Hugh Williams, Debec, NB

Introduction

This paper is an effort to reconsider the relationship between Christianity and socialism. It treats of a question with which many people not that long ago in Canada, in Christian circles at least, did in fact struggle and that arguably are again struggling with in serious ways. In fact, I’m finding that many people today are struggling with this issue, as I am, and are doing so for two good and compelling reasons: the increasing direct impacts of the climate catastrophe that are now upon us, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Iran with our Western governments, including Canada’s, direct complicity. These both are profoundly disorienting issues that cannot help but cause thoughtful and sensitive people to deeply re-evaluate their socio-political commitments and perhaps even their theological commitments. A return to Gregory Baum’s life work can aid with such troubling reflections. In this two-part essay, I review Baum’s classic treatment of Christianity and socialism from 1979, and his extraordinary 1982 commentary on John Paul IIs encyclical Laborem Exercens.

Part One: Gregory Baum on Christianity and Socialism

Socialism, for Baum, has always tended to see a distortion of reality inherent in religion that can prevent people from recognizing their real situation in history, whereas religion, he says, has always tended to see inherent in socialism a tendency to distort one’s view of reality because of a type of economic determinism (based upon a dialectical-materialist view of history).

However, there are Marxists, who have tended to be the most scholarly, thoughtful, and serious of socialists, who do recognize the free creativity of human consciousness and how the working class must have a good sense of the bigger picture, of the ‘whole,’ in order to grasp their historical mission as workers.

Baum briefly speaks of the important analyses of Lukacs, Gramsci, and Bloch, who all saw religion as a social phenomenon having diverse meanings and thus differing social functions. Religion is recognized to have both reactionary and progressive trends. Biblical religion has even been understood as a major source of utopian thought in history, where the ‘sky god above’ becomes the promise of an alternative future, the source of a forward movement motivated by an alternative vision that judges the ‘empire’ critically. In fact, there has been an understanding that has seen the Western revolutionary tradition as the natural heir of biblical religion.

However, it must be said that there is in the socialist tradition a strong position that says clearly that only a certain type of atheism can translate this utopian vision into an effective project for social change. Baum points out that in the British tradition of socialism, we find that this position is tempered because of the strong view that to overcome capitalism, people have to draw deeply upon their historical resources, which include what can be regarded as conservative sources such as belief in God and religion.

Clearly, then, we have this ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between socialism and religion. Social change groups very often confront a dilemma, a choice even, either to become active leaders within the progressive movements in institutional religion or to concentrate on a more staunchly socialist project, which inescapably leads to disaffiliation with the institutional Church. Baum has studied how this happened in the social gospel movement of the early half of the 20th century. He notes how there was an active group of Christian socialists known as The Fellowship for a Christian Social Order that had links with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Canada and had created an original theology from a socialist perspective that in many ways anticipated the socialist-inspired liberation theology of Latin America.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a notable shift to the left in the teaching documents of the mainline Christian churches in which the significance of the doctrines of subsidiarity and socialization was renewed and explored. There was the sense of a significant minority summoning the whole Church to a greater fidelity to the gospel. There are some remarkable documents. However, in the Roman Catholic orbit, the bishops who produced them did not engage, individually or collectively, in communicating this social passion to ordinary Catholics. The documents remained powerless and not backed by action. In effect, the institutional Church remains closely identified with capitalist forces in society.

In Latin America, Catholic bishops promoted a third way alternative between socialism and capitalism. This was a way embraced by the liberal bourgeoisie. Grassroots groups again faced a dilemma where this third or middle way always seemed to end up compromising in a way that served capitalist interests over socialist interests. Many have come to see this third way as an illusion based upon an inadequate understanding of capitalism. It was liberation theology that particularly unmasked the ideological nature of mainstream Christianity.

The Latin American bishops have definitely influenced the Church as a whole in its magisterial instruction that political action for justice is a constitutive aspect of the Christian life and that divine salvation includes liberation from oppressive conditions in real history and life on earth. This did influence the bishops in Canada, animating them to cooperate with other churches in promoting the social gospel.

Nevertheless, it has been part of the Catholic Christian tradition to repudiate Marxism as a philosophical and political system, and yet there has also been an openness and tolerance for socialist projects and a serious recognition that Marxism can provide important and even essential insights for understanding social reality. Thus, there remains some basis for cooperation in socialist projects. However, there has been considerable unfavourable reaction by conservative bishops. There has been a vehement campaign against liberation theology and its movements where, in South America especially, there is evidence of US and CIA backing and support. Baum tells the story of Christians for Socialism in Chile (1971), who were associated with the Allende movement. Strictly speaking, it was not an action-oriented group because the membership was often heavily involved in action through other organizations and projects. The group’s primary purpose and main focus was to clarify the Christian position and to denounce the ideological bias and content of mainline Christianity and, further, to show that there is no contradiction between the gospel and socialism. Baum points out that this is an important network that has been largely destroyed, surviving only in exile.

