Socialism: A Leonine Critique
Thought
experiment: Imagine you’re in middle-to-late 19th-century England. New
opportunities arise for you, as an able-bodied adult, when it comes to making
money. Instead of remaining in your rural village to farm, you decided to give
the factory a shot. But once you step into the city, problems with this new
industrial system immediately make themselves evident: harsh working
conditions, inhumane treatment of workers, unreasonably low wages, and even
child labor. You know you want such a system to change. Deep inside, it is
obvious that there are blatant violations of man’s rights in such
circumstances. The question is: What is the right solution?
This is the historical situation that
moved Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to publish in 1848 The Communist Manifesto. With Marx’s hegelian-inspired,
materialistic view of history as one big class struggle between the ruling
class/bourgeoisie and the working
class/proletariat as theoretical backdrop,[1]
the two saw that the best means toward renewing society’s mistreatment of
workers is nothing less than a revolution: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians (poor workers) have nothing to lose
but their chains. They have a world to win.”[2]
What is Socialism?
But if revolution is the means, what is communism’s
end? Marx couldn’t be more clear: “the theory of the Communists may be summed
up in the single sentence: abolition of
private property.”[3] In other
words, for communism, the solution to the so-called tyrannical control of
industry by the ruling class is to strip
them of the private ownership of the means of production of goods and
services so that they’d be communally
owned.[4]
The Communist Party of the Philippines, in their official constitution and
program, is also very explicit about this goal: “The private ownership of the means of production and
distribution by the big bourgeoisie and landlord class must be abolished.”[5]
This is so that there’d be no hierarchy of social classes, but only a classless society, a society which, in
the mind of the communists, would be promoting equality and fairness to its
citizens.
This politico-economic theory, which advocates for “taking away the source of capitalists’
power (which is) the private ownership of
property,”[6] is
otherwise known as socialism. To once
again quote the Communist Party of the Philippines, this is a socio-political
vision in which “(p)ublic
ownership of the means of production shall become dominant and state economic
planning will direct the development of a well-balanced socialist economy…
After the socialist transformation of industry and the entire economy, the Party shall ensure that there is no
retrogression into private ownership of the means of production.”[7] More precisely defined,
socialism “concerns
government ownership and control over basic[8]
means for the production and distribution of goods.”[9]
“Hold on a
minute,” you might ask, “I thought socialism advocates for the social/communal ownership of the sources
of goods and services; why is it now defined as government/state ownership of the same?” It’s simple, really: If,
for instance, the agricultural industry is to be owned by all (as was the
aspirations of socialist rulers like Stalin and Mao)[10] so
that all can be provided for, someone has
to be in charge to regulate it and see its proper distribution, which is none other than the state. So, at the
end of the day, communal ownership isn’t really communal in the strict sense
when it comes to socialism. It’s more of a state
control of a nation's economic sector; we can thus call a socialist economy
a command/planned economy.[11]
Now that we have
properly defined what socialism is, we now have to ask: Is this the right solution to the socio-economic ills not only during
Marx’s time, but ours as well?
Here Comes the Lion
The social conditions in
which Marx formulated his communist-socialist vision are also the same contexts
that Pope Leo XIII (d. 1903) wished to address in what is now considered the
“first social encyclical,”[12] Rerum Novarum[13] (English
translation: “new things”), published on May 15, 1891. Just like Marx, Pope Leo
saw many problems in the “new things” of the industrial revolution,
particularly regarding the circumstances in which workers find themselves.
Among other things, he saw “the
utter poverty of the masses,” “moral degeneracy,” “rapacious usury,” and the
“misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working
class.”[14]
But the
similarities between the two end there. Marx and Leo may have diagnosed the
same disease, but they have provided cures that can’t be more different. As a
matter of fact, the latter even went so far as to say that the socialist
solution to the industrial problem, which is “to do away with property,”[15]
is a cure worse than the disease:
“their (i.e. the socialists) contentions are so clearly powerless to end the
controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be
among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they
would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create
utter confusion in the community.”[16]
So, Pope Leo XIII
is explicit: socialism is a terrible solution to the problem. Why did he think
so? His position can be summed up into three reasons: Socialism is wrong because (1) it goes against the natural right to
private property, (2) it violates the principle of subsidiarity and the rights
of the family, and (3) it restricts personal freedom of initiative to take on
diverse interests and jobs, which will generate diverse and unequal outcomes
and wages.
Let’s take a look
at these two reasons and why, in my estimation, these reasons make a good case
against socialism.
Socialism vs Private Property
We’ve already
seen that socialism is against the private ownership of property. For the sake
of precision, however, it would be helpful if we can define exactly what it
means to own something. The
philosopher Edward Feser provides a helpful definition of ownership:
(T)o own something is essentially to possess a bundle of
rights over the thing. For example, suppose I own a certain pencil.What that involves is my
having the right to use the pencil whenever I want to, the right to lend it to
others if I so desire, the right not
to lend it to them if that’s what I prefer, the right to chew on it if I feel
anxious, the right to break it in half if I want to shorten it or simply as a
way to take out frustration, and so forth.To own the pencil is to have a bundle
of such rights, and to have such a bundle of rights over the pencil is to own
it.[17]
So,
to own something is to have a right to be able to dispose of it
in an autonomous fashion. Of course, you have the obvious moral and legal
limits to such an autonomous use/disuse, but overall, this sounds like a very
intuitive definition that all of us can agree upon. If I own something, I can
do with it whatever I like (within moral and legal limits, of course).
Common
sense also tells us that the right to own private property is a natural right, or a right that springs
forth from us simply by being human, not by some deliberate contractual
obligation or state imposition. Leo XIII says that, when it comes to said
right:
There is no need
to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the
formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.[18]
I have the natural right to own food/ingredients that can help me cook
food, because I have the right to feed myself for the sake of
self-preservation. And this right was not arbitrarily given to me. It’s simply
a consequence of my being human. Take note, I have a natural right to own,
not just access, goods that I will
need to preserve myself. Access to goods is all an animal needs to have. If an
elephant is thirsty, all he needs to do is drink from a lake. But unlike
animals, humans have intellects,
which not only tells us what we need at the present but allows us to discern and prepare for the future. The
conclusion is obvious: We must therefore not just have goods for today or at
this moment; we must also keep and
safeguard things (and the source for such things) for future use, which is
just another way to say we have the right to own private property.
It is the mind,
or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it
is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially
from the brute. And on this very account - that man alone among the animal
creation is endowed with reason - it must be within his right to possess things
not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to
have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only
things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been
reduced into use, continue for further use in after time…
For man,
fathoming by his faculty of reason matters without number, linking the future
with the present, and being master of his own acts, guides his ways under the
eternal law and the power of God, whose providence governs all things.
Wherefore, it is in his power to exercise his choice not only as to matters
that regard his present welfare, but also about those which he deems may be for
his advantage in time yet to come. Hence, man not only should possess the
fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, inasmuch as from the produce of
the earth he has to lay by provision for the future.[19]
The consequence of such reasoning is also obvious: If ownership of
private property is a natural right, then
the socialist aspiration to abolish it is a violation of a natural right,
and hence must be condemned.
What
would happen if we abolished private property and opted instead for a system
where property of goods and services are socially/communally owned and
excessively regulated by the state? Simply put: the consequences would be
disastrous.
First,
such a system will succumb to what economist Friedrich Hayek called the “synoptic delusion” or “the knowledge problem.” Fr. Robert
Sirico describes it this way:
The synoptic
(one-eyed) delusion is the notion that a single analyst – not necessarily a
single individual, but a single entity or agency – can accurately comprehend
and assess the entire range of information necessary to predictably manipulate
a complex social organism such as a modern culture or economy.[20]
In other words, a
single person/body of persons cannot know
the exact ways to navigate economic matters, like pricing, for knowledge in
such matters are dispersed through every
single individual, since they are the ones who know their wants and needs,
and not a single individual or group. But this is exactly the problem of
socialism: Socialists want economic knowledge to be centralized/isolated in a
single system, which is impossible. For example, how will we know if there’s a
shortage in the production of bread given, say, a lack of resources to make it?
