist states. Venezuela – the majority of Venezuelans seem to be doing better under Chavez, despite American attempts to thwart Chavez’s every turn. Indigenous peoples in Venezuela are much better off. Bolivia – similar situation as with Venezuela. In rural areas of Bolivia indigenous peoples have been allowed to forcibly take back land that is owned by corporations, and the govt refuses to do anything about it. When this sort of thing happens, it forces right wing govts in Latin America to either become more brutal, or to initiate reforms, as a result of the fear such instances instills in the hears of capitalists. Iceland – since the destruction of the Icelandic economy by finance capitalists and their collaborators in govt, the radical left in Iceland has made huge inroads (the Left Greens aligned with a Progressive Party veering ever further left built a coalition govt after the fall of the govt in power when the crisis was facilitated), and since then this left govt has nationalized the banks and some other businesses, thrown bankers in jail, re-written the constitution to have a much more leftist bent and much more economic democracy orientation, and begun measures which will expropriate more property over time. It was empowered to do this because of genuine fear that there would be violence and destruction of properties if genuine change were not realized. South Africa – a mess, yes, but not the mess of the sort that a Cambodia or Myanmar or North Korea is, and on the whole most black South Africans are far, far better off today than they were under apartheid. The ANC is essentially a real socialist party, has many leftists within it, and is on close terms with a number of communist parties throughout the world (no doubt in gratitude to the role the Cuban Army played in creating a political dynamic in South Africa which allowed the ANC to win). The ANC South African govt has expropriated a considerable amount of private property in South Africa. Because of instances like these and others, I think we can say that the forced expropriation of property (in a manner contrary to CST, or at least CST as it was interpreted in the Spanish Civil War and remains interpreted by some in the Vatican today, including the Cardinal who told, as we know because of Wikileaks, a U.S. diplomat that Chavez and his socialism must be stopped in Venezuela) does not always lead to the grave human harm suggested in your comment. I believe that is usually does not.
“But history shows how such measures just as much harm the people they are designed to help.” This is something of a mantra when it comes to red baiting, and I think that an honest look at the historical record proves that the matter is not anywhere near as clear as your assertion here.
“The application of such measures based on an a priori ideology ignores the complexity of human society and results in injustices that no one can tolerate.” and “You seem to think there is only one way to achieve justice, and fail to see that wherever it has been tried (with the possible exception to Cuba) it has only resulted in injustice.”
This, I believe, is not a fair representation of what I have written above. I have stated that I believe that class warfare and class conflict are a necessary part of what has happened in modernity with regard to workers, women, and non-whites in the West. I have stated that I believe it to be a requisite part of overcoming capitalism. I have not stated I believe it to be the only operative factor, nor have I stated that it expresses itself in some sort of universal and singular manner. Hell, while I have said things sympathetic to anarcho-syndicalists in this thread, I am not one, I am a Marxist (syndicalists tend to dislike Marx and Marxists). Anarcho-syndicalists hold to basically one model of how expropriation of capital is supposed to work. I don’t hold to one model.
As I stated above, I believe societies should be oriented toward and founded upon a notion of economic democracy. I believe that there is no one path to get to that end, and that upon getting to that end, there will be huge variances with regard to systems, administrative forms, balances of power, and the like. I agree that there is no easy fix, and I would also say that culture and natural resources and historical contingencies and all manner of other things make it such that a transition to an economic democracy in the U.S. will look very different than it would in Honduras, or in Iran, or in Myanmar.
” But, it seems, you can only imagine of world of stark dichotomies, where justice lies on the side of one class alone, and everyone besides the ‘worker’ is an enemy.” I certainly didn’t mean to infer this, and I believe this is a misrepresentation of what I have written in the thread, and it seems based on a common caricature of Marxist thought. I believe in a diverse balance of powers when it comes to economic orders. In an economic democracy, control of land and resources and facilities and the like will not typically be in the hands of a single person or a few people in a given business (that would only occur in the case of very small business which employ only a very few workers under strict conditions, if at all). Workers councils, workers cooperatives, neighborhood & community orgs (perhaps nonprofits), the state, trade unions, civic groups, and so on and so forth, or some combination of such groups, would run production and service provision businesses via collaborative efforts between different power structures, thus spreading the power over economic vehicles out, on both the marco and micro levels (for instance, one model coming out of the Frankfurt School involves businesses in which the board of directors is comprised of persons drawn from workers councils, the employees of the company, community organizations, local state bureaucrats, and the like – the executives running the company would also be pooled out of various diverse sectors, thus granting many different interests a mutual stake in the running of the company) . I am willing for all sorts of people and groups to be involved at the tables of decision making and power in the varied and diverse economic democracies I envision. But I am not willing for capitalists to be allowed at those tables.
Why? Because the nature of capitalism is innately and irrevocably contrary to the sorts of economic democratic structures I have outlined. Businesses and the taking of natural resources and the structuring of social life (what structures social life more than things such as decisions over lengths of typical work weeks, and distribution of resources and compensation among persons?) cannot be ordered in the communitarian and power diffusing manner I suggest and at the same time be subject to “profit as goal and reason for existence” and the internally unmitigated competition that are intrinsic to capitalism. Seeking to reform capitalism such that it is somehow a nicer “profit as highest goal and reason for existence” medium of economic order is akin to advocating a reform of chattel slavery instead of advocating the end of slavery. I believe that capitalism and those who defend it in any meaningful or substantive sense are the enemies of those trying to overcome capitalism, as well as those who are the victims of capitalism’s brutalities. But as I hope you can see from what I have just written that this doesn’t mean I think there is some sort of easy breezy homogeneity of interests and station and perspective in the opposition to capitalism. It is not so simple as “worker” vs. everyone else. It is more “capitalist vs. everyone else” and most of that “everyone else” is, for efficiency’s sake, often referred to as “worker.”
“And, finally, you seem to think that if one rejects your alternative he is on the side of the oppressor.” When I have listed the categories of ideology within the radical left, you will note I have listed some which are quite at odds with each other in terms of strategy, tactic, and the view of the best social order (is there no state?, is there always to be a limited state?, is there a brief period of a powerful state followed by the dissolution of the state?; are there trade unions and workers councils, or are their industrial unions and cooperatives, or are there combinations of all this? and so forth). I am deeply sympathetic to most forms of radical leftist thought, even if I tend to come down on the libertarian communist or Marxist-Humanist side of things in terms of my place within the radical left. I don’t think that one has to be on “my side” to be against the oppressor or to be simply not an agent of the oppressor. I do believe that insofar as one takes the most influential and effective means the radical left has at its disposal (class warfare, class conflict, the forced expropriation of property) away from it, one ends up serving the oppressors whether one intends to or not. I believe that some Catholics have justified their reactionary actions with CST, but on the whole I think CST has had very little effect on social orders in the last few generations, so I don’t mean to suggest that it is a valuable tool of oppressors. However, things may change in the future, and were there to be a situation wherein radical leftists were aligned against reactionaries using CST as an intellectual base for a politically powerful movement in opposition to the dismantling of capitalism, then a side must at that point be taken by persons of good will, and I believe that the side to choose is that of the radical left.
Thanks again for the discussion.
ochlophobist, your points about the necessity of the radical left in bringing about desirable modern social conditions and in goading Catholic Social Teaching are well taken. But that’s exactly the kind of thing Right-Libertarians say about the necessity and benefits of unfettered business and industrialism. It is true that we Distributists have the luxury of advocating CST because we have inherited the fruits of radical leftist struggle. But it is also true that radical leftists had the luxury of organizing mass movements because they had inherited the fruits of industrialism, mercantilism, and colonialism. The fact that industrialism was a historically necessary and on balance beneficial development does not validate it as a moral stance or a good long term vision, and the same is true of radical leftism. And the fact that radical leftist gains depended on prior industrialism does not invalidate them, and nor does that fact that CST depends on radical leftist gains invalidate it. Class conflict may be a necessary evil at certain times and places (and I have no doubt that the capitalist class in America and around the world is actively engaging in institutional violence against the working class and so the working class has a duty to defend itself fully right now), but I think CST calls us to realize it is an evil, and a historically contingent one. It gives is a vision of a truly good end goal and way to get there that does not compromise our Christianity. You’ve implied that you judge CST a failure on those grounds, and I’d like to the case for that if you’ve written about it anywhere online.
