Source: http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/09/work-and-property.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 22:20:09+00:00

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Those fortunate enough to be acquainted with the work of Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy might be surprised to learn that it was not for his novels that Percy thought he would be most remembered. It was rather for his “semiotics”: his philosophical and scientific work on man’s language and use of symbols, not only in mundane communication, but also in the most profound intellectual acts of comprehension that have as their object the deepest realities of the universe. At its most radical, Percy’s work on language and symbolism deals with the essential nature of the created human intellect’s ability to penetrate – in however limited a way – to the depths of metaphysical reality. It is due to the profound significance of this question for all of reality as man confronts it that Catholics recognize the second person of the Trinity as the Word of God, by Whom all things were made.
How much of the discussion of the Church’s attitude to “capitalism” depends upon what this “ism” means among those discussing it may be gathered from the radically different assessments made of it by many who, at bottom, actually seem to agree, notwithstanding their varying mode of expressing themselves. His Excellency signaled the problem, if tangentially, by saying, “In all discussions of ‘capitalism,’ it is crucial to define what one means by the word.” Contrary to these, however, who beneath apparent disagreement do in fact agree, are others who disagree not only about the words used to signify the reality, but also about the reality itself. It is therefore that third element of Percy’s triad – the reality that the sign used must signify – that we must discover vis-à-vis “capitalism,” in order to have in our possession both a yardstick with which to measure orthodoxy, and a scalpel with which to excise heterodoxy, so as to rectify our ideas about modern economic life. A rectification of thought that is an essential prerequisite, then, to doing what we ought.
In his characteristic way, Chesterton hit on both the problem of definition in general, and the definition of capitalism itself. The great English wit is worth quoting in full, for the light he sheds on the meaning of the vexing term and for the lightheartedness he brings to Percy’s not unimportant observations in the field of language study.
When I say “Capitalism,” I commonly mean something that may be stated thus: “That economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage”. This particular state of things can and does exist, and we must have some word for it, and some way of discussing it. But this is undoubtedly a very bad word, because it is used by other people to mean quite other things. Some people seem to mean merely private property. Others suppose that Capitalism must mean anything involving the use of capital. But if that use is too literal, it is also too loose and even too large. If the use of capital is Capitalism, then everything is Capitalism. Bolshevism is Capitalism and anarchist communism is Capitalism; and every revolutionary scheme, however wild, is still Capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky believe as much as Lloyd George and Thomas that the economic operations of today must leave something over for the economic operations of tomorrow. And that is all that capital means in its economic sense. In that case, the word is useless. My use of it may be arbitrary, but it is not useless. If Capitalism means private property, I am capitalist. If Capitalism means capital, everybody is capitalist. But if Capitalism means this particular condition of capital, only paid out to the mass in the form of wages, then it does mean something, even if it ought to mean something else.
Nevertheless, how many commentators, looking at both QA and Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (RN), envision the Church to have in fact condemned “capitalism” by her pronouncements in both these encyclicals? Which means that these reliable thinkers certainly, and with good reason, believe that some thing signified by the term “capitalism” was indeed condemned, notwithstanding the “neutrality” of the system that Pius XI characterized as “not vicious of its very nature.” Msgr. Luigi Civardi, author of so many books on the Church’s social teaching and its salutary effect on the world, states plainly that RN “condemns the capitalistic system.”9 Bishop Emile Guerry for his part explained why “the Popes condemned liberal capitalism so severely” by saying that “the ‘social system’ itself [is condemned] where it is based on a concept of private ownership opposed to the community end assigned by God to the goods of the earth.”10 Amintore Fanfani, whose study of the “capitalist spirit” more than rivals the treatises of Weber and Tawney, declared that “there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalistic conception of life.”11 If, then, the neutral, almost “mechanical” system built on a division between labor and capital is not condemned by the Popes, what is it that they did condemn – and, more to the point, how does what they condemn relate to the thing, the third element of Percy’s triad, that most people mean when they say “capitalism”?