In Europe, the Catholic left did not have the support of the bishops, and yet there has been no direct effort to exclude these Christians from the Church. Christians for Socialism wants to unite in a common dialogue the diverse expressions of socialism that actually exist. There is a consensus, according to Baum, around the need for a new cooperative economic system where the major means of production should have (some degree of) public ownership, where production and distribution should be (to some degree) planned in a way that has accountability to the people affected.

Christians for Socialism always allowed for a type of theological pluralism. Baum mentions Tillich’s religious socialism, the left-wing reading of Barth, Dorothy Soelle’s reading of Bultmann, Dom Helder Camara’s emphasis of the principle of socialization, Gutierrez’s philosophy of praxis, and Segundo’s biblical-based rereading of history from the perspective of the poor.

Baum ends his essay with a question that still is very relevant for us today: Does the Christian left have a future? In his essay, he does not answer the question but observes that socialist Christians still wrestle with this inner contradiction between religion’s ultimate concern for what is called “eternal life” and the socialist commitment to reconstruct society for the sake of a better life for people on this earth. Baum wants to believe that despite this creative but difficult tension, or perhaps because of it, Christians and socialists can join together with others to build a cooperative commonwealth.

Part Two: Gregory Baum on Labour and Capital

This dialogue-dialectic between Christianity and socialism, especially in its Marxist form, is often boiled down to an ideological conflict between liberalism and Marxism. With this characterization, we perhaps can better recognize and appreciate attempted advances from the Christian side toward a higher synthesis based upon Bernard Lonergan’s extraordinary work in economics. A recent effort by John Raymaker and Pierre Whalon, Attentive, Intelligent, Rational, and Responsible, tries to advance the discussion by fusing Lonergan’s philosophical-theological work with his theory of economy. Both Lonergan and the Raymaker-Whalon text are willing to characterize this discussion and debate as an effort to achieve some higher synthesis or middle way between what can be called the liberal thesis and the Marxist anti-thesis. If this be anywhere close to the truth of the matter, then one must confront the issue of capital and labour and the nature of their relationship. Furthermore, it seems to me that Christianity cannot be seen simply as, or be reduced simply to, an ideological captive of liberalism but as having a much fuller viewpoint that genuinely seeks this (higher) middle or third way sometimes referred to by Lonergan and his followers.

As Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ very much enlivened this debate from the official Christian side, an important earlier 1981 encyclical by John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, also reopened the dialogue debate in powerful ways that simply is not mentioned by Raymaker and Whalon. Also, besides the encyclical, there is an extraordinary and highly relevant commentary, The Priority of Labor, again offered by Greory Baum. As a guide to this complex area of concern, it is luminous and thus very helpful for sorting out these identity terms – “liberal,” “Marxist,” even “Christian,” which can all be used very loosely and even confusedly.

Laborem Exercens’s criticism of Marxism, Baum shows convincingly, is directed toward the official Marxism of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which at the time was viewed as rigidly economistic, whereas the Christian perspective offered is, according to Baum, very much inspired by more creative Marxist analyses and critiques of real-world capitalism. When the encyclical treats of liberalism, its target is economic liberalism, which it finds to be equally economistic, with a very restricted notion of individual freedom and a notion of a so-called free market that in fact never really existed historically. This is because there have always been significant political forces at play in our contemporary Western society, and so it is simplistic, misleading, even deliberately deceptive to define our economy as governed by a free market. The classical liberal picture may be used for misleading ideological purposes, but government has been deeply involved in our economies. Liberals and neo-liberals have always ideologically promoted and defended a type of reform capitalism. But the encyclical asserts that such novel developments have occurred in the organization of capital and in the development of technology, and that there have been grave consequences for workers creating new conditions of exploitation. Multinational corporations have gained enormous power, so that national governments are now effectively prevented from guiding their national economies and protecting their people from exploitation. (see Adam D.K. King’s article in the ‘Other News’ tab)

Baum’s commentary acknowledges that the encyclical’s analysis in this area is brief and limited. In addition, he cites how the traditional Catholic distinction between the use and ownership of capital needs much further work and development to remain credible (certainly for Marxists). And he is forthright in how official and institutional Christian political interests in situations of serious social conflict, too, have often defended or sided with capitalist interests over socialist interests. Nevertheless, the encyclical is insightful in noting the similar exploitation of workers that can occur under both capitalist and communist regimes. And yet, Baum notes that in the Christian view, a society does have the right to nationalize ownership of privately owned industries and financial organizations whenever corporations’ power is such that it is impossible for the common good to be protected and served by a nation’s government. Clearly, according to Baum, with this encyclical, the social good of even reform capitalism is now seriously in question for many Christians because of actual practical or lived experience.

