The Case for Christian Socialism: Both the Capitalists and the Liberation Theologians Are Wrong

Somewhere in a magazine (could it have been Crisis?) I read a piece by a young man who used to be a devout Catholic. He left the Church, however, because he found himself becoming “increasingly angry about what [he] heard coming from the pulpit.” What he heard was too many sermons about “the homeless, nuclear war, Central America and South Africa, banalities on how we must learn to love each other.” He continued, “The Bible has rarely been taught at the Catholic masses I attended…. Passages are read at the beginning. But little is done to give these passages meaning in the lives of individuals.” Later in the piece the young man quotes a Bible passage that he wishes priests would give meaning to, from Matthew 25: “He will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…. Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you who are accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ”

I identify with this complaint. Time was when the fear of hell was greatly overdone. “Perfect love casteth out fear” and even imperfect love is usually a better source of motivation than fear. But we have gone too far in the opposite direction. Like spoiled children we have come to believe, sometimes with the encouragement of priests, that God is too nice to punish anybody really, no matter how foul our iniquities. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” What is strange about the young man’s quote from Matthew 25, however, is that he fails to include that part of the passage that details precisely why the Lord has condemned the wicked and sent them into hell. That’s the most important part. Why has the young man left it out? A fascinating question. This is it:

“For I was hungry and you did not give me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take me in; naked, and you did not clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer and say, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” Then He will answer them, saying, “Amen I say to you, as long as you did not do it for one of these least ones, you did not do it for me.” And these will go into everlasting punishment, but the just into everlasting life.

The just, of course, are the ones who did it.

Think about that, young man, the next time you hear some “banality” about how we must learn to love each other and how that love might demand that we do something significant about the homeless, about the threat of nuclear destruction, about the oppression of blacks in South Africa, about the killing of innocent people in Central America.

What has all this got to do with the case for Christian socialism? Just about everything, for Matthew 25 is the surest foundation for such a case. A wise priest once said, “To feed the hungry is a simple imperative, but it is not a simple undertaking.” It is not even simple these days to find a hungry person to feed, just in the course of your ordinary rounds. But there are millions out there just the same, in this country, and hundreds of millions beyond our national borders. Hungry for food, hungry for a decent home, hungry for a decent job that will make food and home possible for themselves and the families they have (or do not have because they can’t afford to have them), hungry for the self-respect that goes with providing these things for themselves without charity or welfare. How do we go about providing these things to satisfy these different kinds of hunger, for we are not so simple as to imagine that Jesus spoke only of providing a piece of bread or cup of water? How, in this complex world, do we arrange things so that Jesus will not one day say to us, “Depart from me, you who are accursed”?

There’s another saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s still too simple. Teaching a man how to fish with a hook and line isn’t going to feed him for a lifetime, not to mention clothe and shelter him, his wife, and his children. He needs more than a hook and line. He needs an expensive boat that can go to sea winter and summer, or a job on such a boat. He needs a society around him that will buy his fish and pay a fair price for it. The undertaking has now become far from simple. These are some of the considerations that might persuade a Christian to become a socialist, considerations that would spring naturally from his study of the scriptures—not just Matthew 25, but the Mosaic law: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19: 18) and “Love the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Dent. 10: 18) or Isaiah or Amos or Jeremiah or Sirach or Tobias, who said the same things in different words.

In the New Testament he might think seriously about the Good Samaritan, about Dives and Lazarus, about the camel and the needle’s eye, about the rich man who said to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years” and to whom God said, “Fool, this night your soul is required of you.” Or he might reflect on the Epistle of James (2: 14-17) or the First Epistle of John (3: 17-18). And then, if he really cares about what the Judeo-Christian-Catholic tradition has to tell us about these matters, he might read the Fathers and Doctors of the Church: Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Gregory summed it up nicely in these words: “When we furnish the destitute with any necessity we render them what is theirs, not bestow on them what is ours; we pay the debt of justice rather than perform the works of mercy.”

As with so many other Christian concepts it took the great Thomas Aquinas to formalize it most clearly and one of his commentators, Cardinal Tommaso Cajetan, to express it most succinctly: “Now what a ruler can do in virtue of his office, so that justice may be served in the matter of riches, is to take from someone who is unwilling to dispense from what is superfluous for life or state, and to distribute it to the poor… [for] as Basil said, it belongs to the indigent, at least as owed, if not in fact.” These are not the principles that you will find in that other Bible, the Bible of capitalism, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. What you will find there is a theology of selfishness, a blind faith in “the invisible hand” that has the awesome power to bring public good out of private greed. Nor will you find such principles in the Fathers and Doctors of capitalism, men such as Jean Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Herbert Spencer who, in one way or another, buttressed the heresies of Smith with heresies and errors of their own. For example, Say’s Law held that “out of the production of goods came an effective (that is to say, actually expended) aggregate of demand sufficient to purchase the total supply of goods.” This incentive for not being concerned with justice for workers and the poor was not exploded until the Great Depression and still today many cling to it.