The careful reader will be ready to reply that all of the answers to the first part of our question are spelled out in precision and detail by Pius XI in QA, who, in exercising his ordinary magisterium, simply reiterated and more or less codified the common opinion both of his predecessors and of Catholic philosophical tradition. Condemned by the Pope is the social and moral philosophy that prevailed since the advent of industrialism, and which reigns still today (it is “an economic science alien to the true moral law” (QA §135; see also §§42, 43, 131)). Also condemned are the broader ideologies supporting rationalist economics (and highlighted by His Excellency at the beginning of his introduction): liberalism (§§14, 24, 26), individualism (§§46, 70, 89, 110), and materialism (§§120–1, 134). Condemned as well, at least implicitly, is the triumph of machine- and technology-worship, to the exclusion of the focus man should have on the “one thing necessary” and the other values that support such a focus (“dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, where men are corrupted and degraded”(§138)). Condemned, in the strongest terms, is limitless, free competition (§§89, 108–110), as is the resultant gross disequilibrium in the distribution of ownership (§§57, 60–63) and the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few (§106). Condemned is the anarchist conception of the state which refuses to sanction any enforcement of the moral law (§135). Resulting from these condemned principles and practices, furthermore, is a condemned economic life that is “hard, cruel, and relentless,” producing crying evils, and leading to economic imperialism and a “noxious and detestable internationalism...in financial affairs” (§§3–4, 102–110, 134–135, 137).
It will help us better appreciate what Pope Pius XI was driving at by concentrating upon what he advocated, in addition to and in light of what he condemned in his encyclical. For while he refrains from setting forth in detail a point-by-point program for social and economic restoration (indeed this is the task of the laity who collaborate to develop and implement a “truly Christian social science” and conduct specific activities “in accordance with Christian social doctrine”15), he clearly articulates the attributes of a sane and healthy social economy that serve as stars by which to navigate in our quest to understand – and then to implement – the principles of a socio-economic order worthy of Catholic men and families.
QA is frequently understood to be a restatement of the most well known and hardly controversial Catholic moral principles in the field of economic thought (such as the right of workingmen to a just or family wage; the right of both labor and capital to a proper share – but not to all – of profits; the need to steer social philosophy away from the twin errors of individualism and collectivism; plus the utter opposition of Catholicism to Socialist doctrine). It is that, of course, as His Excellency highlights in the introduction. But across the encyclical’s paragraphs, a careful reader will observe a vindication, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, of two key, indispensable principles of political economy that have been and remain dear to the hearts of Social Catholics of all generations, even if they are not declared in concise statements (e.g., “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist”) that can be made almost platitudinous through repetition and without broader context. These two principles are: (1) the need, in a healthy and rightly ordered society, for a wide distribution of productive property, and (2) the importance of organizing economic activity in free “vocational groups” uniting the employers and employees of the various industries and professions.
The latter is perhaps less susceptible of rejection, insofar as it is so clearly stated. “The aim of social legislation must therefore be the re-establishment of vocational groups” (§84). It could not be more clear. Encompassed in an individual Guild or Corporation (yes, that’s what the Pontiff meant – for, following Leo XIII16 and St. Pius X,17 whose social teaching he declared in Ubi Arcano (UA) §60 to be in “full force” at the outset of his pontificate, he specifically laments the Guilds’ destruction at the hands of liberal individualism (§80)) will be both “employers and employees of one and the same group joining forces to produce goods or give service” (§85, emphasis mine), uniting not according to their status as supplier or procurer of labor (along familiar trades-union lines), but according to the functions they exercise in society (§84). Putting, as it were, the “crown” atop the corporative social order that he outlines in the paragraphs dealing with vocational groups, the Pope calls for the development of a true juridical order, with “social charity” as its “soul” and a State ready “to protect and defend it effectively” (§89). The sincerity of the Pope on this point was made only more obvious by his frank advocacy of Corporatism in Divini Redemptoris (§54), six years later.
