Why the pope is no marxist

‘So what of it if your pope is called a ‘Marxist’? It might be inaccurate, but both seem to rightly criticise the alienating factor of capitalism and the culture of greed it spawns.” This is how my non-Catholic friend from New York responded after he read my last column in The Southern Cross about “the Catholic vote”. The following paragraphs are my summary of his e-mail.

Factory workers assemble a car. Although the theories of Karl Marx coincide in some ways with the vision of the Church, there are very clear differences. (Photo: Rebecca Cook, Reuters/CNS)

Regardless of whatever else the Catholic Church has done, it has always been strongly against the commodification of lives and mindless culture of hedonism, and resultant steady haemorrhaging of human values.

As such it is hard to find an intelligent critique of capitalism that is not indebted to Marxism. This does not mean Karl Marx invented Marxism in that sense. Indeed, Marx’s critique of capitalism is rigorous and comprehensive, but plenty of anarchists, libertarian socialists and liberals — such as Hegel, Voltaire, Rousseau, and so on — had got there before him.

The Catholic Church has voiced similar concerns as well, more strongly since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1892.

St Thomas Aquinas, naturalist and fair-minded as he was, probably would be more comfortable with a socialist economic system (obviously, I might add, without the anti-clericalism that often, but not invariably, accompanies it) than a capitalist one.

Marx didn’t even invent socialism or communism; that is of ancient provenance. Even the idea of a revolutionary party emerged from the French Revolution, not from Marx.

Marx could be called a prophet, in a sense of denouncing injustice and invoking the fires of the revolution to punish and reform the evil of the capitalist system. Isn’t this what the Catholic Church teaches its laity and religious to be?

So, that’s what my friend in the US wrote. I take a different perspective.

Writing in his communist Manifesto, Marx famously declared that “the history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles”. The Catholic Church does not subscribe to this grand narrative, basing its own on the Judeo-Christian history of religion. Scientists, feminists and others also have a problem with Marx’s grand narrative.

Without denying a correlation between the forces of production and class relations, the Catholic Church refuses to lock the two into feeding Marx’s historical scenario.

The Church agrees that there’s a great damage that can exist in the gap between excessive material wealth and moral health, but she refuses to see the material and spiritual as being in permanently irreconcilable conflict (the camel’s eye parable).

The Church does not see why, as Marx says, the productive forces should always triumph over social relations. She puts more faith in changing the heart of man, including businessman, to determine better conditions for providing material wealth that benefits all. Marx places his trust in the violent upheaval of democratic revolution.

The Catholic Church’s social teachings also acknowledge, contra Marx, that free market capitalism will not invariably be replaced by socialism.

It might be succeeded by fascism — the African kind with its notions of nationalisation, or the national-socialism of the Third Reich.

Or it might morph into a monopoly capitalism which dumps market losses onto the taxpayer while the wolves of Wall Street greedily take all the profits — as we saw in the trillion-dollar bailouts in the United States after 2008.

Or it might be the ruthless state capitalism of the People’s Republic of China which disregards basic human rights. Or, as in Syria, it might be the anarchy of contending forces which create a state of tragic stalemate, one that delivers Marx’s “common ruination” of all.

The Church’s institutional memory is older than Marxism. She knows that if you attempt to build socialism in wretched economic conditions, you’ll end up not with an utopian system of equality, but with some species of Stalinism.

To be fair, Marx also knew that. This is why he accepted the need for a maturing capitalism that’ll implode from internal contradiction to deliver socialism.

He treated capitalism in the same manner as Catholics see the necessity of evil in God’s plan for humanity. He sought to use capitalism’s evil (the drive of self-interest, ruthless competition, need for ceaseless expansion, and the ineluctable suffering it produces for the majority) to arrive at a better society.

The Church is also not convinced about the good in the “dictatorship of the working class”, or any dictatorship for that matter.

In our era we see a growing good practice of what is termed business with a social conscience. Wealthy people, such as Patrice Motsepe (who, incidentally, is a Catholic), use their wealth towards the greater good for all.

Marx would probably have a problem with that, since it delays the “natural laws of capitalism…working with iron necessity towards inevitable results” of its collapse.

On the other hand, Pope Francis and the Catholic Church are aiming at business with a social conscience. The Church wants to see a more egalitarian kind of capitalism, one that does not dehumanise the workers but instead uses profits to lift and benefit the majority, and thereby promotes human harmony.

Both Catholicism and Marxism want to get to the point of utopia, one where human labour is used for creative spiritual purposes. They differ on how to get there and, of course, to what purpose.

For the Church, the purpose is the greater glory of God. Marx never really revealed his purpose, except he thought to indulge what he called our endemic nature of indolence.