Malthus taught that anything done to help the poor would only encourage overpopulation, since population increases by geometrical progression whereas the means of subsistence increases only by arithmetical progression. Of course Malthus never had the chance to meet Frances Moore Lappe or other modern experts on food production.

Ricardo’s Iron Law of Wages was almost equally damaging. He concluded from it that “like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.” Or trade unions. He did not live to see exactly how unfair and unfree “the competition of the market” could become.

And then there was Herbert Spencer who, building on the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, coined the phrase, “the survival of the fittest.” He told anyone who would listen that by these laws “nature secures the growth of a race that shall both understand the conditions of existence and be able to act upon them” and further that “it is impossible to any degree to suspend this discipline.” There was no lack of people who would listen to such notions, especially among the captains and kings of capitalism, for here was the ultimate justification for selfishness. They are still listening. All these heresies and errors still endure.

Over the long years the social teachings of Moses, Jesus, the Church Fathers, and Thomas Aquinas faded, especially as faith in Christianity grew weak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, succumbed to the blandishments of power and the marriages of Altar and Throne. In particular, the popes of the nineteenth century, especially Gregory XVI and Pius IX, became so distracted by the struggle to hold onto the papal states that they turned a deaf ear to the cries of the poor and left the field free to Karl Marx and his disciples, chief of whom was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin.

Meanwhile capitalism went on from strength to strength. The campaign by Adam Smith et al. had some help from both Catholic theologians such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and from Protestant theologians such as Calvin and Luther. Perhaps the most corrosive idea was Calvin’s notion of predestination, which held that the way to tell who was predestined by God to be saved was to note who was materially and financially blessed in this life.

Self-interest can be a powerful motivator, and not all of that motivation is bad. There is a legitimate role for self-interest. And the fortunate folks of the northern hemisphere, with their salubrious climate, natural resources, and the peculiar combination of Christianity and laissez-faire, were able to perform marvels of production that made many people better off than they had been before and few people very, very rich, and a good many very, very poor.

The richest ones tend to live in the United States, which remains the most quintessentially capitalist country in the world. The New York Times for April 21, 1988, reveals one reason why. An analysis of the 1987 income of Lee Iacocca, chairman of the Chrysler Corporation, who some people think should be president of the United States, reveals that he paid himself $18 million in salary and bonuses, not to mention income from stocks and bonds. This works out, roughly, to $8,608 per hour or 618 times as much as a typical assembly line worker, who makes about $14 per hour. Contrast this with the ratio of Japanese top executives’ salaries to those of their auto workers. That ratio runs somewhere between six and eight to one, about 100 times less greedy than Mr. Iacocca.

Consider a few more quintessentially capitalistic facts about our American auto industry and their economic and ethical consequences. Ford reported a record profit of $1.5 billion last year. General Motors and Chrysler also reported immense profits. This contrasts with the losses suffered in the early 1980s when foreign imports, and especially those Japanese Toyotas and Hondas, were cutting into the Big Three’s domination of the American market, partly, of course, because the Japanese executives were foregoing high salaries and bonuses in favor of lower prices. (Secondarily, because our inventive brains were busy making bombs and other homicidal gadgets while theirs were busy making better cars.)

At one time General Motors commanded over 50 percent of the American market. Now it is down to 37 percent, but current profits would make it possible to cut prices and regain some of that lost percentage from the Japanese and Europeans. Ditto for Ford and Chrysler, which are also now in a position to regain their lost market share by cutting prices and thereby to begin rehiring the thousands of workers laid off. Are they going to do it? No, they are not. They have no intention of sacrificing profits on current prices for greater sales and the restoration of jobs. They are resigned to their defeat by foreign imports. Profits win out over people once again. Matthew 25 is the last thing on their minds.

And speaking of plant closings and lay-offs, what do we find by way of solid Christian policy in the White House? Ronald Reagan, assuming his customary air of stubborn rectitude, vows that he will veto a trade bill that his country and the whole world needs because it contains a clause to give workers 60 days notice of a plant closing that will put them out on the street and free them to take some nice “new job” at a fast-food joint for perhaps one-third the pay. Or sit home and collect unemployment insurance. Quintessential capitalism.

Christian socialism differs radically from this kind of capitalism, the kind that we know here in the USA, the only Western industrial nation that has no comprehensive health plan, that has no family allowances (the practice of paying additional money to families that have children), and that has, coincidentally, no significant socialist movement.

Another curious coincidence: some of the top auto executives in Japan started their adult lives as Marxists. Could there be a connection between that fact and their more reasonable salary ratios, their reluctance to sacrifice low prices for profits, their reluctance to lay off workers, their reluctance to close plants and move them to places where labor is cheaper and governments more obliging?

Don’t get me wrong. I make no plea for Marxian socialism. Nor do I make a plea for the Christian socialism that is preferred by the liberation theologians of Latin America, precisely because it is mixed with far too much Marxism, and even some Leninism. I would suggest that the major errors are three:

(1) The notion, expressed in the writings of Gustavo Guttierrez and Juan Luis Segundo, that private ownership of the means of production should be eliminated, and workers, peasants, and farmers left to the mercies of total nationalization and deprived of the right to own their own enterprises or work their own land, even as part of a cooperative. (A cooperative, though a form of socialized property, is nonetheless private property.)