As for the first of our two principles, it is capitulated in the declaration of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (the “Magna Charta,” according to Pius XI, “on which all Christian activities in social matters are ultimately based” (§38)): “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners” (RN, §46). That Pius XI throughout QA reiterated his predecessor’s call for development of what Fr. McNabb termed the “ownership system,” in opposition to the then- and still-prevailing “wage system,” is clear on a number of counts. Let us look at these to ensure that there is no mistaking the point.
That Pius XI is referring, throughout QA, to productive property is clearly proven in three ways.
First, if one looks at the logical progression of the portion of QA dealing with property (§§44–66), the discussion of the right of ownership (§§44–53) appears as a preamble for the treatment of the distribution of both ownership and the products and income that are the fruit of the property owned. Now the type of property that, combined with labor, creates products and income is by definition, productive property. Furthermore, the discussion that takes place at §§56–66 regards the distribution of wealth and income derived from the very property whose ownership by private individuals was just defended in those preceding paragraphs. So in even just general terms, there is no doubt, based upon the structure and the “narrative” progression of this particular section of the encyclical, that the property that is the subject of discussion here is of the productive kind.
The commentary on the encyclical by Nell-Breuning,18 its drafter, confirms the point, by noting clearly that the discussion in these paragraphs deals with, among other things, whether ownership as such is a title to income from the property owned (which it is); the kind of property at issue, therefore, is productive.
Finally, §§53, 54, and 56 make explicit reference to property upon which labor is expended, whether that property is one’s own or that of one’s neighbor.19 One man might hire another to work his land or his machine to produce new wealth, but not to work his food, drink, and his furniture, which all serve merely to satisfy a need or a want. Furthermore, at §53 there is the possibility of “some new form or new value” being produced by the labor of a man who works “as his own master,” directly implying that his labor is applied to some land or capital, because it is only in this way that new wealth can be created by labor. The kind of property thus referred to is necessarily productive property. Indeed, no other interpretation of these passages is remotely possible, since the whole discussion ultimately addresses how to reconcile the competing claims of capital and labor to not just wealth in general but also to the products resulting from the combination of labor with that wealth. So the property in dispute is precisely that kind that can create new wealth when labor is applied to it: namely, productive property.
Having established that the ownership in question in QA §§44–66 is the ownership of productive property, we now look at the Pontiff’s treatment of the distribution of ownership (which follows its mere vindication as a right in itself), to show that he was indeed aiming for a better, more widespread distribution. We take the argument in five parts.
First, the Pope decries the present distribution of property between the two classes, those possessing capital, and those possessing mere labor. Insofar as we have established above that, in general, the property that Pius is referring to throughout this part of the encyclical must be of the productive kind, his condemnation of the present state of property distribution must deal essentially with that kind of property.
Following his warning that “not every kind of distribution of wealth and property amongst men is such that it can at all, and still less can adequately, attain the end intended by God” (§60), he goes on to denounce as a “grave evil” (§61) “the vast differences between the few who hold excessive wealth and the many who live in destitution” (§61). More stridently, he then declares that “the immense number of propertyless wage-earners on the one hand, and the superabundant riches of the fortunate few on the other, is an unanswerable argument that the earthly goods so abundantly produced in this age of industrialism are far from rightly distributed” (§63). By denouncing the present distribution of “earthly goods,” the Pope prepares the way for the solution he will propose in the paragraphs that follow, as we see below.
A close examination of the actual texts we have just cited, where the Pope demands the rectification of inequity in the distribution of income (irrespective of whether this rectification is a means or an end in itself – for arguably it is both), reveals that he also requires an adjustment to the inequity in the distribution of property in general.