In a free market system, such knowledge could be communicated to all by the
setting of prices: those who produce flour and eggs that can make bread will
increase the prices for said produces in order to properly manage the scarce
resources by regulating customer consumption and so that the producers can have
more funds/incentives to produce more of it. On the other hand, if there’s an
abundance of said ingredients, then these same producers will lower the prices
to incentivize consumers to buy more of it and to discourage producers from
making too much of something that is not too profitable.[21]
And herein lies
the socialist problem: Without multiple producers and consumers who represent
the wants, needs, and resources of the collective through privately owned
businesses and enterprises, only the state can arbitrarily set prices and/or
produce (or not produce) goods, which will inevitably fail to reflect the law
of supply and demand among the people, which would then lead to the overproduction of supplies that have little
to no demand and underproduction of supplies that have so much demand. This
is because such a society will have statesmen relying on guess work in terms of production instead of the more reliable price system that free societies have and which we have explained above.
This is exactly
what happened in the USSR. As Trent Horn and Dr. Catherine Pakaluk noted:
“(U)nlike capitalist economies that allow
prices (and production) to adjust according to consumer choice, the Soviet
system set rigid production targets,
and consumers just had to ‘choose’ whatever was offered to them.”[22]
In other words, because the Soviet Union relied on production quotas instead of prices, the people had no choice but
to take what was produced, instead of what they really wanted or needed. The
negative effects of this were felt during the reign of Joseph Stalin who,
because he wanted to prioritize national defense, “focused on heavy industry at
the expense of things like food production.”[23]
Because he arbitrarily chose to produce more with regards steel and the like
instead of food (not to mention his forced confiscation of Ukrainian farms for
the sake of his “project”), this led to people (who’d naturally prefer food
over steel) starving to death. This famine, which lasted from 1932-1933, killed
5 million.[24]
This is the effect of not letting the people themselves decide what they need
to own and buy to preserve themselves and presuming that only one person or
party can determine that for everyone. A lot of evil things can indeed happen
if you violate a natural right.
But besides the
knowledge problem, socialism’s desire of centralizing instead of freeing the
economy at the hands of the people also creates what can be called “the
incentive problem” or what I prefer to call “the public bathroom problem.” To
explain what this is, it would be helpful to cite an example from history.
In the year 1620,
the so-called Plymouth Colony, one of
the first few English colonies in America, decided to grow their food communally and distributed it equally to all who belong to their colony, including
those who didn’t work for the growth of the foods. For someone sympathetic to
socialist principles, this sounds like paradise. But nothing could be further
from the truth: “The result was economic chaos, disease, starvation, death, and
the near extinction of the first New England settlers.”[25] How
did this happen?
Think about it:
If I, who works hard in the communal farm, will get the same amount of food as the one who works less than me or is too
lazy to work for the community, then why
would I bother working hard, not to mention working at all? Also, the
complaint of the young men in the colony was: Why would I work for the
sustenance of someone else’s wife and children if those aren’t my family? Why can’t the husband and father of that
same family work for themselves?[26]
The result was
that the workers lost the incentive to
work because the lazy man got the same ration of food as the hardworking
man anyway. But if no one’s working or at least starts working less than
before, then this will lead to decreased production, which will lead to
inevitable death by starvation the less incentives there are to work and the
less productions of food occur.
How did the
colony solve this problem? It’s simple: the people were allowed to own portions of the land and let them
work for their own sustenance. “The result was the first plentiful harvest and
the first bountiful thanksgiving.”[27]
This is, once
again, common sense. People work to get
paid for the sake of self-preservation. And this is not selfishness, this
is natural self-interest, which
everyone has: You eat and drink for
yourself; it follows that you will also work for food and drink for yourself. If we can get these goods
for free every time, no one will work. Getting paid fairly and being able to
procure goods through the wage is a natural incentive for working. As Pope Leo
XIII said:
It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in
remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain
property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own.
If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the
purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his
needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not
only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just
as he pleases… Socialists, therefore, by
endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at
large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of
disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing
his resources and of bettering his condition in life.[28]
No one would
bother working if, in the name of “equality” and “community,” I can get the
same amount of goods as the one who doesn’t work by a deliberate choice. And
because no one would find it reasonable to work, the result will be production
decrease, as noted above, and the ruin of society will be inevitable, as in
what happened in the Plymouth Colony.
This is why I
also call this “the public bathroom problem.” There’s a reason why public
bathrooms are generally dirtier and nastier than our bathrooms at home: There’s
not much incentive to clean the former, because
someone else can clean it for me (i.e. janitors and other good-willed
people), with the result being that most of the time it isn’t even cleaned well
or not cleaned at all. On the other hand, we prefer to clean the latter because it belongs to us. Same thing
with property ownership and access to goods: If I can work to own it for the
sake of my own survival, then great. But if it can be guaranteed that I can
have access to these goods without even working (because someone else will work
on my behalf), then I’d rather not work, with the inevitable result being that
no one will (want to) work, unless, of course, the state forces us to work, which leads to the problem of tyranny, the major
issue of all socialist states throughout history – from Russia to North Korea.
Socialism vs The Family (and
Subsidiarity)
As noted above, man “precedes
the state” and thus has natural rights, like the right to private property, “prior to the formation of any
State.” But these natural rights flow from man’s natural dispositions.
Look again at the right to private property. Man has a right to private
property because, by nature, he is disposed
to plan his life ahead of time and thus has to have ownership of goods in
accordance with this plan. But besides our rational disposition or ability to
plan our lives, we also have the disposition
not just to preserve ourselves but our species, which can be done through the raising of a family, enabled
through the procreation between persons who differ in sex: Man and woman.
Humans, who have a disposition to procreate and preserve the human species,
thus have a natural right to marry and
have children, a right that is also independent of the state:
The rights here
spoken of, belonging to each individual man, are seen in much stronger light
when considered in relation to man's social and domestic obligations. In
choosing a state of life, it is indisputable that all are at full liberty to
follow the counsel of Jesus Christ as to observing virginity, or to bind
themselves by the marriage tie. No human law can abolish the natural and
original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal
purpose of marriage ordained by God's authority from the beginning:
"Increase and multiply."(3) Hence
we have the family, the "society" of a man's house - a society very
small, one must admit, but none the less [sic] a true society, and one older
than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which
are quite independent of the State.[29]
The consequence of this natural right, Pope Leo XIII said, also affects
the right to private property. Here’s a helpful way of thinking about it: If X has a right toward Y, then Y has a duty
toward X. An analogy might be helpful: just as a statesman has a duty toward the nation, like
safeguarding the public peace, this means that it goes hand in hand with the
nation’s right to have its peace
maintained. If a student has a right to
be educated, then a teacher has a duty to
educate. I hope it’s clear: My duty to do something to others implies the
rights of the others to be served by me. Rights and duties, in other words, are
relational realities. It makes sense
through a reference to another person.
Now,
when it comes to the family, the person (Pope Leo specifies the father)[30]
who freely enters married/family life obviously has the duty to provide for his family. But remember: duties are
accompanied by rights. So if the father has the duty to provide for his family,
then he has the right to be able to keep
for himself the goods (or the sources of such goods) that will allow him to
fulfill this duty – like a house or food supply accessed and bought through
just wages. We can see here that the right to private property is “extended,”
so to speak, to one’s familial duties so that one not only has the right to own
for oneself, but also for those he’s responsible towards.
That right to property,
therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to individual persons, must in like wise [sic] belong to a man in
his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in
proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group.
It is a most sacred law of nature that a
father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten;
and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry
on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with
all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and
misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can
a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he
can transmit to his children by inheritance. A family, no less than a State,
is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to
itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore,
the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not
transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice
and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We
say, "at least equal rights"; for, inasmuch as the domestic household
is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a
community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior
to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on
entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a
commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of
being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of
desire.[31]
Just
as taking away the ownership of an individual in the name of collectivism is a
violation of a natural right as we saw above, then it is also a violation of a natural right for other groups/societies
“above” the family to take away this parental responsibility and make it their
own. Leo XIII formulates this obvious conclusion:
The contention, then, that the civil government should at
its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the
household is a great and pernicious error.
True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the
counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right
that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the
commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there
occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to
force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to
deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and
strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here,
nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed
by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. "The child
belongs to the father," and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's
personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society,
not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is
born. And for the very reason that "the child belongs to the father"
it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "before it attains the use of free
will, under the power and the charge of its parents." The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a
State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of
the home.[32]
If it isn’t
obvious yet why this is such a big deal, allow me to explain further. Fr.
Sirico argues that private property is such an important right that, when we
take it away, we take away other rights that depend on it. He puts it this way:
If you are to
have a right to free speech, but are not permitted to publish a book at a
private publisher, or to own a newspaper or TV or radio station, or
(increasingly) even to post an opinion online because the government has begun
to treat the internet as if it owns it, then in what practical sense can you be
said to have the right to free speech?