Zeb,
I don’t think I disagree with anything in your comment other than one or two lines, and those are rather mild disagreements.
” it is also true that radical leftists had the luxury of organizing mass movements because they had inherited the fruits of industrialism, mercantilism, and colonialism. ” Indeed, no Marxist would ever deny this.
“nor does the fact that CST depends on radical leftist gains invalidate it.” Agreed. It is wrong with regard to class warfare and personal property because it is wrong (I won’t rehearse the outline of my arguments again in this comment), and not because it has in other respects borrowed from and been a reaction to radical leftist thought. It would be helpful if Distributists were more clear and more focused upon their dependence upon radical leftist thought (and action) and were clear with regard to how they believe their CST approved methods are actually going to facilitate the social transformation they desire in light of their rejection of the most integral radical aspects of radical leftist thought and action and in light of the fact that the critical gains workers and women and minorities have made have come through mechanisms (or the threat of mechanisms) which CST rejects. .
My former blog is no longer online I’m afraid.
In light of the discussion on this thread and given that today is the 76th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, I thought I would offer this link to my favorite song in English concerning that War:
I know I said I would say more, but I am intemperate.
To expropriate the lands of the smaller holders does little to solve the problems associated with the capitalist order, for it leaves the truly powerful in place. I wonder, in choosing which of the smaller properties to expropriate, did the Republican government diligently seek to distinguish between oppressive and non-oppressive landowners? I doubt it.
I will add that Gironella’s novel, the Cypresses Believe in God — which, I understand, is considered a balanced portrayal of the period leading up to the civil war — details rather brutal behavior by the anarchists and communists alike. It does not, as well, deal gently with the Falange Espanola and other “rightist” groups, nor hide the condition of workers in the Spain of the time.
Communist Romania is hardly an example of peaceful expropriation, if this article is to be believed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Romania. It appears, too, that there is at least some dispute over Venezuela’s record: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/a-rotting-chicken-in-ever_b_666805.html
And how would you define the “capitalist” whom you would not allow at the table of social reform? Wouldn’t the term include those who take “the most influential and effective means the radical left has at its disposal (class warfare, class conflict, the forced expropriation of property) away from it” and thus end “up serving the oppressors whether one intends to or not”? As only a small portion (generously, a third) of any population ever really support a revolution or genuinely embrace its principles, it would seem only a minority would really sit at the table — a kind of elite. And it will be the function of this elite to “revolutionize” the rest. And will this process be carried out without significant oppression?
I do not doubt your good will toward social reform. We would probably agree on a number of points. (I am not against all expropriation, even all forced expropriation. I am against removing the right of private property as such or allowing it to exist merely at the whim of the government.) Yet, given human nature and, again, in light of history, what you propose will not be carried out without grave, intentional violations of human dignity.
“I wonder, in choosing which of the smaller properties to expropriate, did the Republican government diligently seek to distinguish between oppressive and non-oppressive landowners?”
This would be akin to asking if a govt that was taking an incremental process to eliminate slavery made sure to end the “bad” slaveholdings before the “good” slaveholdings. The point is that all the landowners were large enough to exploit the labor of their workers, and I stand by what I said above concerning small landowners generally.
I don’t deny that anarchists and communists committed atrocities in the Spanish Civil War, my argument is that the state of human life prior to conflict demanded aggression to seek an end (in light of the obvious fact that reactionary forces were not even committed to moderate reforms), and the presence of militant reactionaries made violence inevitable. We must not forget that the life and existence that peasants and workers knew under the thumbs of their masters was itself intrinsically violent. To then insist that their atrocities somehow make them morally on par with the reactionaries is species – it would be like saying that the slaves in the Haitian Revolution who killed their masters are somehow on par in terms of atrocity with the whole system of slavery in Haiti and the new world. Yes, those slaves were often wrong to do what they did in slaughtering indiscriminately, but my god man, considering the social conditions prior to the Haitian revolution can we not say that the innate violence of the system itself bore its own sour fruit? I would say the same of the violence of the anarchists and communists in Spain. All capitalism requires violence to survive – those who live comfortably because of the sword sometimes die by it. Sometimes those deaths are grisly. We can regret this (and we should, in most cases), but to assert that because all sides in the conflict committed atrocities there is some sort of moral equivalence is to deny the prior innate violence in the social conditions that men and women desperately fought to get out of. The anarchist and communist cause in Spain was just. The reactionary cause was not. Both sides committed atrocities.
I didn’t state that Romania or Venezuela are all peaches and cream nor did I state abuses didn’t occur there. I was responding to your comment about forced expropriation nearly always doing more harm than good.
“And how would you define the “capitalist” whom you would not allow at the table of social reform?” Those who own means of production and own means of provision of services (aside from very, very small business owners – such that the size has no real impact on a local community), and those manage the same at the top levels, and those are in militant allegiance to those who do and have some capacity to act on that allegiance.
As I thought I made sufficiently clear in my last comment, I do not consider all, or even most persons who do not identity as radical leftists to be capitalists. I am aware that one could argue that a public school teacher with a pension is a capitalist, but plenty of Marxists have answered that gimmicky retort and I don’t feel the need to do so here, as I assume you and I can agree that such a person has no real power over capital, and the benefit from it is relatively marginal, at least relative within American society. The pension fund manager and senior staff on the other hand….
“and it will be the function of this elite to ‘revolutionize’ the rest.” As I said in a previous comment I am not among those radical leftists or those Marxists who believes in a vanguard. I suspect that the majority of leftists in the west are in camps that reject a vanguard, either along anarchist lines, or in the Rosa Luxemburg sense, or, as in my case, along Marxist-humanist and libcom lines.
Most radical leftists so not support the end of private property in toto, individuals could own cars and small garden plots and the like in most radical leftist schemas. But yes, the real issue when it comes to parsing the differences between leftist and reactionary modes of thought are differences in the understanding of property and property rights.
“what do you propose will not be carried out without grave, intentional violations of human dignity.” Probably very little, as almost all signs point to an increase in violence on all sides as late capitalism plays out. I would highly suggest reading the article on Allende I linked to above. The author outlines why parliamentary and judicial and peaceful means of incrementally carrying out even moderate expropriation schemes are so fiercely hated by imperialist and capitalist powers. They are not going to go down without a fight, and as with all modern wars, there will be collateral damage. I do not condone collateral damage, I mean only to state what I think is inevitable. I do not think that a violent means of expropriating capital should be the only vehicle the left uses, or even the primary vehicle (it shouldn’t really be considered at all until there is the collective will to support it as a serious option, whether locally or regionally), but I believe it is a vehicle that must be on the table in the worldwide confrontation of capital. I believe that the only truly just war left in the modern world is class war, but I also think the map of that war at this time looks very grim. Take, for instance:
http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1844671607/ref=pd_sim_b_1
Ochlophobist,
But, surely, people like me will not be at the table in your new order, even though we don’t “own means of production and own means of provision of services…” — for we oppose blanket expropriation of productive property. Nor, in the end, will you include those who do not understand your principles and/or continue to hold to a sense of private property — for their decisions could jeopardize your society in the making. Too, the transition to the society you desire will not be without its sacrifices, which the insufficiently committed and ill-informed will blame on your new order. They will have to be quieted in some way. You might not intend an elite vanguard, but an elite vanguard is what will develop. It is in the logic of the thing.
When distributists talk about private property, they do not mean cars and small garden plots. They mean the means of production. When Leo XIII and Pius XI speak of private property, they meant the means of production. Obviously, such as hold to these principles cannot have at place at your table.
We are talking about what happens in revolutions. They are bloody, dicey affairs, which is one reason Catholic thinkers have not been too warm in espousing them. They are at times necessary, as Thomas Aquinas and Paul VI admitted, but they are utterly perilous.
Christopher,
I agree with your concerns more than it seems you may think.
First, I think we should distinguish two arenas. When I was talking about “a place at the table” I was talking about the distribution of power with regard to economies on both the micro (individual businesses) and macro levels. I provided a list of groups I thought might participate in such power division schemas. I don’t see why a given person’s opinion on the social usefulness of private property, or on private property rights, should in and of itself disqualify her from serving in a leadership position in a company or an economic team of a given region, though I suppose if the person made it clear that they were committed to the destruction of communitarian forms of distribution of property that might be a factor. But to be the production manager at the company I work at, I don’t see why his opinion would matter at all.