For in §61, the Pontiff demands, yes, that each class “receive its due share” of profits, but he also maintains that in general – without reference only or specifically to income or the products of industry – “the distribution of created goods must be brought into conformity with the demands of the common good and social justice” (emphasis mine). The reference to social justice and the common good especially situates the Pope’s remarks within the framework of a discussion of that kind of property that provides people with a living, for it is the distribution of this productive property and how that distribution is handled in terms of a broad social institution – rather than just the availability of food and clothing to individuals or individual families – that is most bound up with the overall structure of society and the social order, and therefore properly discussed in terms of social justice and the common good.24 Two paragraphs later, the Pope contrasts, as we have seen, “the immense number of propertyless wage-earners on the one hand, and the superabundant riches of the fortunate few on the other” (§63), again without limiting his remarks only to income or products generated by the use of capital. Finally, in §64 the Pope expresses concern that without “efficacious remedies,” the “dispossessed laboring masses” in the newly capitalistic countries, along with the “immense army of hired rural laborers,” will remain “perpetually sunk in the proletarian condition” (emphasis mine).
Note the explicit reference to the propertylessness and “proletarian” status of wage-earners, propertylessnes that must refer to their non-ownership of productive property, and not their lack of the basic means of sustenance (i.e., property for consumption), which the Pope concedes elsewhere had been in certain areas mitigated and partially remedied since Leo XIII’s day. For it is the “condition” of not owning productive property that causes, as we have seen at §64, the “uncertainty” that is necessarily – the Pope almost offers a definition here – “the lot of the proletarian.” One has the sense here and elsewhere that the Pope means “proletarian” as an almost binary indicator of “status” (i.e., one is an owner or one is not), rather than simply as a descriptor of degree (i.e., that one doesn’t have enough material possessions, even if one has some).25 In fact this is the only way to read the Pope’s language, for no one could maintain that even the poorest of the “non-owning” masses did not possess some rags of clothing and some modest number of personal items. The point is, though, that this kind of ownership does not yield a living, while owning capital or land does so, when labor is applied to it. Confirming this interpretation is that fact that the Pope specifically calls, six years later, for efficacious methods to be applied to rectify the mal-distribution of property; he demands precisely that the methods adopted in furtherance of such an aim “will really affect those who actually possess more than their share of capital resources, and who continue to accumulate them to the grievous detriment of others” (DR §75, emphasis mine).
Now the need for a man who owns only labor to approach someone else who owns productive property, in order to seek employment and obtain income, arises precisely because the man does not own his own productive property. But, as we have already seen, the Pope specifically calls for ownership of property to be distributed among the class of laborers who presently do not own, even while he insists that “man is born to labor as the bird to fly” (§64).27 So he is aiming, at least in broad terms and to the extent feasible, at a re-union of work and property, of labor and ownership. Unless we are to believe – and this is both ludicrous, and distinctly refuted by §64 – that the Pope intends for the masses to come into ownership of proprietary and financial assets, such that they need not labor but can rather obtain income exclusively from property, the ideal envisioned, even though in the distance and a long ways off, must be the man who can apply labor “to his own property” (§56), as his own “master” (§53), so as to depend more upon himself and less upon the “uncertainty” (§64) of a wage built upon only the “alliance” (§56) between his toil and another’s property.
The small proprietor appears again at §72, where the Pope discusses the limits the capitalistic economy must observe in employing women and children. He rightly finds it “intolerable, and to be opposed with all Our strength,” that mothers of families be “forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the domestic walls to the neglect of their own proper cares and duties.” Now “gainful occupation” evokes employment for a wage, a necessity, as we have seen, principally for non-owning men and families. But Pius is far from condemning altogether the contribution of women and children to the home economy, just as he is far from condemning labor (even while he decries the proletarian status of the laborers). It is rather the homestead and the shop that are subtly offered as the ideal where “the rest of the family [can] contribute according to their power towards the common maintenance, as in the rural home or in the families of many artisans and small shopkeepers.” Here labor is joined to the family’s property, not to someone else’s. And again at §103 we find a reference, not to an individual, but to a whole social system that differs from that “in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production” (§101). As an example of this “[other] economic system” the Pope offers the peasant-owners, namely “the agricultural classes, who form the larger portion of the human family, and who find in their occupation the means of obtaining honestly and justly what is needful for their maintenance” (§103). And finally, when wrapping up a concluding section of the encyclical calling for a renewal of Christian principles and Christian charity, the Pontiff places before us a Model Who, though He spent His life “in labors” (§128), was not employed by the “Schwartz Lumber Conglomerate,” but Who had full share of ownership in “Joseph & Son, Proprietors”: namely, “Him Who, being in the form of God, chose to become a Carpenter among men, and to be known as the Son of a Carpenter” (§140).