But, you interject, “Whoa there, this isn’t socialism!” You’re wrong. This is precisely how socialism started in the early nineteenth century, before Marx got his collectivist teeth into it. This is what the Christian socialists such as John Ludlow, Philippe Buchez, and Archbishop Ketteler meant by socialism, what even secular socialists like Robert Owen, Louis Blanc, and Ferdinand Lassalle meant by socialism. And this is precisely how post-Marxian socialism is evolving in the modern era.

Proof: The Socialist International, a federation of non-communist socialist parties, has since 1951 operated under a charter known as the Frankfurt Declaration, which not only defends the legitimacy of “private ownership in… agriculture, handicraft, retail trade, and small and middle-sized industries” but also proposes the wide use of consumer and producer cooperatives. The Declaration also calls for the maximum decentralization of economic power consistent with “the aims of planning,” and the maximum participation of workers in “the direction of their industry.” And although they do not use the term “socialism” and would put a lesser emphasis on public ownership, this is how the U.S. Catholic Bishops tend to describe a Christian economy in their recent pastoral.

(2) A second false Marxist notion, embraced by liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez and Enrique Dussel, is the idea that the employer-employee (wage) relationship is of its nature and of necessity evil, enslaving, and alienating. Since power tends to corrupt, the cooperative relationship is better than the employer-employee relationship, but even cooperative workers must be paid wages and work under bosses. Public employers, as in the Marxist vision, can be even more oppressive than private. Nevertheless, some public ownership is necessary, as popes and bishops have acknowledged.

(3) Liberation theologians, apparently incapable of distinguishing between the policies of Ronald Reagan and democratic government, and impatient with the failures of democratic reform in Latin America, have been ambiguous about the Marxist nonsense enshrined in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Socialist International, however, is not ambiguous on this score. The Declaration again: “Without freedom there can be no Socialism. Socialism can be achieved only through democracy.” And to make sure you understand that democracy cannot be reconciled with any kind of dictatorship, as in “democratic centralism,” it adds, “Every dictatorship… is a danger to the freedom of all nations and thereby to the peace of the world.” Still, we must give some credit to Marx, whether it be in the subconscious reactions of Japanese auto executives or in the influence, both in the East and the West, of socialist and communist parties that have, in whole or in part, been led by one kind of Marxist or another. I speak in particular of their effect on the most essential attributes of a Christian economy, the extent to which that economy reflects the commandments of our Lord in Matthew 25 for the modern era: namely, the right to a job, the right to a home, the right to health services, the right to an education proportionate to each person’s potential.

Let us take one more comparison of U.S. capitalism with four other countries: Sweden and West Germany under socialist governments at the time, France and Japan under non-socialist, capitalist governments that, willy-nilly, showed the effect of socialist influence in their economic policies. Let us take the most essential of these essential rights, the right to a job, in the period of 17 years between 1959 and 1976. This is a fair period of comparison, before OPEC and our own profit-skewed economy brought on a period of acute inflation that the Federal Reserve, in quintessentially capitalist style, countered by raising interest rates, which in turn created unemployment and, as in the 1930s, by reason of our powerful influence on their economies, created similar unemployment in the nations of Western Europe.

In this period U.S. unemployment averaged out, officially, at 5.3 percent, just about what it is today. Unofficially, if we count those who can only find part-time work and those who have given up trying, it is closer to 12 or 15 percent. With dependents that translates into 30 or 40 million people. In the same period unemployment in France averaged 2.5 percent, in Sweden 1.9 percent, in Japan 1.4 percent, and in West Germany 1.2 percent. These are percentages that the U.S. economy has only approached in wartime.

How, then, should “socialism” be defined? The first person to use the word “socialism” was a French Protestant divine, Alexandre Vinet, in 1831, and he defined it as “the opposite of individualism,” by which he meant egotism or selfishness. Appropriately enough, one of the more recent definitions, as reported by Michael Novak from memory, is that of Cardinal Paolo Arns of Brazil, who said, “One thing is clear… we must reject capitalism, which is based on selfishness. We believe in the right of workers to own their own land and to keep their profits for themselves, and therefore we incline toward socialism.” (Note the Cardinal’s disagreement with those liberation theologians who favor “the elimination of private ownership of the means of production.”)

Another good definition: “Socialism is the extension of democratic process from the political to the economic sphere.” My own preferred definition of what I mean by socialism is this: “A vision of a pluralist society in which the advantages of competition, a free market, and political democracy are reconciled with the maximum socialization of production (preferably in cooperatives) and the demands of justice, full employment, and the realization of that minimum of worldly goods for all that Thomas Aquinas told us is necessary for a life of virtue.” Perfect attainment of that vision is unlikely, but more of the spirit of Jesus Christ and less of the spirit of Adam Smith will certainly get us a lot closer to it than we are now.

Author

  • John C. Cort

    John C. Cort (1913–2006), was a longtime Christian socialist writer and activist. He was the co-chair of the Religion and Socialism Commission of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was based in metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts.

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