I don’t see why a pope should have an administrative place at the table in a local/regional economy or with a particular business, unless we were talking about something within Vatican City or Rome or central Italy or somesuch.
Second, we have the leadership that exists during the expropriation process in the transition from a private property oriented economy to one which is communitarian. Given the many instances I have noted in this thread of quite varied approaches to expropriation, I don’t see any evidence that expropriation necessarily leads to a vanguard. I suppose one could argue that vanguardism is more likely to develop in some cultures as opposed to others. But I don’t see a universal human phenomenon of expropriation leading to a vanguard. The CNT in Spain operated radically differently than the Bolsheviks with regard to leadership structures and principles of leadership. Allende, the Zapatistas ( Subcomandante Marcos has famously said “#!@* the vanguard!”), the IWW at its most powerful, Rosa Luxemburg & Co during the German revolution, and so forth didn’t operate with a vanguard.
Of course there is always the danger that any leadership within any system could turn into a junta or a cabal. Safety measures have to be taken to prevent as much. But with the Bolsheviks, or the Maoists, who were rather transparent about revolutionary processes depending upon a revolutionary vanguard, there is no real “gotcha” moment for people who listened to what these groups had always been saying – they ended up with a ruling elite that had extraordinary, virtually unlimited powers because they started with that ideology of revolution to begin with. That ideology is one that the vast majority of radical leftists in the West have not shared and do not share.
“When distributists talk about private property, they do not mean cars and small garden plots. They mean the means of production.”
I agree. They are gravely wrong, and this ultimately makes them reactionaries. I suspect that were American distributists transported back to Spain in 1936 and told to pick a side, most would fight for Franco without much hesitation. This saddens me.
“When Leo XIII and Pius XI speak of private property, they meant the means of production.”
Indeed, this was perhaps part of Pius XI’s motivation in awarding a Church medal to the man who had ordered the blanket bombing of the civilians of Guernica. The history of the Catholic Church’s, shall we say, “actually existing” application of CST is a history of protecting private property and Church privileges at virtually all costs.
“[Revolutions] are utterly perilous.”
Indeed, but then again, so is capitalism.
One does not have to have begin one’s operation with a vanguard in the Leninist sense to have an elite end up controlling the government. I used the term “vanguard” perhaps imprecisely. But I would assert again that a revolutionary movement such as you propose would end in the creation of just another elite as the master of the many — despite the good intentions of those who initiative the movement. This is the pattern of communist revolution. Allende is not a good counterpoint, since he remained in power only three years.
Like you, I deplore Pius XI’s granting a decoration to Franco. I deplore his blessing of Mussolini’s troops before the invasion of Ethiopia (though, it seems, the pope was not intending to bless the invasion; still, it was the wrong thing to do and reflects a current, predominant strain of theology that held that no citizen could question the justice of his government’s war. One of the premier Catholic moral theologians, by the way, Alphonsus Liguori, did not hold this.) I admire Pius XI for other things, however, and think it is important to understand the context of his actions. He saw Franco as saving the Catholic Church in Spain. Moreover, he had only to look at such events as the Holodomor in Ukraine to extrapolate what might occur in Spain. Further, is it clear that Pius knew precisely what happened at Guernica? Perhaps he should have. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. Do you?
I think it interesting that you are so willing to comprehend the atrocities of leftists as an understandable reaction to oppression (and I have been known to make such a qualified defense of leftists myself), but will give no quarter to the excesses and stupidities of what you call “reactionaries.” For Pius XI, as for any Catholic, the supreme good is mankind’s ability to reach its final end, union with God. Theosis. Of course, as CST insists, social justice plays a role, and an important, necessary role, in this; but to destroy the Church so that we might achieve a better life on earth is like cutting off the head for the health of the body — at least from a Catholic perspective. I am approaching 50 (not as old as some on this blog, I grant), and I grow every day to see the truth of Cardinal Newman’s aphorism: “life is short, eternity is long.” This does not mean I ignore social good or treat work for social justice as so much tripe — I do not — but it means I see, finally, the poignant truth of what Jesus said: “what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” What does it profit society if it gains economic justice but loses its soul?
Anyway, I don’t expect that you see things this way; but it is important, in assessing history, to understand (though not necessarily approve of) the actions of historical figures who see things this way.
Pax tecum.
Christopher,
“This is the pattern of communist revolution.”
And this is where these conversations seem to inevitably break down, when there is nothing else to say, red-bait, and appeal, repeatedly, to the “common wisdom” that all communist revolutions operate via the same anthropology and socio-political trajectory [note that not once in this thread have I referred to the expropriation of private property as a “communist revolution” – a communist revolution is one way to expropriate private property, but certainly not the only way, and not the way of the majority of instances of property expropriation I have mentioned on this thread.] I’ve answered this concerned as directed and re-directed a number of times on this thread. Allende only ruled for three years because we killed him, as we did any number of revolutionaries committed to social transformations not in keeping with the mythos of communism that the American govt needed to have projected to its citizens and to the world (to be fair, the leaders of the Soviets and the Chinese CP did the same). And so now, conveniently, we can point to the horrible examples of property expropriation in the world as necessarily how these things must turn out.
Have I excused the actions of radical leftists who commit atrocities? No. When I point them out I simply point out the context. What is the context of the Haitian slave who eventually kills his master? It is one of being subjected to the brutality of a system maintained by the master (and his class). What is the context of the master (and his class and its allies) then, in using force to maintain his position? It is one of privilege, of comfort, of profiting from the exploitation of others, of access to mechanisms of power that are built around an economy designed to create and maintain servile classes and vast swaths of people who are disenfranchised from an egalitarian participation in the economy (even if just by representation in economic structures). So the slave rises up and kills the master and his family. Now what? We have masters responding with their own violence, and they inevitably appeal to the abuses of the slaves and the horrors of the violence, and their intrinsic right to protect themselves. Insofar as innocent people were killed, the killers were wrong. But where did the violence begin? Not with the slave, in my opinion. This doesn’t make the slave’s violence just. But when considering excesses, I can say that the context out of which the slave’s violence was borne, in comparison to the context out of which the master’s violence was borne, needs be taken into account before any allegiances are drawn, or before any blanket dismissals on the basis of violence are made. Sure, I can understand the motivations behind reactionary violence, but at the end of the day, it is always at least in considerable part based on the conviction that a system which requires, both ideologically and in practice, the gross exploitation of others be maintained. In politics the assumption is that one, ultimately, must make a choice. If I must choose between one murderer who kills because of the violence previously hurled at him, and another murdered who kills to save the lives of himself and his class, and to restore an order that requires mass violence and mass subservience, with whom ought I to choose?
This is why you keep insisting that the radical leftist way(s) of property expropriation cannot provide a system that is ultimately fair and peaceful, for it could, then the choice mentioned above would be a clear one. But insofar as we insist that the world the leftists create will be just as violent and exploitative as the one it replaces, it takes any sense of justice out of any sort of force (even non lethal) being used in the process of such a social transformation.
What might well be kept in mind is that line has been used over and over and over again by reactionaries confronted with efforts for an expansion in social franchise. They said the same thing with regard to slavery (freedom for blacks won’t improve their lot, it will actually worsen it, etc.). They said the same thing with regard to the rights of women to vote, to own property, to sue for divorce, etc. – that this would all actually result in harm to women overall. They said the same thing with regard to the rights of workers – that a reduction in normative work weeks and widespread increases in pay, the ability to sue employers over work related grievances (unsafe conditions) and the right to form unions and collectively bargain would ultimately hurt workers both in terms of their work ethic and in terms of their health (they will drink away all that time and money, etc.) and social well being. An expansion in medical coverage across the population will necessarily result in worse health care for all. You get the drift – this is classic reactionary logic – it must assert always that the undesired change will bring about a worse condition, or an equally bad condition, as the condition we started with, and thus the effort to effect change is deluded, probably based on greed or a base aspiration for power, and so forth. An excellent resource in this regard is the quite well done book by Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin: http://www.amazon.com/The-Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund/dp/0199793743
So in Spain the peasants and the workers did not start out killing their masters (aside from a relatively few instances drawing severe reactions from both the right and the left — note that the leadership of the CNT was very firm on disciplining the vast majority of violence against the bourgeoisie until a war broke out and the CNT leadership had fewer resources to police its own). The properties of the Church were, for the most part expropriated, but before the war virtually none of them were taken over. All the Church had to do was pay a modest rent (by comparison to the rents the working and peasant classes had to pay) for the use of its former properties – properties it, in most cases, only ever had in the first place because of the exploitation of Spanish peasants and workers.