This encyclical is nothing less than a highly relevant instruction from the Christian side of the Christian-Marxist dialogue. It can help prepare us again for considering the actual nature and relevance of more recent discussions, as in the recent Lonerganian effort to advance to some higher synthesis for what increasingly, in my view, can be cast as this liberal-Marxist dialectic, especially in its relevance for our own times, with its troubling planetary circumstances. We can see how from both the Christian side and the Marxist side there is this reach for some kind or measure of transcendence over ideological capture, or what Baum has called “deadening reification.”

Baum’s commentary is especially good at emphasizing certain key elements in the Christian position – too easily overlooked – that align in significant ways with the Marxist position on labour and its economic value. Baum explains that human labour for Christianity is central to human self-making and self-understanding. Thus, the conflicts causing oppression, alienation, wars, and dehumanization in our industrial age, which is still unfolding, are seen to be largely based in this conflict between capital and labour. There is this conflict between the small but powerful group of entrepreneurs, owners, and holders of the means of production and the much larger and broader multitude of people who lack these means and thus share in the production process solely by means of their labour. For the encyclical, says Baum, this conflict over work is certainly a central problem of society, if not the central problem, in both the East and the West, and also in the developing world. Human life constitutes itself everywhere on this economic basis. For the encyclical, this problem between capital and labour is not to be seen as due to sin, at least not sin understood generally as a matter of personal or private selfishness. This conflict has to be understood in a larger historical-societal and structural context having to do with capitalism’s historical development. All other conflicts and structures of oppression must be understood in the light of this economic infrastructure. Thus, there is this need, according to Baum, to pause to consider more carefully the nature of capital, asking, “What is capital?” Objectively, capital is the natural resources we use along with the means by which these resources are transformed to meet human needs. Thus, it refers to the means of production and the money needed to pay for labour and technology.

However, an often overlooked or forgotten point—and it is fundamental for our argument here and going forward—is that this capital is always the result of human labour. All this capital is the result of people’s work. Capital is labour transformed into the means of production. The encyclical recognizes and emphasizes how there is a seriously distorted economic understanding of this capital–labour relationship. There is, in the history of liberalism, this economic view that sees labour and capital as distinct and separate quantities in the productive process. Human labour’s behaviour was seen to follow the laws of the market in a type of economism which the Christian Church also viewed and denounced as a type of materialism. Both the capitalist class and their liberal economist apologists promoted this practical materialism. They did so without denying spiritual reality outright, though people became viewed, for the most part, as acting in accordance with economic laws. This is the liberal thesis. Marx and the Marxist anti-thesis protested this subjugation of labour to capital. But for most Christians, Marxism was also seen to retain the error of economism, where the human being continued to be solely understood in economic terms. Culture and consciousness were regarded as reflections of economic conditions, and the reality of the spiritual was denied or subordinated to these economic-materialist conditions.

Nevertheless, Baum calls attention to an important departure in the encyclical from the classical view that says we first get ideas and then act on them. The encyclical, in contrast, gives practice a certain primacy over theory, in the sense that the economic theories of the liberal economists are understood to be rooted in the distorted practices of the early capitalists, who were hiring labourers at the lowest wage possible and treating them only as economic units in a productive process with the sole purpose of maximizing profit. From a traditional Christian perspective, this was both immoral and irrational and was the material basis for this distorting theoretical separation of capital from labour. These early entrepreneurs, it seemed, were intent on breaking with the feudal order, where ownership of land carried with it the social duty to provide for the well-being of the peasants living and working on the land. This, then, is the historical context for what the encyclical presents as the natural priority of labour over capital and for where it was first violated in practice and then justified ideologically in liberal economic theory by virtue of an erroneous or distorting separation. Despite our tendency to ignore these insights in the West, we nevertheless owe a great debt to Baum’s persistent probing of these questions for this illumination of the issue. We still have much to learn from this Christian–Marxist dialogue, and Baum knew this well. He remains a good and relevant model in how to proceed.

Hugh Williams received his doctorate in philosophy from the Dominican University College in Ottawa. He has taught philosophy part-time at both St. Thomas University and the University of New Brunswick; he is now retired from teaching. His scholarly work continues as an independent researcher with a sustained interested in both theory and practice. Other papers can be accessed at academia.edu. Williams has also worked in the area of human services and community development for most of his life.