A Catholic Leftism?

To that end, this piece on social justice in the teachings of Pope Pius XI puts the issue elegantly:

In other words, there is a role for state action in helping to establish, and especially in securing and protecting, the institutions and organizations of social justice, by enacting, for example, legal safeguards for their proper functioning and, when necessary, enforcing their decrees by civil law.  Even earlier, in Casti Connubii, Pius had taught the same thing, “that in the State such economic and social methods should be adopted as will enable every head of a family to earn as much as, according to his station in life, is necessary for himself, his wife and for the rearing of his children….” Thus, in addition to what they can do by their own efforts, such groups of employers would usually need to work for legal changes as well, and would properly coordinate their own activity with that of other interested parties, such as organized labor.

The most important thing to learn from Pius XI’s exposition of social justice is that it concerns reforming or establishing the institutions of society so that it becomes possible, or easier, for the individual members of society to fulfill their duties of justice and charity to one another. For this task, group action is necessary. Pius XI’s discussion of social justice concerned primarily its application to the economic realm, but in truth the basic principles he explains could be employed in other areas of social life. Our duties in this regard will be suggested by our position in society. If one is an employer, normally one of his primary duties will be to work toward a just economic order, for by participating in the economy as an employer, he has taken upon himself a grave responsibility for paying just wages. If he literally cannot do so in present circumstances, we have seen that he has a duty to work toward a different kind of economic order, not just to shrug his shoulders and say he is doing the best he can, or worse, to justify his conduct by an appeal to economic ideas that are not in accord with authoritative Catholic teaching.

There are, of course, other more individualized forms of justice. If you read the article, you’ll see that they have their own role to play, but that they cannot be used to defer responsibility when it comes to issues of systemic or structural injustice.

Understanding this, even obliquely, led me to take writers like Marx more seriously. I did not (and here is a complicated term) become a “Marxist,” but I began to recognize that we human beings are confronted by circumstances that are, at first glance, far beyond our understanding. This is what our social analysis must do; it must take seriously the ways in which we are historical beings and in which Catholics must apply the unchanging truths of our religion in varied historical circumstances. We are embodied, temporal beings:

The Church’s exposition of social justice reached a high degree of clarity in the writings of Pius XI. But nothing since then suggests that the mind of the Church has altered, or that Pope Pius’s teaching applied only to his own time. As Pope Benedict XVI, in his own social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, reminded us: “It is not a case of two typologies of social doctrine, one pre-conciliar and one post-conciliar, differing from one another:  on the contrary, there is a single teaching consistent and, at the same time, ever new.”

The basic principles of social doctrine do not change, even if the external circumstances to which they must be applied can, of course, change. But it never comes about that a fundamental teaching of one pope is, or can be, overturned by his successor. Thus Pius XI appropriately characterizes the Church’s teaching in this area as “unchanging and unchangeable.”

To link this to the “political Left,” here is the Marxian economist Henryk Grossman on Marx’ philosophy:

The task of all science is the exploration and understanding of the concretely given totality of phenomena, of their interconnections and their mutations. The difficulty of this task is that phenomena are not immediately identical with the essence of things. The exploration of the essence constitutes a precondition for understanding the world of appearances. Marx, in opposition to vulgar economics, seeks to identify the “hidden essence” and the “inner connection” of economic reality; this is not to say that he is not interested in concrete appearances. On the contrary! Only appearances present themselves to consciousness, which means that – purely methodologically – their hidden, essential “core” can only be accessed through the analysis of appearances.

But the concrete appearances are important to Marx not only because they are the starting point and the medium for understanding the “real movement.” They are, rather, the very objects that Marx ultimately wants to identify and understand in their interconnection. By no means does he simply want to restrict himself to the exploration of the “essence” while ignoring the phenomena. In fact, the essence, once identified, has the function of enabling us to comprehend concrete appearances.

I do not mean to over-simplify. The “Left” is a complex beast that includes post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault. Fittingly, though, I think there is a reason such thinkers are somewhat popular in certain “conservative” circles: they came to challenge structural approaches in a way that, in ways too varied to spell out here, gel well with conservative positions. There’s a reason Foucault has been called a neoliberal.

What I do mean to say here is that “the Left” needn’t be scary to Catholics; in fact, its attempt to develop rigorously-structural analyses of immensely-complex historical circumstances that condition (and are conditioned by—this is just Plato and Aristotle, folks) human agents ought to intrigue us. It’s not enough for Catholics to throw up their hands and say “conditions are such that I cannot pay my workers enough”; it’s not enough for us to balk at the idea that reform is a possibility—the eschaton is not upon us yet; there is still time for change. Change needn’t be utopian: it may be reformist, revolutionary, even incredibly gradual, but, at minimum, we are required to think socially, to think in ways that commit each of us to justice by worrying about justice for each.