Any spiritual system which depends upon privileges which depend upon the exploitation of workers is such that either, (1) God hates it, (2) God doesn’t hate it and thus God is a cosmic jerk and I and people of good will should gladly serve the forces of hell, or (3) there is no God.
I understand that Pius XI, like chauvinistic spiritual monarchs through the ages, believed that keeping Catholicism running in Spain was of the greatest importance. In ages past there have been societies that have believed that maintaining human sacrifice was of non-negotiable utmost importance, I have little patience for that either. I am of the opinion that if there is a just God, that God must surely be happier with a Spain in which no Masses are served and no sacraments given but the poor are not on the whole brutalized than a Spain in which Masses and sacraments come along only because a brutal reactionary elite has bought and paid for them with the blood and exploitative labor of peasants and workers. Again I would bring up the worker priests whom did just fine among the CNT forces. What was hated was really bourgeois Catholicism, and not simple belief or folk piety.
As I have said above, prayer and reflection and serious theological commitments require leisure, something workers and peasants under the thumb of the master class rarely had. This is why conservative religion has been normally preserved within the bourgeoisie in most of modernity. I realize that keeping the theological purity and religious devotion of a minority of persons in society is more important to many devout Catholics than the issue of a vast majority of persons in that same society living in conditions we today would consider abject and brutal. The God of Abraham oft does come off as a socio-path, or at least his followers do. Perhaps in modernity he is offering them the opportunity to do some growing up.
“Perhaps he did. I don’t know. Do you?” Honestly, I cringe when I read things like this. Perhaps Lenin didn’t intend for atrocities to be committed by the Reds. I don’t know, do you? Perhaps Stalin’s didn’t really intend to kill millions of people. I don’t know, do you? Sure, I don’t know exactly what Pius XI knew, or exactly what his intentions were. But I know the general trend of the support the Catholic hierarchy gave to reactionary forces in fronts the world over during that same period of time Popes were issuing encyclicals supposedly in support of workers.
” But I would assert again that a revolutionary movement such as you propose would end in the creation of just another elite as the master of the many.” And I would assert, per above, that this is because you are ideologically committed (insofar as you subscribe to a tight reading of CST and believe yourself religiously bound to do so) to believe that any expropriation of private property must follow an anthropology that is defunct to the point that is will have amazingly predictable results no matter the setting, the orchestration, the stated ideology, etc. At the end of the day, there is no argument that can win against a de facto fideism.
Ochlophobist,
You have not shown how my reasoning regarding the creation of an elite does not follow. “But insofar as we insist that the world the leftists create will be just as violent and exploitative as the one it replaces, it takes any sense of justice out of any sort of force (even non lethal) being used in the process of such a social transformation.” Though I will be accused of “red-baiting,” the fact of the matter is that leftist regimes have been “as violent and exploitative” as the ones they replaced. And it is a false juxtaposition to compare expropriation of private property with the abolition of slavery. Slavery is an evil. The private possession of wealth producing property is not — though, I suppose, you would say it is.
“If I must choose between one murderer who kills because of the violence previously hurled at him, and another murdered who kills to save the lives of himself and his class, and to restore an order that requires mass violence and mass subservience, with whom ought I to choose?” It has never been this simple — for many are the cases where the first murderer you mention has established “an order that requires mass violence and mass subservience.” But, I suppose, by saying this, I am being merely a reactionary red-baiter who is unable to see that, where your real leftism have been tried, the result has generally been mass prosperity and benign government.
” Though I will be accused of ‘red-baiting,’ the fact of the matter is that leftist regimes have been ‘as violent and exploitative’ as the ones they replaced.”
We’re now just circling here. The fact of the matter is that not all have, per now thousands of words with many references above, and the ones which showed most promise to not be so were put down violently, usually by capitalist forces.
“Slavery is an evil. The private possession of wealth producing property is not — though, I suppose, you would say it is.”
Private property is an evil at least in principle on par with slavery. Indeed, it necessitates a de facto slavery of most of humanity. To scale, there is no greater force of social evil in the world today than private property.
It amazes me to know end the intellectual leaps which otherwise left leaning persons will take to defend private property, for whatever the reason (religion, social convention, etc.). What is property as it currently functions? It is power over a given resource or over given resources that one has a piece of paper claiming title to and legal protection concerning. Why on earth, when talking about resources which have effect on the social ordo, do we think one person, or one cabal of persons (a board of directors, a management team, an ownership team, whatever), should be able to unilaterally make decisions without even an attempt at real and power yielding representation from the people who will be effected by those decisions? Why on earth should a Walmart be able to make decisions without its employees, and representatives of the communities Walmart is in, having no power in the decision making processes? That is absurd. It is just as absurd when the owner of a hardware store in a small town, say by far the biggest business in that small town, is able to unilaterally make decisions which end up effecting the whole town. Workers at that small hardware store shouldn’t just be able to bargain with the owner, leaving the owner the right to close up shop, walk away, and leave the town in economic havoc if he wants. The workers and the community should have representatives in leadership positions in that small hardware store (or be part of the process to elect a leader of it), or at least it should be owned cooperatively, in order to distribute both the power over the property, but also distribute franchisement in decisions which effect all the workers of the property and the whole town. By allowing private property one concentrates the power of coercion into a small number of hands, and disenfranchises the vast majority of persons.
Of course, in response to radical leftism, much of the last 150 years has seen liberal democracies attempt to mitigate the power of property owners, so as to satisfy the grumbling and sometimes agitating masses. Marx predicted how these reformist efforts would play out, and this is one of those areas where Marx happened to be more than less correct. We are currently living in a time when capitalists are making huge regains in their capacity to make use of property power without mitigation by the state or other forces.
” It has never been this simple — for many are the cases where the first murderer you mention has established ‘an order that requires mass violence and mass subservience.’”
First, I know the case I provided was grossly simple – but I had in mind a simple analogy to Spain, wherein one can imagine some worker having to choose, and he has to make a choice (this certainly did happen at times), between one side or the other, both sides having been guilty of atrocities. My analogy is meant to provide a moral framework for why he picks one side over the other, given no other option. That is all.
There have not been many cases where the working class rises and creates an order that requires mass violence and mass subservience, at least not in comparison to capitalism. Communism and radical leftism has been organizationally operative for a little more than 150 years. It has had power over some govts for a little less than 100 years. The number of those govts does not compare to the number of govts capitalism has had control of, and the number of those govts which actually created worse conditions than previously existed (under either capitalism, or feudalism, or monarchy, or some mix), in terms of mass violence and subservience, is relatively few.
“I am being merely a reactionary red-baiter who is unable to see that, where your real leftism have been tried, the result has generally been mass prosperity and benign government.”
Look, in this discussion you have noted that my presuppositions bind me to certain trajectories of thought and commitment, for instance my belief that private property is evil. I think it perfectly fair to note that your ideological commitments also bind you to certain trajectories. This isn’t to say that you are not a worthy interlocutor, it’s just to delineate where the differences really lie.
I have not anywhere stated that where my leftism has generally been tried there has been mass prosperity and benign govt. I have said that the govt of Cuba is not benign, but certainly no worse and in some aspects better than the U.S., and with an economic system that is more democratic. I have noted that Cuba’s potential prosperity has been thwarted because of the U.S. embargo, and thus not allowed to prosper or attempt to prosper. I have pointed out that where my leftism has generally been tried (or been about to be tried, or shown potential to be tried) the U.S. and its reactionary allies have been hostile to it, and used force to stop it. I don’t believe that if all the reactionaries die tomorrow heaven will descend upon the earth and all shall be well in all manner of well. I believe that economic democracy is a far more rational, humane and decent manner to structure society and allows for the possibility of far less brutalities than late capitalist systems, all things considered. But as with all human affairs, there are complexities and material, cultural, and social difficulties, and tendencies toward corruption, and the potential for violence and the like. Babies in a communitarian society with a near perfect economic democracy won’t stop getting sick and dying sometimes. Leaders won’t stop vying for more power. But just as representative democracies allowed for, overall, far better lives and far more humane social conditions than feudal monarchies, and for a general trend toward a greater diffusion of power (even if this trend has been and is being reacted against successfully on various fronts) I believe economic democracies and the transition from private property into diffused economic power structures provides far more promise than other options with regard to the pursuit of the most humane social structures possible.