If this all-too-familiar scene is not what Pius wishes to advocate in calling for wages high enough to support the family and its head, then we must return to the “rural home or…the families of many artisans and small shopkeepers,” specifically offered by the Pope as the example of a situation where the family does have a means of support beyond “the wage income of its father and head.” But the key here is the need for ownership of the property the family needs to generate an alternative “means” of support, and to enable its members to participate in the creation of wealth necessary for a life of modest material sufficiency and dignity.
Fifth, and finally: QA’s explicit references, in the area of distribution of property ownership, to the demands made by the predecessor of Pius XI and author of Rerum Novarum confirm beyond all doubt that family ownership of productive property is precisely is being advocated. Five times, over as many paragraphs, Pius XI refers specifically to what Leo XIII proposed as a way of both endorsing his own recommendations and vindicating and renewing Leo’s proposals. It is Leo XIII, says Pius, who urged “the uplifting of the proletariat” as the “necessary object of Our efforts” (§62). Leo’s injunctions “have lost none of their force or wisdom for our own age.” Pius XI’s calls, which we have just examined, that workingmen obtain an “ample sufficiency” so that they may rise out of their non-owning status; that they be “freed from….hand-to-mouth uncertainty which is the lot of the proletarian”; that they may be enabled to “support life’s changing fortunes” and pass on “some little provision for those whom they leave behind them” (§64); all of these are ideas that were “not merely suggested, but stated in frank and open terms” by Leo XIII. Finally, the Pope writes that the need for the “propertyless wage-earner…[to] acquire a certain moderate ownership” was “already declared by Us, following the footsteps of Our Predecessor” (§66).
And what were those footsteps that Pius intended to follow in?
One: The father of every family is enjoined in RN to “provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten” and to enable them “who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, [to have] all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.” Fair enough. But how? “[I]n no other way,” says Leo XIII, “can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance” (RN §13, emphasis mine).30 Note the explicit parallel between this and Pius’s concern for what a workingman needs to pass on to his family.
If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners (RN §46, emphasis mine).
Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and revolution has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide chasm. On the one side there is the party which holds power because it holds wealth; which has in its grasp the whole of labor and trade; which manipulates for its own benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which is not without influence even in the administration of the commonwealth. On the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit and ever ready for disturbance. If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes will be brought nearer to one another (RN §47, emphasis mine).
The second point, relating to what Pius XII calls “the insistent call of the two Pontiffs of the social Encyclicals,”34 deals with the family’s plot of land – the smallholding – as that which nearest approximates to the ideal form of productive property possessed by the family, necessary for safeguarding its liberty to pursue and fulfill its economic, social, moral, and spiritual duties: “Of all the goods that can be the object of private property, none is more conformable to nature, according to the teaching of Rerum Novarum, than the land, the holding on which the family lives, and from the products of which it draws all of part of its subsistence.”35 The successor of Pius XI goes to far as to state, “in the spirit of Rerum Novarum,” that “as a rule, only that stability which is rooted in one’s own holding makes of the family the vital and most perfect and fecund cell of society....”36 Leo XIII’s demand that individuals be enabled to look forward to obtaining “a share in the land,” and Pius XI’s allusion to it, give substance to the continuity of aim that animates Catholic teaching on this point and inspired Pius XII’s confirmation of it, enabling us, in hindsight, to establish with precision the content of Quadragesimo Anno in this regard.