The same is true
of religion. If the state strips away our economic freedom to decide how and
where we use our private means to compensate doctors, nurses, and physical
therapists in exchange for medical care, if the government comes to control all
of this as if these medical skills and private exchanges were somehow the
government’s property, then it suddenly becomes easier for the government to
infringe upon one’s right to religious freedom in certain important ways…
(like) the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in
early 2012, requiring religious institutions to provide abortifacient drugs,
sterilization, and contraception coverage as part of their health insurance
programs even if those religious groups are morally opposed to doing so.[33]
In other words, if you take
away private property, you take away man’s initiative in making his quality of
life better in a way that would correspond to other natural rights, like free
speech and religious liberty. The right to ownership is so fundamental that, if you abolish it, you abolish many other
rights together with it, uprooting a tree so that it bears fruit no more.
Let me give another example. If the
state takes away a husband and father’s right to dispose of his wages in the
best way possible – like the right to use it for his children’s tuition or to
buy books or school materials – then the state not only took away his right to
private property, it also took away his
right to educate his children or choose the best possible education system his
children needs. This is the “great and pernicious error” that Leo XIII
condemns.
This would also give rise to the
problems mentioned in the previous section, like the knowledge problem. As I
would like to say: The man from Malacañang does not lose sleep regarding
whether or not I’ve already eaten dinner. That concern is for the parents and
closest relatives/friends only. Also, what if my problem is not lack of food,
but lack of self control in consuming
food? The people from the highest of offices won’t know that. If they take the
role of parents instead of my actual parents, then if they misjudge that the
people in my home need more food supply, that will be to my health’s detriment.
My family would’ve known that what I needed was to spend money on diet products
and gym membership.
This is why Marx and Engels saw the
family as a threat to their collectivist mentality. Just like their disdain for
private property, they were very clear that abolishing the family is part and
parcel with their desire for a communal ownership of goods: “Abolition of the
family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the
Communists.”[34] The
connection is clear: Any good parent will want
to shield his family from outside forces that (at least in his judgment) can
corrupt his children’s moral formation and is more inclined to help his family before the larger community (this
is also common sense: we know there’s a huge difference, morally speaking,
between a man who fails to feed his next-door neighbor and a man who fails to
feed his own children; the latter is more morally depraved). But at the heart
of the communist-socialist ideal is that these so-called “outside forces” and
“larger community” are the priority over
any smaller group such as the family (see
the definition of “socialism” above), because “(c)entral to the meaning of socialism is common ownership.
This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire
global population.”[35] Therefore, if the family hinders the
progress of the collective, we have to sacrifice and abolish it.
This is why the push for a stronger
and more centralized government will inevitably weaken the family unit, while a
stronger family unit is a form of resistance to such efforts. You can only
fight for one or the other. You cannot have both. Feser states:
(T)he more the
traditional family structure breaks down, the more individuals there are –
especially single mothers and children – who find themselves without sufficient
private means of support, and thus require greater governmental assistance. This plausibly accounts for what social
scientists have called the “marriage gap” in U.S. voting patterns. Both married
men and married women are likelier [sic] to vote for conservative candidates. By contrast, unmarried men are significantly
more likely to vote for liberal candidates, and unmarried women are massively more
likely to vote for liberal candidates. If you are a breadwinner capable of
supporting a family or the spouse of such a breadwinner, you are less likely to
need state assistance and are bound to resent the government taxing away income
that could be used for the benefit of your family. By contrast, if you do not have a family to
support you will be less resentful of taxation, and you are single mother with
children or a woman unable to find a husband you are bound to regard government
as a kind of surrogate provider.[36]
Remember that many other rights (like the right to educate one’s
children) presuppose private property such that if you take away the former,
you take away the latter as well. This means that if the state takes the right to own a property as its own, then it also
takes those other rights for itself. Pope Pius XI saw this tyrannical,
anti-family system very clearly:
(T)here is a
country where the children are actually
being torn from the bosom of the family, to be formed (or, to speak more
accurately, to be deformed and depraved) in godless schools and associations,
to irreligion and hatred, according to the theories of advanced socialism;
and thus is renewed in a real and more terrible manner the slaughter of the
Innocents.[37]
A socialist-leaning state (even if not full-blown socialist) will assume
for itself the duties that are supposed to be the parents’. And parents are
justified in reacting against such an injustice and lack of respect toward
parental duties. Content creator and commentator Raffy Zamora’s reaction to the
push for the so-called Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) bill here in the
Philippines is the right reaction to have if you’re a parent: “As a father, I
will not stand by and watch my children’s future be shaped by forces that
undermine everything we believe in.”[38] The
right to educate children – especially in the most intimate of topics,
sexuality – does not belong to the
state, but to those who love and care for these children the most: mom and dad.
More than modules and PowerPoint presentations, the children need proximate and
personal love, care, and respect of human dignity that no teacher at school can
ever provide.
Socialism’s
violation of family rights is just a specified way of saying that it goes
against the principle of subsidiarity.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
defines subsidiarity as the principle which says that “a community of a higher
order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower
order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in
case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the
rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”[39] In
other words, “the community must not deprive individuals, nor larger
communities deprive smaller communities, of the opportunity to do what they can
for themselves.”[40]
Subsidiarity is the aspect of Catholic Social
teaching against external coercion by any large(r) community against the family
and/or any intermediate, non-government groups, in order for people and their
immediate connections to freely choose what’s good for them and what satisfies
their self-interest. Subsidiarity is the
way to oppose tyranny and dictatorship, so that the state does not acquire too much power. as Pope Pius XI wrote: “Just as it
is gravely wrong to take from
individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and
give it to the community, so also it is
an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order
to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate
organizations can do”[41]
Given their goals, socialism, even those who advocate for what they would call
“democratic socialism,” always ends up becoming tyrannical and depriving people
of their freedom and rights. Again, history is a witness to this. The only way
to fight this collectivist mentality is to
strengthen our family units and our local communities through respecting
subsidiarity.
Socialism vs Justice and Personal
Initiative
Recall what we have said above that
the goal of socialism/communism is “a classless
system in which the means of production are owned communally and private
property is nonexistent or severely curtailed.”[42]
For the socialist, the fact that there are different social classes – the rich,
middle class, and poor – is proof that
the current world order is terrible and unfair. For them, a good society is a
society without a socio-economic
hierarchy. No one should be richer or poorer than the other. This is the
communist ideal.
But is this even possible in a free society? Pope Leo XIII
writes:
It
must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human
affairs must be borne with, for it is
impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in
that intent do their utmost, but all
striving against nature is in vain. There
naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind;
people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is
a necessary result of unequal condition [sic]. Such unequality [sic] is far
from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social
and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity
for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses
the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.[43]
Just as it is natural for man to own private property and
choose to raise a family, so also it is natural for man to have different job interests, skills and talents,
which then generates diverse – and therefore unequal – outcomes and wages. Wages
are just prices for certain jobs. And remember that a price is adjusted
depending on whether or not supply is higher than the demand (or vice versa).
Is a particular skill harder to acquire and therefore more rare to have? Given
that the supply is lower than the demand in this case, then the wages of a man
who has that skill will be higher than the one whose skill(s) is more common. A
neurosurgeon’s wages are higher than a dishwasher’s, or a school teacher’s
wages are lower than LeBron James’, for the same reason. This is a basic demand of justice and fairness. The lesson here
is that fairness doesn’t necessarily mean equal. The two concepts are not
synonyms. This “fair inequality” is inevitable in a free society. If I choose
to be a security guard at a mall, and you become a member of a successful boy
band, then my wages will necessarily be lower than yours. Once again, this is
simply the law of supply and demand. In the case of the latter, the supply is
lower than the demand. There are only a few successful bands, but they have a
lot of fans worldwide. Again: “it is
impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level.”
And how are we going to pull off a system without a
socio-economic hierarchy anyway? Are we going to force all people to have the
same job? Then we will no longer be free in choosing the jobs we like due to
state coercion. Are we going to allow the state(s) to mandate that the rich –
whether rich individuals or wealthy nations –
postpone their economic progress until poor people and countries catch
up? The problem with this is that the very first to suffer are the people that
the socialist claims are those that socialists fight for: the poor and the
workers. There will be no advances in things like medical technology since the
most financially capable of us – the rich – will be hindered to innovate
(again, this is the incentive problem), an innovation that could’ve helped the
poor and be more and more affordable once mass production happens. Unemployment
will also happen, since those who give jobs do not grow in wealth, which means
the said wealth will inevitably be consumed, to the point where companies/employers
can no longer afford workers.[44]
How about allowing the state to confiscate an x amount of
wealth from the richest and redistribute it to the poor? Besides (once again)
the incentive problem (“Why would I wanna earn an x amount or beyond if the
state will confiscate it once I reach that amount? I might as well get less
profitable jobs.”), think about this: “Where would people work once all the
wealth of the richest 1 percent was redistributed?”[45]
We have to take note of this very carefully: The real wealth of these rich
people are not their mansions and cars, but rather their investments and businesses.