I think it odd that you should assume that I hold to a capitalist view of property — property to which is attached an absolute right, a property unregulated by the exigencies of the common good but serving merely the interests of the individual who owns it. I hold a very different view of property. It is ironic that you should bring up Walmart, for I have been an active member of a group in my town that has, so far, been successful in keeping Walmart out (for which I have been called a socialist, of all things!) In fact, I find little to disagree with in your paragraph, beginning, “It amazes me…” I favor cooperative ownership of businesses; I see it as a one form of private property. I would favor measures to prohibit businessmen to close up shop to avoid their employees’ just demands. I want to see a widespread ownership of property and/or participation in the ownership of property. The only thing I disagree with in that paragraph, in fact, is: “By allowing private property one concentrates the power of coercion into a small number of hands, and disenfranchises the vast majority of persons.” Private property can do that, but it need not.
Further, nothing in that paragraph is not, I think, found in CST, which insists that economic possession must serve the economic good of all — but, more importantly, the cultural and spiritual good of all. At the center of CST is the common good, which, to be truly itself, must be truly common.
In short, I want to see radical changes in “property as it currently functions,” while preserving private property and expanding access to it to as many as possible.
Christopher,
I am not surprised to hear of your manner of anti-capitalism. I mentioned in my previous comments Marx on the reform of capitalism. If the collective forces of those currently protesting against WalMart were 1,000 times stronger than they currently are, they would occasionally win more local battles but WalMart would still be winning the war. Note this as well, when states began creating fairly complex restrictions upon what business owners could do with their properties, capitalists shrieked in horror about how this violated basic property rights, and used the “socialist” word in response, and in a certain sense they were correct to do so as this was, incrementally, the trajectory things slowly appeared to be going in certain stretches of time between the 1870s and 1940s when you had serious legal mitigations incrementally being advanced on capitalist properties (not in a comprehensive manner, but in fairly wide swaths. Serious sweeping mitigations of power over property began because of pressure from radicals to eliminate property altogether, and thus reformist concessions were made to appease labor and the working classes. But capital has now very much wised up to that former trajectory and has been very competent at playing off of contrived crises to re-privatize elements of the market, to destabilize labor, and to advance business property rights and repeal many of these former mitigations of property rights. Marx was wrong about any number of things (particularly the continued rise of the proletariat – our age is now producing lumpenproletariat at a far greater rate than proletariat, even with all those Chinese rice farmers having been turned into factory workers in recent decades), but he predicted this state of capitalism in terms of reformism and capitalism’s response to it, which is now quite successful.
I mean, in theory, I suppose one could state that the hardware store owner still “owns” his property, but his power is so mitigated that he is no longer able to make decisions about any aspect of the business without going through a management team that involves representatives of his workers and the community, but in that case, does he still really own the business? No. And libertarians and conservatives are correct in their protest that heavy mitigations on the legal ability of property owners to use their property as they wish diminishes the whole notion of property rights. Reformism is very attractive here, but to the extent that the owner(s) still has real power over that property, he still has an unjust power of coercion over communities and workers, and this is intrinsically unjust, especially considering that no one has an innate right to the resources they make use of (human or material). I mean, seriously, all land in North America was at some point stolen from someone – the only rational approach to distribution of those resources is communitarian – the idea that one person should ever have any unilateral rights over any resources to the extent that it substantially effects a community seems entirely irrational to me. Reformists want to tweak this or that, and mitigate things to some point where at least a fair number of capitalists are somewhat happy and a fair amount of workers are fairly happy, but in the end power is still will power is. If the owner of the business still has unilateral power to make decisions which crush people who had no representation in the decision process, then we are in an intrinsically unjust situation. Again though, If he doesn’t have that power (at least in some arenas), in what meaningful sense does he own the property?
And where CST and I disagree over property is here – if he (the capitalist / business owner(s)/executives) have that power, then I believe that it is, within the parameters of prudence, just for the workers to remove the owner or executive or board of directors from control of the property, and to disperse control in a more economically democratic manner. CST does not allow for the workers of WalMart to take ownership of WalMart by force, even nonlethal force (say through a general strike with sit-ins, etc. – CST may allow those methods in some cases, but not to expropriate property and forcibly take ownership).
Obviously, you and I are allies in many practical things. The workers of WalMart (and the local hardware store) are not going to expropriate the company anytime soon. So the best we can do is protest and try to educate people. I may not think such efforts will win a stable justice or really hurt capitalism in and of themselves, but at least they promote more widespread bitterness towards capitalism and advance a discontent that might, under ever changing social circumstances, grow into more serious means of bringing down the beast. With regard to such projects, I appreciate your efforts.
Since Daniel calls you Owen, do you mind if I do so as well? Ochlophobist is a mouthful.
Your write: “I suppose one could state that the hardware store owner still ‘owns’ his property, but his power is so mitigated that he is no longer able to make decisions about any aspect of the business without going through a management team that involves representatives of his workers and the community, but in that case, does he still really own the business? No.”
I wouldn’t think every decision need be so involved; but such a discussion would get us too deep into particulars that would, in this context, be mere abstractions.
So, to move on to a true abstraction:
I think the properties of private property (no pun intended) are these:
1. A title to the possession of means of production upon which one can exercise his prudence and thus make plans for the future
2. A title to a participation in the fruits of production according to one’s contribution and one’s need
3. Stability and perpetuity in both titles against arbitrary seizure
I think there are various forms or models of private property that would, to differing degrees, include all three properties. A family farm, for instance, would include all three to the highest degree. A cooperative business would fully include 2. and 3., but 1. would be more participative. One could have a mixture of sorts, too. I read of a farming cooperative in England that has maintained the medieval strip cultivation. The farmers get together every year and together decide who will get what strips that year and what crops each will plant. I think this private property. Most Americans, I think, would not, for, following Locke, Americans tend to see the possession of property as absolute — as the right to use and abuse, with only the very minimum of regulation that would allow others the right to use and abuse over their own property. (Libertarians, of course, would not even countenance the minimum of regulation.) The Lockean notion, however, is quite distinct from the notion of private property found in CST.
Christopher,
As I stated above I follow the usual Marxist and socialist line of considering private property in terms of that power to use resources, means of production, and means of provision of services, in such a way that can coerce or harm the community that exists outside of what the individual owns.
I have also stated my support of Cuba doubling its permits allowing privately owned businesses – businesses which are kept at a very small size (there are regulations regarding what level of distribution of ownership has to be involved depending on how many employees are working for the company – I think the hot dog vendor is allowed something like 3 part time employees, but once he gets a full timer he has to offer that full time employee a plan to gain at least partial ownership in the company over time, and this gets more and more complex as companies get bigger.
I have no problem whatsoever with small family farms that don’t hire full time workers outside of the family, so long as they don’t own so much property that is effects the local land economy in a manner that is coercive or harmful. In Cuba, the large landowners, a relatively small % of families who owned most of the land in Cuba, saw their land expropriated after the revolution. It was distributed in various ways – some divided into communes (Soviet model) and some into small family plots. Over time, more and more of it has been divided into small family plots as the Soviet commune model largely didn’t work. Cuba is not an agrarian success story (for reasons I won’t get into here), and I think that large populations need a mixture of farm sizes and farming techniques (I basically follow The Land Institute when it comes to coherent and sustainable land usage – http://www.landinstitute.org/ ) though I have an overall negative view of conventional farming. But I see no problem with an agrarian economy that is a mix of worker collectives working larger parcels of land, and small family farms working smaller parcels of land. I have no problem with the small parcels being inherited within families. Though safeguards need be made – my wife is from WI and we know some relatively small family farmers who got involved in the Organic Valley cooperative who have found it to run essentially like a corporation and found that Organic Valley exploits its family farmer members. Small family farms should exist, and they should be protected, and sometimes this means protecting them from organizational models which purport to be in the interest of small family farmers. In keeping with what I have written above, I have no problem with legal protections for small family farmers operating autonomously within the economy so long as they keep their size small – the allowed size would depend upon the type of farm and location (a small ranch in Nebraska will be much bigger than a small rye/wheat/soybean/oats farm in WI), and they care for their land in a manner that suits the long term interests of the greater community. I think, as a socialist, that the single best argument for allowing farms to be inherited is that a person who grew up on that land is going to be more aware of the land’s long term needs. There again, however, I grew up in a rural area where most farmers who farmed on longstanding family land (some going back 4 and 5 generations) were conventional farmers who loved Monsanto technologies and govt subsidies. So there still needs to be regulation even with small farming. But once regulations such as those the Land Institute advocates are in place, there is little a small farmer can do to hurt the community at large. This is not the same when it comes to even a small manufacturer (say 100 employees), thus I think “private” businesses that are non-farm have to be kept minuscule (like the hot dog stand) and anything larger than that must involve cooperative ownership and/or other collective options of ownership.
ochlophobist, I think the most powerful common criticism economists make of socialism is that it degrades or eliminates price signaling. The genius of the free market is that it allows a wide variety of values to be agregated, converted into a common metric and balanced simply by consumers paying for what they want and producers pursuing profit. It seems to me your idea of even small businesses being managed by a committee of stakeholders would suffer from degraded or eliminated price signaling. How would such a system avoid the inefficiencies that have plagued highly socialized or unionized enterprises?