There is much more to Pius XI’s monumental social encyclical than its take on capitalism, work, and property, as His Excellency rightly highlights. But perhaps for the needs of our time these aspects are properly emphasized. With QA as our guide, we can think with the Church about that “thing” that moderns mean when they say “capitalism,” while we worry less about the label. We will support the idea of a Guild System, so clearly promoted in this and other social encyclicals. And we will work to foster as best we can in our own little circles, in our own families, at least, if not elsewhere, a wider distribution of ownership of productive property, striving both to see and to realize the ideal re-integration of work and property, where a man’s labor – which is obligatory on most all of us – is combined with his property rather than someone else’s. Let us become, with the doctrine of the Popes to inspire us, the peasant proprietors; the independent tradesman; the employee-owners; the self-employed entrepreneurs of a resurgent Christendom.
Given the outlook of Pope Pius XI on this question, it would not be gratuitous to see in his encyclical a word of encouragement for the Distributists (whose land movement he lauded as a “most praiseworthy enterprise” in a letter from then Cardinal Pacelli), the Corporatists, the Solidarists, and so many others of Social Catholic conviction who sought to understand the role of private ownership of productive property in society, to clarify it, and to mark its duties and limitations in view of the common good of society. “Most helpful therefore and worthy of all praise,” the Pope writes, “are the efforts of those who, in a spirit of harmony and with due regard for the traditions of the Church, seek to determine the precise nature of these duties, and to define the boundaries imposed by the requirements of social life upon the right of ownership itself or upon its use” (§48).
Of course no one would have the parochial temerity to call Pius XI a “Distributist.” Nevertheless, he laments the mal-distribution of productive property; defends its private ownership so far as to wish that more people had it; sees the solution to the plight of the employed masses in wage-earner “ownership”; insists that the right of property must conform to the needs of the common good, and must therefore be subject to regulation by the public authority in its interest (§§49–50); and expects, finally, that after following his program “the production and acquisition of goods [and] the use of wealth…will within a short time be brought back again to the standards of equity and just distribution” (§139, emphasis mine). So what, then, would we call him, especially in light of his principled, if unintentional, sanction of the outline for reform offered some years later by an English historian in a little essay called Restoration of Property?
Meanwhile, let Pius rouse our spirits for the battle ahead with the closing thoughts of QA. We must avoid, he says, as “valiant soldiers of Christ” who are ready to “strain every thew and sinew” (§148), modernism of the moral, social, and juridical kind (§46),37 lest we fall victim to a schizophrenia that cuts off social thought and public life from day-to-day Catholic duty, prayer, and worship – a “cleavage” in the conscience later condemned by the Pope as “a scandal to the weak, and to the malicious a pretext to discredit the Church” (DR, §55). Instead, we will reach outside our ramparts and invite the cooperation of all men of good will to apply Catholic principles (§98), adapting to modern needs the unchanging and unchangeable doctrine of the Church (§19). We will develop and thrust into public view a truly Christian social science (§20), and convince well-intentioned but erroneous social reformers that their just demands are more cogently defended by the Church and promoted by Christian charity (§118). We will avoid contributing to the calumny that the Church is on the side of the rich (§§44, 127) by ignoring her social teaching or, worse, by hiding immoral economic practice under her name.38 And, finally, because “nowadays the conditions of social and economic life are such that vast multitudes of men can only with great difficulty pay attention to…their eternal salvation” (§132), we endeavor “unremittingly” to reform society according to the mind of the Church (§128), imitating and attaining to the marvelous unity of the divine plan, which “the Church preaches” and “right reason demands” (§139).
As for the “final say” on work and property, perhaps we may be permitted to see in the words of the Carpenter of Nazareth regarding Holy Matrimony a lesson that is instructive here as well: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (St. Matt. xix:6).

References: §135
 §60
 §46
 §53
 §61
 §64
 §64
 §75
 §64
 §72
 §103
 §13
 §46
 §47
 §55