(W)e tend to lose sight of the fact that
most of the wealth (of the 1 percent) of the wealthiest is invested. It is put
to work in the businesses they own and manage, and in stocks and other
financial vehicles that provide the capital for countless other businesses. These are the businesses that provide the 99 percent
with the goods, services, and employment that they regularly enjoy and often
take for granted.
Whether
it’s a big automotive plant or a small bakery… all businesses that produce
goods and employment are owned by someone. It’s businesses that make up most of
the wealth of the 1 percent. Confiscating
that wealth and giving it to the other 99 percent would mean shifting much of
that wealth from investment and production to consumption, since the poor and
middle class consume a far higher percentage of their income than the wealthy
do. This sudden shift from investment and production to consumption would demolish the infrastructures that
makes [sic] jobs, goods, and services
possible.[46]
The
wealth that could’ve grown through investments or businesses and could’ve led
to more employment and economic growth through increased profit will most
probably be only consumed by the less wealthy, since they are more needy than
the richest of us. And even if they invest it and use it to develop and grow
their own businesses, the socio-economic hierarchy will not disappear at all;
you’ll just put new people in the top 1 percent and new people in the other 99
percent.
Are
there bad wealthy people, businessmen, and employers that have a tendency to
abuse their power against the less wealthy? Sure, but that doesn’t justify the
abolishing of the free market and the institution of a more centralized,
egalitarian economy. Besides generating more problems, as we’ve seen above, it
also blames the system – which, in and of itself, is just a tool – when in fact
we should blame and hold the people who
abuse the system accountable. Saying that the free market should be banned
because it can give rise to abusive actors in the market is like saying we
should ban knives because people can use it to kill, or saying we should stop
living in a democracy because election fraud and vote buying can happen. In all
of these cases, you’ve generated solutions worse than the problems.
Conclusion: Socialism vs Human
Nature
In this blogpost, I have
given reasons why Pope Leo XIII’s criticisms of Socialism in Rerum Novarum are justified. Notice,
however, that at the very heart of his criticisms, it’s not because he sees
socialism as just a poor economic method or an impractical system that could’ve
worked if we were living in a different historical era. Rather, he sees the
problem as essentially an anthropological
issue. Socialism, before it is an economic system or a sociological theory,
is a claim about human nature.
Socialism claims that the human person is basically reduced to his collective role, forgetting
that he also has the right and capability for personal initiative as an
individual and a human person in himself. Socialism denies a fundamental
truth that man can take care of himself and his family through private property
and through diverse means of earning wages in
an autonomous fashion, distinct from the state. As St. John Paul II wrote in Centesimus Annus:
Marxism
criticized capitalist bourgeois societies, blaming them for the
commercialization and alienation of human existence. This rebuke is of course
based on a mistaken and inadequate idea of alienation, derived solely from the
sphere of relationships of production and ownership, that is, giving them a
materialistic foundation and moreover denying the legitimacy and positive value
of market relationships even in their own sphere. Marxism thus ends up by
affirming that only in a collective society can alienation be eliminated. However, the historical experience of
socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away
with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic
necessities and economic inefficiency.[47]
Together
with Pope Leo XIII, St. John Paul II rightly concludes:
(T)he fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in
nature.
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule
within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely
subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good
of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the
unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or
evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the
concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears,
the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a
distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an
opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can
call "his own", and of the possibility of earning a living through
his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who
control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity
as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human
community.[48]
“All striving against nature is in vain.” If our
arguments above do not prove this, all we do is look at the societies that
adopted socialism and all the deaths and human rights violations that happened
within them. We’ve already mentioned the 5 million who died due to famine
during Stalin’s reign. There were also the 30 million that died at the hands of
Mao Zedong due to his prohibition of owning private farms,[49]
the lack of electricity and unpaved roads in North Korea,[50]
and execution of more than 10,000 after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba.[51]
That’s not even exhaustive. According to The
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,[52]
the number of deaths due to communism worldwide is more than 94 million. If that's not proof that socialism is against
humanity, what is?
Let us therefore resist this error which is still subscribed to even by many people today, like the Communist Party of the Philippines.[53] Let us not be afraid to expose its evil ways. Let us, like Pope Francis, not hesitate to proclaim: “The Marxist ideology is wrong."
[1] Mering,
N. (2021). Awake, not Woke: A Christian
Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. TAN Books. 28-31.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).
Marxists.org Publications. (n.d.).
https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/
[3] Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chapter II. emphasis added.
[4] Horn,
T., & Pakaluk, C. R. (2020). Can a
Catholic be a Socialist?: The Answer is No - Here’s Why. 22-24
[5] Admin.
(2021, October 29). Program for a
People’s Democratic Revolution. PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central.
https://www.cpp.ph/2018/06/30/program-for-a-peoples-democratic-revolution/
[6] End private property, not Kenny Loggins. (2016, February 13). https://jacobin.com/2016/02/socialism-marxism-private-property-person-lennon-imagine-kenny-loggins. emphasis added.
[7] Program
for a People’s Democratic Revolution. emphasis added.
[8] The
word “basic” is an important qualifier/adjective for a proper definition. It’s
not as if the government is not involved in regulating a non-socialist economy
(unless you’re someone like an anarcho-capitalist),
but rather that the government is in
control of how basic goods (like
food which is a basic need) are
distributed or produced in socialism. It is therefore a question of how, not if, a government is involved.
See Socialism versus the Family.
(n.d.). http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialismvsthefamily.html
[9] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis in the original
[10] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 83-85, 97-99
[11] Ibid. 21-22
[12] Zieba,
M. (2023). Papal Economics: The Catholic
Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute. 7.
[13] Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) | LEO XIII. (1891, May 14).
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
[14] Rerum Novarum; 1, 3
[15] Rerum
Novarum; 4
[16] Ibid.
[17] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis added.
[18] Rerum Novarum; 7
[19] Ibid., 6, 7
[20] Sirico,
R. (2012). Defending the Free Market: The
Moral Case for a Free Economy. Regenery Publishing. 125-126
[21] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 32
[22] Ibid., 81. emphasis in the original
[23] Ibid., 83
[24] Ibid., 83-84
[25] Defending the Free Market. 35
[26] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 19-20
[27] Defending the Free Market. 36
[28] Rerum Novarum; 5. emphases added
[29] Rerum
Novarum; 12. emphasis added.
[30] Ibid., 13
[31] Ibid., 13. emphases added.
[32] Ibid., 14. emphases added.
[33] Defending the Free Market. 33
[34] Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chapter II.
[35] What is Socialism? – World Socialist Movement. (n.d.).
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/a-homepage-section/introductory-material/what-is-socialism/
[36] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis added.
[37] Divini Illius Magistri (December 31, 1929) |
PIUS XI. (1929, December 30).
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121929_divini-illius-magistri.html
[38] Peanut
Gallery Media Network. (2025, January 26). Here
are the details of the UNBELIEVABLE bill authored by Senator Risa Hontiveros |
Ep 29 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52ijvj95eC0
[39] uCatholic. (2012, July 22). Catechism of the Catholic Church #1883.
uCatholic. https://ucatholic.com/catechism/1883/
[40] Papal
Economics. 10.
[41] Quadragesimo anno (May 15, 1931) | PIUS XI. (1931, May 14). https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. 79.
[42] Chen,
J. (2024, July 1). What is Communism?
Definition and History. Investopedia.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/communism.asp
[43] Rerum Novarum; 17. emphases added.
[44] Defending
the Free Market. xviii.
[45] Defending the Free Market. 102.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991) | John Paul II. (1991, May 1). https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. 41. emphasis added
[48] Ibid.,
13. emphases added.
[49] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 98
[50] Ibid.,
100
[51] Ibid.,
102
[52] Courtois,
S., Werth, N., Panné, J.-L., Paczkowski, A., Bartosek, K., & Margolin,
J.-L. (1999). The Black Book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press.