You talk of economic democracy solely in terms of bureaucracy, with no mention of the democracy of the market. Suppose we had a society where productive property was widely distributed (but privately owned), and where the market was regulated with adequate minimum wages and such. In such a society everyone would have more or less equivalent economic power and voice, but it would be up to each to decide when and how to use their influence, what opportunities and luxuries were worth giving up to exercise more or less influence, and which decisions were of highest personal priority. If the person who owned the town’s hardware store was treating the workers poorly, those workers would have the option to stike and if the owner responded by closing up shop the workers could buy the store if it was worth it to them. Or they could simply start up their own store independently. But in either case doing so would require them to invest their own capital and give up the opportunity to use it otherwise, so you wouldn’t have people taking intractable stances with frivolous demands simply becuase they have a “seat at the table.”
One of the moral and material goods that I think justifies the Church’s fundamental support for private property is that it allows for material creativity – actually participating in God’s creativity. If each person has her own piece of the world’s productive capital, whether that is land or a building or an education or just a bunch of money that can be turned into any type of capital, then she has the opportunity to pursue a personal vision of what would be a good and beautiful way of living and adding value to the world. She can participate in bringing about the Kingdom of Heaven according to her personal inspiration. It seems to me your vision of committee rule would seriously reduce the freedom and creativity available to people. I started my own business four years ago because I saw a demand that was going unfulfilled and because it would help build the world I want to live in. I have put in a ridiculous amount of work and have made big sacrifices to make this business successful. I would not have done that if I’d had to submit to the decisions of a committee of my neighbors and the random employees I’ve hired. As it happens the biggest part of my business is organizing, managing and marketing a cooperative of organic Amish farmers. If it weren’t for this business I don’t believe these farmers would have organized at all and I don’t think most of them would be able to support themselves by farming sustainably. I don’t see how that kind pursuit of a singular vision can exist without private property. And as long as private property is continually widely distributed so that there is a diversity of visions and enterprises being pursued, and as long as those enterprises are subect to community evaluation through the price signalling of the free market, I don’t see what the great threat in private property would be.
I think you are right though that Distributists and radical leftists like yourself are allies for the forseeable future anyway. The biggest enemy to everything Distributists want is the capitalist class. I would not include small business owners in that class, but just those who receive their income solely because they own property, not because of the value they create in managing the property they own. That kind of capitalism concentrates property in fewer and fewer hands and disenfranchises the majority in every way.
” If the person who owned the town’s hardware store was treating the workers poorly, those workers would have the option to stike and if the owner responded by closing up shop the workers could buy the store if it was worth it to them. Or they could simply start up their own store independently.”
This, I fear, is the logic of libertarianism. As long as this thread is, I won’t at this point list the many reasons that workers normally do not have the power to realize these supposed options. The whole nature of the capitalist economy, even in our imagined small town, is set against workers and even collectives of workers getting access to the necessary capital to make such a transition. Of course it happens occasionally, but for most collections of workers this isn’t even remotely possible.
” How would such a system avoid the inefficiencies that have plagued highly socialized or unionized enterprises?”
Most radical socialists do not believe in a large central command economy directed solely by the state. In fact relatively few support such a thing. One question which needs to be asked is what capitalist efficiencies are oriented towards? They are oriented towards increased profits, not increased provision/quality of services. As late capitalism advances, we see great declines in the quality of customer service and of end products, because achieving quality in those arenas (generally) creates inefficiencies with regard to growth in profits. I would argue that Cuba’s health care system is far more efficient (from the user end perspective) than what most Americans experience in the American health care system. But yes, I have a friend who has said to me many times that he doesn’t want to fly on “Distributist Air” and having flown on Aeroflot in 1992, I’m not a big fan of state run aviation either. In an economic democracy there is no reason why you could not maintain consumer choices (between airlines, between auto manufacturers, between manufacturers of shampoo etc.). What would change is that the folks running those production/ service providers would represent the workers, the communities, etc. (the list of players I provide above). The problem with both the 20th century highly controlled central economies (Russian, North Korea, etc) and with capitalism is that both require a great lack of diversity in decision making process and places at the table representative of economic constituents, and both are concerned with economic growth that is not in the best interest of communities or users of the end product.
“One of the moral and material goods that I think justifies the Church’s fundamental support for private property is that it allows for material creativity – actually participating in God’s creativity. If each person has her own piece of the world’s productive capital…”
There is no way to insure in a private property schema that “each person has her own piece of the world’s productive capital.” People will get sick and have to sell their property. More creative or more hardworking people will ruthlessly drive others out of certain markets. Even if Distributists could achieve their goal of a radical redistribution of wealth so that every family in the world (or in a nation) owned a piece of property, you are just setting a reset button and things will drift toward the same problems inherent in private property. I believe material creativity will be expressed to the greatest extent when, in an economic democracy, all, or nearly all people, are voting constituents in thepower structures of the economies (micro and macro) which they participate in (even if you get sick and can’t work you are still a voting member of the community org which is a power player in local business decisions, etc.). If you want to drop out of college and build a better software system, forming a collective of workers committed to your project, and pitching it to workers councils and community orgs and the like doesn’t seem to me to be any less a stifling of creativity than what we have now. In many ways it might be more conducive to creativity. We know Bill Gates spent a great amount of resources purchasing the technologies of would be competitors in order that they never saw the light of day and thus Microsoft continued on its trajectory of market dominance. In an economic democracy situation, Bill Gates (and his collective of workers, say) has to answer to community orgs and workers councils and the like, and would be competitors might well have been able to pitch to those orgs their better technologies. And Gates isn’t in this case protecting his millions or billions, as profits will be much distributed in a much more egalitarian manner (maybe Gates makes 3 or 4 or 5 times more than the janitor, and gets more public notoriety). These sorts of situations might radically improve getting technologies to end users.
For a number of reasons I won’t get into now, I don’t see the Amish model generally as one that is a good one, or one applicable to mass scale. Though there is a substantial variance between Amish groups. In central WI where my mother lives, they are in many ways socio-economic leeches who drain the communities around them.
“I think you are right though that Distributists and radical leftists like yourself are allies for the forseeable future anyway. ”
Agreed. There is no serious expropriation of capital for the foreseeable future. Local bakers aren’t even allowed to expropriate the symbol of the Olympics:
“A cafe manager in London who displayed five bagels in the style of the Olympic rings was ordered to take them down. A butcher in Weymouth, Dorset, also had to take down five rings made from sausages.”
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2012/07/21/london-olympics-lord-coe-s-astonishing-sponsors-outburst-86908-23910798/
Oh, and I forgot to say, thanks for the comment Zeb.
If you say that any love of locality and subsidiarity that appeals to the libertarian side of American politics is “false” Distributism, how about the brand you preach that identifies with Marxism and the Wobblies? How can you claim it is neither “left nor right” when you seem to be very far leftist?
I hate to be a “no, you!” pointer, but it seems to be your leftist Distributism that is false because it seems to be a false-flag for Socialism.
I am not sure to whom your remarks are directed, Steven, but Owen is pretty forthcomingly leftist, and neither he nor Christopher has denounced localism or subsidiarity.
So what are you talking about?