[53] Philippine
Revolution Web Central. (n.d.). PRWC |
Philippine Revolution Web Central. PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web
Central. https://www.cpp.ph/
Thought experiment: Imagine you’re in middle-to-late 19th-century England. New opportunities arise for you, as an able-bodied adult, when it comes to making money. Instead of remaining in your rural village to farm, you decided to give the factory a shot. But once you step into the city, problems with this new industrial system immediately make themselves evident: harsh working conditions, inhumane treatment of workers, unreasonably low wages, and even child labor. You know you want such a system to change. Deep inside, it is obvious that there are blatant violations of man’s rights in such circumstances. The question is: What is the right solution?
This is the historical situation that
moved Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to publish in 1848 The Communist Manifesto. With Marx’s hegelian-inspired,
materialistic view of history as one big class struggle between the ruling
class/bourgeoisie and the working
class/proletariat as theoretical backdrop,[1]
the two saw that the best means toward renewing society’s mistreatment of
workers is nothing less than a revolution: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians (poor workers) have nothing to lose
but their chains. They have a world to win.”[2]
What is Socialism?
But if revolution is the means, what is communism’s
end? Marx couldn’t be more clear: “the theory of the Communists may be summed
up in the single sentence: abolition of
private property.”[3] In other
words, for communism, the solution to the so-called tyrannical control of
industry by the ruling class is to strip
them of the private ownership of the means of production of goods and
services so that they’d be communally
owned.[4]
The Communist Party of the Philippines, in their official constitution and
program, is also very explicit about this goal: “The private ownership of the means of production and
distribution by the big bourgeoisie and landlord class must be abolished.”[5]
This is so that there’d be no hierarchy of social classes, but only a classless society, a society which, in
the mind of the communists, would be promoting equality and fairness to its
citizens.
This politico-economic theory, which advocates for “taking away the source of capitalists’
power (which is) the private ownership of
property,”[6] is
otherwise known as socialism. To once
again quote the Communist Party of the Philippines, this is a socio-political
vision in which “(p)ublic
ownership of the means of production shall become dominant and state economic
planning will direct the development of a well-balanced socialist economy…
After the socialist transformation of industry and the entire economy, the Party shall ensure that there is no
retrogression into private ownership of the means of production.”[7] More precisely defined,
socialism “concerns
government ownership and control over basic[8]
means for the production and distribution of goods.”[9]
“Hold on a
minute,” you might ask, “I thought socialism advocates for the social/communal ownership of the sources
of goods and services; why is it now defined as government/state ownership of the same?” It’s simple, really: If,
for instance, the agricultural industry is to be owned by all (as was the
aspirations of socialist rulers like Stalin and Mao)[10] so
that all can be provided for, someone has
to be in charge to regulate it and see its proper distribution, which is none other than the state. So, at the
end of the day, communal ownership isn’t really communal in the strict sense
when it comes to socialism. It’s more of a state
control of a nation's economic sector; we can thus call a socialist economy
a command/planned economy.[11]
Now that we have
properly defined what socialism is, we now have to ask: Is this the right solution to the socio-economic ills not only during
Marx’s time, but ours as well?
Here Comes the Lion
The social conditions in
which Marx formulated his communist-socialist vision are also the same contexts
that Pope Leo XIII (d. 1903) wished to address in what is now considered the
“first social encyclical,”[12] Rerum Novarum[13] (English
translation: “new things”), published on May 15, 1891. Just like Marx, Pope Leo
saw many problems in the “new things” of the industrial revolution,
particularly regarding the circumstances in which workers find themselves.
Among other things, he saw “the
utter poverty of the masses,” “moral degeneracy,” “rapacious usury,” and the
“misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working
class.”[14]
But the
similarities between the two end there. Marx and Leo may have diagnosed the
same disease, but they have provided cures that can’t be more different. As a
matter of fact, the latter even went so far as to say that the socialist
solution to the industrial problem, which is “to do away with property,”[15]
is a cure worse than the disease:
“their (i.e. the socialists) contentions are so clearly powerless to end the
controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be
among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they
would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create
utter confusion in the community.”[16]
So, Pope Leo XIII
is explicit: socialism is a terrible solution to the problem. Why did he think
so? His position can be summed up into three reasons: Socialism is wrong because (1) it goes against the natural right to
private property, (2) it violates the principle of subsidiarity and the rights
of the family, and (3) it restricts personal freedom of initiative to take on
diverse interests and jobs, which will generate diverse and unequal outcomes
and wages.
Let’s take a look
at these two reasons and why, in my estimation, these reasons make a good case
against socialism.
Socialism vs Private Property
We’ve already
seen that socialism is against the private ownership of property. For the sake
of precision, however, it would be helpful if we can define exactly what it
means to own something. The
philosopher Edward Feser provides a helpful definition of ownership:
(T)o own something is essentially to possess a bundle of
rights over the thing. For example, suppose I own a certain pencil.What that involves is my
having the right to use the pencil whenever I want to, the right to lend it to
others if I so desire, the right not
to lend it to them if that’s what I prefer, the right to chew on it if I feel
anxious, the right to break it in half if I want to shorten it or simply as a
way to take out frustration, and so forth.To own the pencil is to have a bundle
of such rights, and to have such a bundle of rights over the pencil is to own
it.[17]
So,
to own something is to have a right to be able to dispose of it
in an autonomous fashion. Of course, you have the obvious moral and legal
limits to such an autonomous use/disuse, but overall, this sounds like a very
intuitive definition that all of us can agree upon. If I own something, I can
do with it whatever I like (within moral and legal limits, of course).
Common
sense also tells us that the right to own private property is a natural right, or a right that springs
forth from us simply by being human, not by some deliberate contractual
obligation or state imposition. Leo XIII says that, when it comes to said
right:
There is no need
to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the
formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.[18]
I have the natural right to own food/ingredients that can help me cook
food, because I have the right to feed myself for the sake of
self-preservation. And this right was not arbitrarily given to me. It’s simply
a consequence of my being human. Take note, I have a natural right to own,
not just access, goods that I will
need to preserve myself. Access to goods is all an animal needs to have. If an
elephant is thirsty, all he needs to do is drink from a lake. But unlike
animals, humans have intellects,
which not only tells us what we need at the present but allows us to discern and prepare for the future. The
conclusion is obvious: We must therefore not just have goods for today or at
this moment; we must also keep and
safeguard things (and the source for such things) for future use, which is
just another way to say we have the right to own private property.
It is the mind,
or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it
is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially
from the brute. And on this very account - that man alone among the animal
creation is endowed with reason - it must be within his right to possess things
not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to
have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only
things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been
reduced into use, continue for further use in after time…
For man,
fathoming by his faculty of reason matters without number, linking the future
with the present, and being master of his own acts, guides his ways under the
eternal law and the power of God, whose providence governs all things.
Wherefore, it is in his power to exercise his choice not only as to matters
that regard his present welfare, but also about those which he deems may be for
his advantage in time yet to come. Hence, man not only should possess the
fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, inasmuch as from the produce of
the earth he has to lay by provision for the future.[19]
The consequence of such reasoning is also obvious: If ownership of
private property is a natural right, then
the socialist aspiration to abolish it is a violation of a natural right,
and hence must be condemned.
What
would happen if we abolished private property and opted instead for a system
where property of goods and services are socially/communally owned and
excessively regulated by the state? Simply put: the consequences would be
disastrous.
First,
such a system will succumb to what economist Friedrich Hayek called the “synoptic delusion” or “the knowledge problem.” Fr. Robert
Sirico describes it this way:
The synoptic
(one-eyed) delusion is the notion that a single analyst – not necessarily a
single individual, but a single entity or agency – can accurately comprehend
and assess the entire range of information necessary to predictably manipulate
a complex social organism such as a modern culture or economy.[20]
In other words, a
single person/body of persons cannot know
the exact ways to navigate economic matters, like pricing, for knowledge in
such matters are dispersed through every
single individual, since they are the ones who know their wants and needs,
and not a single individual or group. But this is exactly the problem of
socialism: Socialists want economic knowledge to be centralized/isolated in a
single system, which is impossible. For example, how will we know if there’s a
shortage in the production of bread given, say, a lack of resources to make it?
In a free market system, such knowledge could be communicated to all by the
setting of prices: those who produce flour and eggs that can make bread will
increase the prices for said produces in order to properly manage the scarce
resources by regulating customer consumption and so that the producers can have
more funds/incentives to produce more of it. On the other hand, if there’s an
abundance of said ingredients, then these same producers will lower the prices
to incentivize consumers to buy more of it and to discourage producers from
making too much of something that is not too profitable.[21]
And herein lies
the socialist problem: Without multiple producers and consumers who represent
the wants, needs, and resources of the collective through privately owned
businesses and enterprises, only the state can arbitrarily set prices and/or
produce (or not produce) goods, which will inevitably fail to reflect the law
of supply and demand among the people, which would then lead to the overproduction of supplies that have little
to no demand and underproduction of supplies that have so much demand. This
is because such a society will have statesmen relying on guess work in terms of production instead of the more reliable price system that free societies have and which we have explained above.
This is exactly
what happened in the USSR. As Trent Horn and Dr. Catherine Pakaluk noted:
“(U)nlike capitalist economies that allow
prices (and production) to adjust according to consumer choice, the Soviet
system set rigid production targets,
and consumers just had to ‘choose’ whatever was offered to them.”[22]
In other words, because the Soviet Union relied on production quotas instead of prices, the people had no choice but
to take what was produced, instead of what they really wanted or needed. The
negative effects of this were felt during the reign of Joseph Stalin who,
because he wanted to prioritize national defense, “focused on heavy industry at
the expense of things like food production.”[23]
Because he arbitrarily chose to produce more with regards steel and the like
instead of food (not to mention his forced confiscation of Ukrainian farms for
the sake of his “project”), this led to people (who’d naturally prefer food
over steel) starving to death. This famine, which lasted from 1932-1933, killed
5 million.[24]
This is the effect of not letting the people themselves decide what they need
to own and buy to preserve themselves and presuming that only one person or
party can determine that for everyone. A lot of evil things can indeed happen
if you violate a natural right.
But besides the
knowledge problem, socialism’s desire of centralizing instead of freeing the
economy at the hands of the people also creates what can be called “the
incentive problem” or what I prefer to call “the public bathroom problem.” To
explain what this is, it would be helpful to cite an example from history.
In the year 1620,
the so-called Plymouth Colony, one of
the first few English colonies in America, decided to grow their food communally and distributed it equally to all who belong to their colony, including
those who didn’t work for the growth of the foods. For someone sympathetic to
socialist principles, this sounds like paradise. But nothing could be further
from the truth: “The result was economic chaos, disease, starvation, death, and
the near extinction of the first New England settlers.”[25] How
did this happen?
Think about it:
If I, who works hard in the communal farm, will get the same amount of food as the one who works less than me or is too
lazy to work for the community, then why
would I bother working hard, not to mention working at all? Also, the
complaint of the young men in the colony was: Why would I work for the
sustenance of someone else’s wife and children if those aren’t my family? Why can’t the husband and father of that
same family work for themselves?[26]
The result was
that the workers lost the incentive to
work because the lazy man got the same ration of food as the hardworking
man anyway. But if no one’s working or at least starts working less than
before, then this will lead to decreased production, which will lead to
inevitable death by starvation the less incentives there are to work and the
less productions of food occur.
How did the
colony solve this problem? It’s simple: the people were allowed to own portions of the land and let them
work for their own sustenance. “The result was the first plentiful harvest and
the first bountiful thanksgiving.”[27]
This is, once
again, common sense. People work to get
paid for the sake of self-preservation. And this is not selfishness, this
is natural self-interest, which
everyone has: You eat and drink for
yourself; it follows that you will also work for food and drink for yourself. If we can get these goods
for free every time, no one will work. Getting paid fairly and being able to
procure goods through the wage is a natural incentive for working. As Pope Leo
XIII said:
It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in
remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain
property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own.
If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the
purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his
needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not
only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just
as he pleases… Socialists, therefore, by
endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at
large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of
disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing
his resources and of bettering his condition in life.[28]
No one would
bother working if, in the name of “equality” and “community,” I can get the
same amount of goods as the one who doesn’t work by a deliberate choice. And
because no one would find it reasonable to work, the result will be production
decrease, as noted above, and the ruin of society will be inevitable, as in
what happened in the Plymouth Colony.
This is why I
also call this “the public bathroom problem.” There’s a reason why public
bathrooms are generally dirtier and nastier than our bathrooms at home: There’s
not much incentive to clean the former, because
someone else can clean it for me (i.e. janitors and other good-willed
people), with the result being that most of the time it isn’t even cleaned well
or not cleaned at all. On the other hand, we prefer to clean the latter because it belongs to us. Same thing
with property ownership and access to goods: If I can work to own it for the
sake of my own survival, then great. But if it can be guaranteed that I can
have access to these goods without even working (because someone else will work
on my behalf), then I’d rather not work, with the inevitable result being that
no one will (want to) work, unless, of course, the state forces us to work, which leads to the problem of tyranny, the major
issue of all socialist states throughout history – from Russia to North Korea.
Socialism vs The Family (and
Subsidiarity)
As noted above, man “precedes
the state” and thus has natural rights, like the right to private property, “prior to the formation of any
State.” But these natural rights flow from man’s natural dispositions.
Look again at the right to private property. Man has a right to private
property because, by nature, he is disposed
to plan his life ahead of time and thus has to have ownership of goods in
accordance with this plan. But besides our rational disposition or ability to
plan our lives, we also have the disposition
not just to preserve ourselves but our species, which can be done through the raising of a family, enabled
through the procreation between persons who differ in sex: Man and woman.
Humans, who have a disposition to procreate and preserve the human species,
thus have a natural right to marry and
have children, a right that is also independent of the state:
The rights here
spoken of, belonging to each individual man, are seen in much stronger light
when considered in relation to man's social and domestic obligations. In
choosing a state of life, it is indisputable that all are at full liberty to
follow the counsel of Jesus Christ as to observing virginity, or to bind
themselves by the marriage tie. No human law can abolish the natural and
original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal
purpose of marriage ordained by God's authority from the beginning:
"Increase and multiply."(3) Hence
we have the family, the "society" of a man's house - a society very
small, one must admit, but none the less [sic] a true society, and one older
than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which
are quite independent of the State.[29]
The consequence of this natural right, Pope Leo XIII said, also affects
the right to private property. Here’s a helpful way of thinking about it: If X has a right toward Y, then Y has a duty
toward X. An analogy might be helpful: just as a statesman has a duty toward the nation, like
safeguarding the public peace, this means that it goes hand in hand with the
nation’s right to have its peace
maintained. If a student has a right to
be educated, then a teacher has a duty to
educate. I hope it’s clear: My duty to do something to others implies the
rights of the others to be served by me. Rights and duties, in other words, are
relational realities. It makes sense
through a reference to another person.
Now,
when it comes to the family, the person (Pope Leo specifies the father)[30]
who freely enters married/family life obviously has the duty to provide for his family. But remember: duties are
accompanied by rights. So if the father has the duty to provide for his family,
then he has the right to be able to keep
for himself the goods (or the sources of such goods) that will allow him to
fulfill this duty – like a house or food supply accessed and bought through
just wages. We can see here that the right to private property is “extended,”
so to speak, to one’s familial duties so that one not only has the right to own
for oneself, but also for those he’s responsible towards.
That right to property,
therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to individual persons, must in like wise [sic] belong to a man in
his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in
proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group.
It is a most sacred law of nature that a
father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten;
and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry
on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with
all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and
misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can
a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he
can transmit to his children by inheritance. A family, no less than a State,
is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to
itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore,
the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not
transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice
and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We
say, "at least equal rights"; for, inasmuch as the domestic household
is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a
community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior
to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on
entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a
commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of
being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of
desire.[31]
Just
as taking away the ownership of an individual in the name of collectivism is a
violation of a natural right as we saw above, then it is also a violation of a natural right for other groups/societies
“above” the family to take away this parental responsibility and make it their
own. Leo XIII formulates this obvious conclusion:
The contention, then, that the civil government should at
its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the
household is a great and pernicious error.
True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the
counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right
that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the
commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there
occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to
force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to
deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and
strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here,
nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed
by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. "The child
belongs to the father," and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's
personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society,
not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is
born. And for the very reason that "the child belongs to the father"
it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "before it attains the use of free
will, under the power and the charge of its parents." The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a
State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of
the home.[32]
If it isn’t
obvious yet why this is such a big deal, allow me to explain further. Fr.
Sirico argues that private property is such an important right that, when we
take it away, we take away other rights that depend on it. He puts it this way:
If you are to
have a right to free speech, but are not permitted to publish a book at a
private publisher, or to own a newspaper or TV or radio station, or
(increasingly) even to post an opinion online because the government has begun
to treat the internet as if it owns it, then in what practical sense can you be
said to have the right to free speech?