I would like to thank everyone, and especially Owen and Christopher, for a most thought-provoking conversation. Not least, I would like to thank everyone for the respect and courtesy that has marked these lengthy posts. There is obviously a lot of common ground in the goals of the decentralist, democratic Left and distributism. I think Owen is right in pointing out that the too-common caricature of the Left as identical with State socialism is inaccurate, though I don’t think he recognizes that for many the Left is forever tainted by the nightmares that Marxism has too often created when it came to power, and by the CPUSA’s complicity in defending the Soviet Union (aren’t you a member of that party, Owen?).
I have been working too much overtime to do much but try and keep up, but this has been a really good and fruitful dialogue.
Thanks.
I am a member of CPUSA for family reasons (long, long story). CPUSA is currently tiny, ideologically fragmented (there are local Clubs who are not in good standing with national leadership, and some that are, and some that don’t bother to ever contact the national leadership), and a mess. My local club does a lot of very good work locally – working with the homeless, with a local organization that fights battles for workers whose bosses have stolen their wages (almost always involving hispanic workers), and in local City Council elections wherein we worked hard to get the first real leftist elected to city council in over a generation. Locally, we are probably the best organized and most effective socialist group in town. As any of the other members of my club will be quick to attest, my views on socialism as well as current political strategies (particularly with regard to Obama) are not in keeping with the current national leadership of CPUSA.
I am also loosely associated with the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, and I am a dues paying member of the IWW. I find that I am comfortable in most radical leftist settings. I lean more old left, and find myself most comfortable therein (in part because of family history) but I recognize the vital contributions the new left has made in its critique of failed leftist projects of the 20th century. In my life this oddly works out with me hanging out mostly with either Soviet loving CP types on the one hand and anarcho-syndicalists and libcoms on the other. I don’t spend time with Trots as they generally drive me nuts and my father would kill me if I ever became a Trot.
Ochlophobist,
As Dan noted, I can’t directly post on any blog using wordpress, so my responses to you
will be a bit disconnected. I don’t want to overburden Dan with posting these and it’s
also more difficult to respond when I can’t do it directly on the C&T blog.
As so often happens, or so it appears to me, on these blog disputes, even when they are
conducted, as this one is, with some charity and clarity, one often loses sight of the original
point at issue. And the long posts here on all sides have certainly raised quite a number
of points. So I’ll restrict myself to just a few.
1. If I understand you corrrectly, you’re claiming all or most of the justice that’s accrued
to workers came about from the radical left, but if any of those whom we might reasonably consider
on the radical left turn out to be not so good fellows – such as the Soviets – you conveniently
define them as not genuine radical leftists. And you do something similar with the recent socialist government in Spain – since they embraced capitalist finance economics, they weren’t really
socialists. If any socialist movement commits gross violence or ends up embracing capitalist economics thereby ceases to be socialist, that is very convenient for you.
2. Looking only at the U.S., since I can’t say that much about most other countries,
what were the forces which concretely brought most benefit to workers? Unions to be
sure, but also activitism on the part of governments, usually the federal since the Supreme
Court struck down most state legislation until the late 30s. But what intellectual forces
were behind, or at least supportive of, this governmental activism. Quite a wide variety
including the Catholic Church and important Protestants, moderate liberals, radical
leftists, etc. I think one could argue that the real radical leftists accomplished little, or
at least that their accomplishments would have come to little without a broad band of
support from others. The broad intellectual and social forces from the populists of the 1880s and
the Knights of Labor to the CIO were hardly all socialists, and there was significant Catholic
support for many of them. Philip Murray of the CIO, who took Quadragesimo Anno seriously and wanted to work toward true industrial democracy didn’t get much support from other unionists,
but his motivation was the social encyclicals. He was too radical for the CIO in the 1940s.
3. I entirely agree with you that a worker in Spain in 1936 might with a good conscience
have thought it was better to support the Republic even if it was attacking, or coniving at attacks
on the Church. No argument with you there. Good and evil are pretty mixed up both in
social movements and in individuals. I imagine God saw very clearly that many fighting
for the Republic saw themselves as fighting for justice, and to some extent they were. But
just as we can’t give Franco’s side a pass by saying they were fighting for Christ the King
and that’s that, so I don’t think we can simply say the Republicans were fighting for justice
and that’s that. It’s very complex and certainly differed from individual to individual and
from place to place, regiment to regiment.
4. Private property. “What is property as it currently functions?” you ask. But by
adding “as it currently functions” are you admitting that private property in itself is
not an evil? As Christopher pointed out, the liberal notion of private property is not the
Catholic notion.
5. When you were talking about the status of serfs and peasants in the Middle Ages I
noticed a curious intermixing of political and economic injustices with remarks about disease
and diet. That reminded me of the kind of argument people like Thomas Woods make,
lauding the capitalist order for its supposed improvement in technology and hygiene.
Let this suffice at least for the time being.
1) This is a straw man, and desperate grasping for an argument. You will also note that I am (as any Marxist following Marx is) willing to view capitalism (in its initial forms), as better than the feudal economic systems which predated it. There is nothing all bad and all good out there – the social phenomena we are talking about here are good and bad relative to other social phenomena, and rarely entirely all good or all bad. I do not say that the Soviets or the Chinese (initially) were not socialists, I state that there views are not in keeping with the majority of radical leftists and socialists in the West. I don’t think the Fidel regime is a model which most socialists in the West would laud as one worthy of replication given the choice, but I also note Cuban accomplishments. I also in this thread note that the majority of the Russian population was better off in 1975 than the majority of the Russian population was in 1875. I deal in complexities, you are looking for simplistic measures by which to dismiss me.
When capitalism was beginning to form, it began in fits and starts and backsteps and with a whole lot of internal ambiguity and dissolution, lacking the systemic organizational coherence, as well as the ideological constructs it now has. There is no reason why it is incoherent to view that this is the norm with the introduction of any socio-economic system. We see no different with the introduction of socialism in the early 20th century, and the introduction of capitalism did not meet the intensely violent opposition socialism did. Socialist leaders from Russia onward had to be the sort of people who could win brutal fights to gain power in an industrial age which had the technology to kill millions, and with populations which Marx himself said were not ready for socialism. When they weren’t they were killed pretty quickly, ala Allende.
2) This, again, is a simplistic take on the matter that appeals to a diversity which is only superficial. I am on the editorial board of a publishing company which publishes labor history, I read a great deal of labor history, and while my assertions here may be “popular” in style and simplified for the sake of a blog thread I know of no labor historian, including Catholic ones, who would dissent from my portrayal of radical leftists as the singular drive behind labor gains in the 20th century, and the one indispensable category of activist in American/European labor history. Please read the histories of radical labor I provide above, or any serious history of labor in the U.S. The majority of the leadership of the Knights of Labor and the CIO were radical during the times they were fighting their most critical battles – the battles between those who were and those who weren’t are famous, and those who weren’t radical had to fight for certain radical goals until the deradicalization process began. By the 1940s the deradicalization processes I mention in outline above in the thread were long underway in the CIO. Yes, govt and deradicalized unions “accomplished” many things – but along the lines I very clearly outline above which you do not at all respond to. Legalization and formal enfranchisement concessions came at the expense of forced deradicalization, and unions when franchised were by design created to be relatively undemocratic organizations and ones which collaborated with industry against broad working class gains in the long run. The Fitch book mentioned about provides amazing archival data in this regard. I have not read one critic of that book dispute the facts he presents. Had Catholic labor activists never existed in the United States the trajectory of the labor movement would have gone pretty much exactly as it did (though not without working class Catholics – let’s face it – most Catholics involved in strikes and direct actions from the 1870s through the 1930s were not particularly concerned with or guided by CST, and Catholic working class populations were often quite amenable to anarchism and socialism in that period, which makes sense considering the popularity of anarchism and socialism in Italy and Ireland during that same time). I’m sure it is really comforting to view members of the RCC who were seriously informed by CST as being guiding participants in labor gains, but that is a case of faith forcing a reading of history which is not just implausible, but manifestly incorrect to anyone who has studied American labor history with his or her eyes open.
3) A very simple distinction can be made between individual Republicans, who might have been fighting for any number of reasons, just or unjust, and the Republican cause, which was just. Those who faught with Franco were fighting against justice. They may have been seriously misinformed (no doubt many were), but when speaking of the causes, the overall goals and structure of the sides at hand, if one cannot state that the Republican cause was just and Franco’s was perverse there is really no discussion to be had here. I have been in discussions with more than one distributist who was a little slow to denounce the cause of Franco, and here we might comment on how cozy ChesterBelloc sometimes were with fascisms which suited their Catholic romanticism.
4). I deal with what you suggest already. Private property can only be addressed as it has existed in time or place, or with regard to specific policy changes being proposed. Any changes in “private property” are either going to be mitigations of the power to use the property as the owner wills, or restrictions on that power. Create enough restrictions, and you don’t have private property in any meaningful sense, you just have the phrase. Point out all you want that your set of restrictions manifests a whole different situation than a Lockean approach to property, and that property use must be in keeping with communitarian principles, but your desire to distinguish yourself from Locke is only important to the choir you are preaching to, it matters not at all to anyone else or with regard to actual positive policy on property use. It might even be said to be ironic when considering how a Catholic defense of CST was used in Spain, in Argentina, in Chile, etc., where those advancing CST on property rights were brutal right wing fanatics bringing down democratically elected govts trying to modestly expropriate some properties.
A socialist believes that no person should have power over property that is able to harm or coerce the community at large, and we are thus honest in stating this means we are against private property in the modern Western use of that phrase. You can dream up some other use of that phrase, but at a certain point one veers into epistemological anarchy. I guess I could say that I support a capitalism that doesn’t have capital, doesn’t have private property, and has economic democracy. But it is just more honest and epistemologically coherent to assert that I don’t support capitalism. Most socialists don’t have a problem with people owning garden plots – people who can call the police when someone else trespasses upon said garden plots. Many socialists don’t have a problem with people owning homes (though most of that sort, like me, would redistribute residences along some sort of regulatory mechanism – regulating when properties can be inherited, though allowing it under certain criteria), or owning cars, or owning computers and surfboards and the like which are legally protected as the property of an individual. As I state clearly above – the “property” in private property – for Marxists and socialists and most anarcho-syndicalists and some anarchists refers to those means of production and means of provision of services that have an effect upon the community at large that is substantial enough to merit economic democratic regulation. Thus, as in Cuba, I have no problem with a guy owning a hot dog stand, so long as he has to get a permit (like he does here in the states), and doesn’t harm the economic activity of the community at large. I have no problem with a small family farm that does not employ full time workers outside of the family that owns it, so long as it doesn’t become large enough to greatly effect the livelihoods of any significant portion of the community around it and its occasional (temporary) part time employees from outside the family are treated in accordance with regulations which protect workers’ rights. Someone could say that therefore I do believe in private property but as I’ve made very clear what I mean by private property, and as anyone who has read any basic texts of socialism ought to know those distinctions already, I feel no need to run a history of the conception of property in modernity course here. The RCC’s view of private property is different from that of socialists and the radical left generally because the RCC asserts that the forced expropriation of properties and the forced (whether violent or non-violent) redistribution of that means of production/services to workers is prohibited. Yes, property owners can be taxed and some of their wealth redistributed in a CST schema. Yes, workers can form unions. But workers do not have the right in CST to rise up and expropriate the property of capitalists, even non-violently, and this is heinous.
5. I consistently made the distinction between social relations, social coercive factors, social constructs, on the one hand and technology on the other when talking about medieval peasants and the like. I noted that even when factoring in technology difference, modern persons would find the social changes abhorrent. Even when considering the technology available in medieval medicine, we can note that the hospitals in the papal states did not devote anything akin to the resources (in terms of % of GDP, or % of treasury resources, or % of tax incomes, or even taking into account philanthropic obligations of certain offices and landholdings in addition to funds of the pope and other nobles) that modern states with decent health care devote to health care costs, thus speaking as if there were medieval “values” regarding public health that are in any way analogous to modern ones is incorrect.
Of course I remind you of Thomas Woods. Your niche ideological position within RCism requires that a socialist, any socialist, be cast as a paint by numbers ideologue who is incapable of approaching nuance and complexity in social phenomenon. When I have some indication that you have even a cursory knowledge of socialist or radical leftist thought and history, I will take your slights seriously.
A bit popular in style, but perhaps of interest:
http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/jesus-pernicious-roots-private-property/
A bit, my ass. I too have a copy of On Farting, given as a gift long ago.
Thanks for posting this. It was interesting to read. However, I think it wrong to suggest that the Fathers were wrong to see in Jesus’ call to “sell all you have” a counsel rather than a precept. We do hear Jesus time and again bid people, like the rich young ruler, to “sell all that you have and distribute to the poor” (Luke 18:22); yet, it is important to see this call in terms of what he then adds, “and come follow me.” It is this following of Christ that is the term and very reason for the poverty Jesus enjoins.
That property divestment is not a universal precept of the Kingdom God is evident from other passages. Jesus, for instance dissuaded the Gerasene demoniac whom he had healed from joining him and instead told him to “go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you” (Mark 5:18-19) Here Jesus countenances a different way of following him — a way different from that to which he called the rich young ruler. And Jesus did not condemn the tax collector Zacchaeus for giving up only half rather than all of his possessions to the poor (and recompensing those whom he had defrauded). Far from condemning Zacchaeus, Jesus praised him — “Today salvation has come to this house,” he said (Luke 19:1-10). One might add, too, the example of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, who were householders and did not divest themselves of all they had.
As for the communism of the Church in Acts, it does not seem it was seen as required. In the story of Ananias and Sapphira, Peter says: “Anani’as, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” The section, “while it remained unsold…not at your disposal?” I think suggests that Ananias could have without blame kept his property. His sin for which he died was fraud and deceit.
I don’t disagree with any of your points Christopher, though I think we could say that the Gerasene demoniac’s home may not have been his property. With regard to Zacchaeus – according to NT scholar Richard Horsley, in Jesus and the Spiral of Violence pgs 212-17, most of the tax collectors “who did the actual work were impoverished, or were slaves employed by a ‘tax agency,’ and quickly dismissed if problems arose.” They were a step above those they made destitute through taxation. But you point there still stands.
Boer, who wrote that piece, likes to push the envelope a bit. It seems to me that Christian communist traditions have actually had more of an anarchist approach to property than a Marxist one – they tend to really believe that every little thing must be held in common, which I and most Marxists tend to think is ridiculous, at least if taken as a universal rule
I do agree with Boer, however, that the insistence that x, y, and z, passages concerning property/money are just “evangelical counsels” tends to feed right into modern capitalist notions of property rights and the hyper individualism that corresponds with it. It is clear throughout the NT that the expectation across the board is that gratuitous income/assets do not properly belong to the individual, and in Acts the dispersion of those assets are communally and not individually decided (though one can make a sound argument that such a situation was not meant to be universal).
I don’t mean to suggest that I think the NT is a proto-Marxist document. Though I don’t believe Marxism or radical leftist thought on the whole could have come into existence without it, and I believe that Marxist and radical leftist thought (at least radical leftist thought concerning economic matters, and, to a lesser extent, the treatment of women) follow coherently from a trajectory which is set in the NT. I do not believe modern libertarian and movement conservative thought has any place in that trajectory, and I see it as a complete deviation from the historical processes which began in the Christian revolution of culture and anthropology.
Owen, thanks for your comments. My point about the Gerasene erstwhile demoniac was that Jesus did not call him to the same sort of following as the rich young ruler. It seems that Jesus asked to return to a moral normal life, which could include the possession of property.
As for evangelical counsels, I think it wrong for one to assume, as many Catholics do, that since one is not called to the sacrifice of property that he is thereby given leave to see property as merely ordered to his own good. Rather, as the Fathers say, those who have an abundance of goods have to see themselves as holding them as stewards for the poor. To quote St. John Chrysostom:
“To deprive is to take what belongs to another; for it is called deprivation when we take and keep what belongs to others. By this we are taught that when we do not show mercy, we will be punished just like those who steal … [T]he rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his need requires, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants.”
The language of “evangelical counsels” has, sadly, been used to justify all manner of hoarding and extravagance. This misuse has stopped up the springs of charity and blunted the sense of justice. We are counseled to remain celibate and to sell all we have and give it to the poor. We are commanded to use our goods as belonging not only to ourselves but to those in need.
This is not a comment from Thomas Storck. This is Maclin Horton trying to figure out why Thomas can’t post a comment here.
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