The same is true
of religion. If the state strips away our economic freedom to decide how and
where we use our private means to compensate doctors, nurses, and physical
therapists in exchange for medical care, if the government comes to control all
of this as if these medical skills and private exchanges were somehow the
government’s property, then it suddenly becomes easier for the government to
infringe upon one’s right to religious freedom in certain important ways…
(like) the Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in
early 2012, requiring religious institutions to provide abortifacient drugs,
sterilization, and contraception coverage as part of their health insurance
programs even if those religious groups are morally opposed to doing so.[33]
In other words, if you take
away private property, you take away man’s initiative in making his quality of
life better in a way that would correspond to other natural rights, like free
speech and religious liberty. The right to ownership is so fundamental that, if you abolish it, you abolish many other
rights together with it, uprooting a tree so that it bears fruit no more.
Let me give another example. If the
state takes away a husband and father’s right to dispose of his wages in the
best way possible – like the right to use it for his children’s tuition or to
buy books or school materials – then the state not only took away his right to
private property, it also took away his
right to educate his children or choose the best possible education system his
children needs. This is the “great and pernicious error” that Leo XIII
condemns.
This would also give rise to the
problems mentioned in the previous section, like the knowledge problem. As I
would like to say: The man from Malacañang does not lose sleep regarding
whether or not I’ve already eaten dinner. That concern is for the parents and
closest relatives/friends only. Also, what if my problem is not lack of food,
but lack of self control in consuming
food? The people from the highest of offices won’t know that. If they take the
role of parents instead of my actual parents, then if they misjudge that the
people in my home need more food supply, that will be to my health’s detriment.
My family would’ve known that what I needed was to spend money on diet products
and gym membership.
This is why Marx and Engels saw the
family as a threat to their collectivist mentality. Just like their disdain for
private property, they were very clear that abolishing the family is part and
parcel with their desire for a communal ownership of goods: “Abolition of the
family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the
Communists.”[34] The
connection is clear: Any good parent will want
to shield his family from outside forces that (at least in his judgment) can
corrupt his children’s moral formation and is more inclined to help his family before the larger community (this
is also common sense: we know there’s a huge difference, morally speaking,
between a man who fails to feed his next-door neighbor and a man who fails to
feed his own children; the latter is more morally depraved). But at the heart
of the communist-socialist ideal is that these so-called “outside forces” and
“larger community” are the priority over
any smaller group such as the family (see
the definition of “socialism” above), because “(c)entral to the meaning of socialism is common ownership.
This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire
global population.”[35] Therefore, if the family hinders the
progress of the collective, we have to sacrifice and abolish it.
This is why the push for a stronger
and more centralized government will inevitably weaken the family unit, while a
stronger family unit is a form of resistance to such efforts. You can only
fight for one or the other. You cannot have both. Feser states:
(T)he more the
traditional family structure breaks down, the more individuals there are –
especially single mothers and children – who find themselves without sufficient
private means of support, and thus require greater governmental assistance. This plausibly accounts for what social
scientists have called the “marriage gap” in U.S. voting patterns. Both married
men and married women are likelier [sic] to vote for conservative candidates. By contrast, unmarried men are significantly
more likely to vote for liberal candidates, and unmarried women are massively more
likely to vote for liberal candidates. If you are a breadwinner capable of
supporting a family or the spouse of such a breadwinner, you are less likely to
need state assistance and are bound to resent the government taxing away income
that could be used for the benefit of your family. By contrast, if you do not have a family to
support you will be less resentful of taxation, and you are single mother with
children or a woman unable to find a husband you are bound to regard government
as a kind of surrogate provider.[36]
Remember that many other rights (like the right to educate one’s
children) presuppose private property such that if you take away the former,
you take away the latter as well. This means that if the state takes the right to own a property as its own, then it also
takes those other rights for itself. Pope Pius XI saw this tyrannical,
anti-family system very clearly:
(T)here is a
country where the children are actually
being torn from the bosom of the family, to be formed (or, to speak more
accurately, to be deformed and depraved) in godless schools and associations,
to irreligion and hatred, according to the theories of advanced socialism;
and thus is renewed in a real and more terrible manner the slaughter of the
Innocents.[37]
A socialist-leaning state (even if not full-blown socialist) will assume
for itself the duties that are supposed to be the parents’. And parents are
justified in reacting against such an injustice and lack of respect toward
parental duties. Content creator and commentator Raffy Zamora’s reaction to the
push for the so-called Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) bill here in the
Philippines is the right reaction to have if you’re a parent: “As a father, I
will not stand by and watch my children’s future be shaped by forces that
undermine everything we believe in.”[38] The
right to educate children – especially in the most intimate of topics,
sexuality – does not belong to the
state, but to those who love and care for these children the most: mom and dad.
More than modules and PowerPoint presentations, the children need proximate and
personal love, care, and respect of human dignity that no teacher at school can
ever provide.
Socialism’s
violation of family rights is just a specified way of saying that it goes
against the principle of subsidiarity.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
defines subsidiarity as the principle which says that “a community of a higher
order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower
order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in
case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the
rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”[39] In
other words, “the community must not deprive individuals, nor larger
communities deprive smaller communities, of the opportunity to do what they can
for themselves.”[40]
Subsidiarity is the aspect of Catholic Social
teaching against external coercion by any large(r) community against the family
and/or any intermediate, non-government groups, in order for people and their
immediate connections to freely choose what’s good for them and what satisfies
their self-interest. Subsidiarity is the
way to oppose tyranny and dictatorship. as Pope Pius XI wrote: “Just as it
is gravely wrong to take from
individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and
give it to the community, so also it is
an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order
to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate
organizations can do”[41]
Given their goals, socialism, even those who advocate for what they would call
“democratic socialism,” always ends up becoming tyrannical and depriving people
of their freedom and rights. Again, history is a witness to this. The only way
to fight this collectivist mentality is to
strengthen our family units and our local communities through respecting
subsidiarity.
Socialism vs Justice and Personal
Initiative
Recall what we have said above that
the goal of socialism/communism is “a classless
system in which the means of production are owned communally and private
property is nonexistent or severely curtailed.”[42]
For the socialist, the fact that there are different social classes – the rich,
middle class, and poor – is proof that
the current world order is terrible and unfair. For them, a good society is a
society without a socio-economic
hierarchy. No one should be richer or poorer than the other. This is the
communist ideal.
But is this even possible in a free society? Pope Leo XIII
writes:
It
must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human
affairs must be borne with, for it is
impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in
that intent do their utmost, but all
striving against nature is in vain. There
naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind;
people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is
a necessary result of unequal condition [sic]. Such unequality [sic] is far
from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social
and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity
for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses
the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.[43]
Just as it is natural for man to own private property and
choose to raise a family, so also it is natural for man to have different job interests, skills and talents,
which then generates diverse – and therefore unequal – outcomes and wages. Wages
are just prices for certain jobs. And remember that a price is adjusted
depending on whether or not supply is higher than the demand (or vice versa).
Is a particular skill harder to acquire and therefore more rare to have? Given
that the supply is lower than the demand in this case, then the wages of a man
who has that skill will be higher than the one whose skill(s) is more common. A
neurosurgeon’s wages are higher than a dishwasher’s, or a school teacher’s
wages are lower than LeBron James’, for the same reason. This is a basic demand of justice and fairness. The lesson here
is that fairness doesn’t necessarily mean equal. The two concepts are not
synonyms. This “fair inequality” is inevitable in a free society. If I choose
to be a security guard at a mall, and you become a member of a successful boy
band, then my wages will necessarily be lower than yours. Once again, this is
simply the law of supply and demand. In the case of the latter, the supply is
lower than the demand. There are only a few successful bands, but they have a
lot of fans worldwide. Again: “it is
impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level.”
And how are we going to pull off a system without a
socio-economic hierarchy anyway? Are we going to force all people to have the
same job? Then we will no longer be free in choosing the jobs we like due to
state coercion. Are we going to allow the state(s) to mandate that the rich –
whether rich individuals or wealthy nations –
postpone their economic progress until poor people and countries catch
up? The problem with this is that the very first to suffer are the people that
the socialist claims are those that socialists fight for: the poor and the
workers. There will be no advances in things like medical technology since the
most financially capable of us – the rich – will be hindered to innovate
(again, this is the incentive problem), an innovation that could’ve helped the
poor and be more and more affordable once mass production happens. Unemployment
will also happen, since those who give jobs do not grow in wealth, which means
the said wealth will inevitably be consumed, to the point where companies/employers
can no longer afford workers.[44]
How about allowing the state to confiscate an x amount of
wealth from the richest and redistribute it to the poor? Besides (once again)
the incentive problem (“Why would I wanna earn an x amount or beyond if the
state will confiscate it once I reach that amount? I might as well get less
profitable jobs.”), think about this: “Where would people work once all the
wealth of the richest 1 percent was redistributed?”[45]
We have to take note of this very carefully: The real wealth of these rich
people are not their mansions and cars, but rather their investments and businesses.
(W)e tend to lose sight of the fact that
most of the wealth (of the 1 percent) of the wealthiest is invested. It is put
to work in the businesses they own and manage, and in stocks and other
financial vehicles that provide the capital for countless other businesses. These are the businesses that provide the 99 percent
with the goods, services, and employment that they regularly enjoy and often
take for granted.
Whether
it’s a big automotive plant or a small bakery… all businesses that produce
goods and employment are owned by someone. It’s businesses that make up most of
the wealth of the 1 percent. Confiscating
that wealth and giving it to the other 99 percent would mean shifting much of
that wealth from investment and production to consumption, since the poor and
middle class consume a far higher percentage of their income than the wealthy
do. This sudden shift from investment and production to consumption would demolish the infrastructures that
makes [sic] jobs, goods, and services
possible.[46]
The
wealth that could’ve grown through investments or businesses and could’ve led
to more employment and economic growth through increased profit will most
probably be only consumed by the less wealthy, since they are more needy than
the richest of us. And even if they invest it and use it to develop and grow
their own businesses, the socio-economic hierarchy will not disappear at all;
you’ll just put new people in the top 1 percent and new people in the other 99
percent.
Are
there bad wealthy people, businessmen, and employers that have a tendency to
abuse their power against the less wealthy? Sure, but that doesn’t justify the
abolishing of the free market and the institution of a more centralized,
egalitarian economy. Besides generating more problems, as we’ve seen above, it
also blames the system – which, in and of itself, is just a tool – when in fact
we should blame and hold the people who
abuse the system accountable. Saying that the free market should be banned
because it can give rise to abusive actors in the market is like saying we
should ban knives because people can use it to kill, or saying we should stop
living in a democracy because election fraud and vote buying can happen. In all
of these cases, you’ve generated solutions worse than the problems.
Conclusion: Socialism vs Human
Nature
In this blogpost, I have
given reasons why Pope Leo XIII’s criticisms of Socialism in Rerum Novarum are justified. Notice,
however, that at the very heart of his criticisms, it’s not because he sees
socialism as just a poor economic method or an impractical system that could’ve
worked if we were living in a different historical era. Rather, he sees the
problem as essentially an anthropological
issue. Socialism, before it is an economic system or a sociological theory,
is a claim about human nature.
Socialism claims that the human person is basically reduced to his collective role, forgetting
that he also has the right and capability for personal initiative as an
individual and a human person in himself. Socialism denies a fundamental
truth that man can take care of himself and his family through private property
and through diverse means of earning wages in
an autonomous fashion, distinct from the state. As St. John Paul II writes
in Centesimus Annus:
Marxism
criticized capitalist bourgeois societies, blaming them for the
commercialization and alienation of human existence. This rebuke is of course
based on a mistaken and inadequate idea of alienation, derived solely from the
sphere of relationships of production and ownership, that is, giving them a
materialistic foundation and moreover denying the legitimacy and positive value
of market relationships even in their own sphere. Marxism thus ends up by
affirming that only in a collective society can alienation be eliminated. However, the historical experience of
socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away
with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic
necessities and economic inefficiency.[47]
Together
with Pope Leo XIII, St. John Paul II rightly concludes:
(T)he fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in
nature.
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule
within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely
subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good
of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the
unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or
evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the
concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears,
the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a
distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an
opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can
call "his own", and of the possibility of earning a living through
his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who
control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity
as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human
community.[48]
“All striving against nature is in vain.” If our
arguments above do not prove this, all we do is look at the societies that
adopted socialism and all the deaths and human rights violations that happened
within them. We’ve already mentioned the 5 million who died due to famine
during Stalin’s reign. There were also the 30 million that died at the hands of
Mao Zedong due to his prohibition of owning private farms,[49]
the lack of electricity and unpaved roads in North Korea,[50]
and execution of more than 10,000 after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba.[51]
That’s not even exhaustive. According to The
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,[52]
the number of deaths due to communism worldwide is more than 94 million. If that's not proof that socialism is against
humanity, what is?
[1] Mering,
N. (2021). Awake, not Woke: A Christian
Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. TAN Books. 28-31.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848).
Marxists.org Publications. (n.d.).
https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/
[3] Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chapter II. emphasis added.
[4] Horn,
T., & Pakaluk, C. R. (2020). Can a
Catholic be a Socialist?: The Answer is No - Here’s Why. 22-24
[5] Admin.
(2021, October 29). Program for a
People’s Democratic Revolution. PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central.
https://www.cpp.ph/2018/06/30/program-for-a-peoples-democratic-revolution/
[6] End private property, not Kenny Loggins. (2016, February 13). https://jacobin.com/2016/02/socialism-marxism-private-property-person-lennon-imagine-kenny-loggins. emphasis added.
[7] Program
for a People’s Democratic Revolution. emphasis added.
[8] The
word “basic” is an important qualifier/adjective for a proper definition. It’s
not as if the government is not involved in regulating a non-socialist economy
(unless you’re someone like an anarcho-capitalist),
but rather that the government is in
control of how basic goods (like
food which is a basic need) are
distributed or produced in socialism. It is therefore a question of how, not if, a government is involved.
See Socialism versus the Family.
(n.d.). http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialismvsthefamily.html
[9] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis in the original
[10] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 83-85, 97-99
[11] Ibid. 21-22
[12] Zieba,
M. (2023). Papal Economics: The Catholic
Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute. 7.
[13] Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) | LEO XIII. (1891, May 14).
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
[14] Rerum Novarum; 1, 3
[15] Rerum
Novarum; 4
[16] Ibid.
[17] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis added.
[18] Rerum Novarum; 7
[19] Ibid., 6, 7
[20] Sirico,
R. (2012). Defending the Free Market: The
Moral Case for a Free Economy. Regenery Publishing. 125-126
[21] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 32
[22] Ibid., 81. emphasis in the original
[23] Ibid., 83
[24] Ibid., 83-84
[25] Defending the Free Market. 35
[26] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 19-20
[27] Defending the Free Market. 36
[28] Rerum Novarum; 5. emphases added
[29] Rerum
Novarum; 12. emphasis added.
[30] Ibid., 13
[31] Ibid., 13. emphases added.
[32] Ibid., 14. emphases added.
[33] Defending the Free Market. 33
[34] Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chapter II.
[35] What is Socialism? – World Socialist Movement. (n.d.).
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/a-homepage-section/introductory-material/what-is-socialism/
[36] Socialism versus the Family. emphasis added.
[37] Divini Illius Magistri (December 31, 1929) |
PIUS XI. (1929, December 30).
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121929_divini-illius-magistri.html
[38] Peanut
Gallery Media Network. (2025, January 26). Here
are the details of the UNBELIEVABLE bill authored by Senator Risa Hontiveros |
Ep 29 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52ijvj95eC0
[39] uCatholic. (2012, July 22). Catechism of the Catholic Church #1883.
uCatholic. https://ucatholic.com/catechism/1883/
[40] Papal
Economics. 10.
[41] Quadragesimo anno (May 15, 1931) | PIUS XI. (1931, May 14). https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. 79.
[42] Chen,
J. (2024, July 1). What is Communism?
Definition and History. Investopedia.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/communism.asp
[43] Rerum Novarum; 17. emphases added.
[44] Defending
the Free Market. xviii.
[45] Defending the Free Market. 102.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991) | John Paul II. (1991, May 1). https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. 41. emphasis added
[48] Ibid.,
13. emphases added.
[49] Can a Catholic be a Socialist? 98
[50] Ibid.,
100
[51] Ibid.,
102
[52] Courtois,
S., Werth, N., Panné, J.-L., Paczkowski, A., Bartosek, K., & Margolin,
J.-L. (1999). The Black Book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press.
[53] Philippine
Revolution Web Central. (n.d.). PRWC |
Philippine Revolution Web Central. PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web
Central. https://www.cpp.ph/
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