Left, Right or Personalist?

There is a growing sense of the pressing need to move beyond the confused and sterile categories of Left and Right. Perhaps the awareness that rethinking is in order is more acute for most observers with respect to the Left. We have recently witnessed the stunning collapse of state socialism. Much of the Left in the West was either directly im­plicated in sustaining state socialism or willing to tolerate, to various degrees, the now universally ac­knowledged crimes, often heinous, committed in the name of Communism. Moreover, in Great Britain and Scandinavia, leftist policies seem at least partly to blame for compromising the economic vitality of whole societies. In the U.S. some welfare policies might well have contributed to the emergence of cycles of dependence and passivity that help entrench a growing and increasingly violent underclass. It is no wonder that a Louis Farrakhan strikes a respon­sive chord in many African-Americans and equally no wonder that both Clarence Thomas and Jesse Jack­son can find praiseworthy elements in his message. Statist benevolence can never supplant disciplined self-help. Moreover, the Left’s apotheosis of privacy has weakened the family, which is the critical center in the struggle against poverty.

But the Right lacks credibility too. Internationally, the Right has specialized in military dictatorships. Domestically, the Right has not done a credible job of disassociating itself from military dictatorships abroad. Moreover, the Right, with its touting of capitalism, is deeply implicated in the production of a consumerist culture in which things progressively displace people and nearly all aspects of our lives become commodities. The economic individualism of the Right helps drive the cultural individualism accelerating the erosion of the family. The irony is tragic. Right-wing economic policies undermine the professedly conservative regard for family.

The demise of Communism has occasioned a triumphal glee among apologists for capitalism. But capitalism, whether of the radical or mitigated sort, must not escape our critical scrutiny. And there is a still fresh basis for criticism found in the personalist philosophy associated with Christians like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier.

Radical capitalism shows the following salient features: Its basic moral claim is that individuals enjoy a nearly absolute right to property. Consequently, there are severe limits on the political sphere. Of course, those who have property can voluntarily tax their own property. To do so is often necessary to maintain public services and insure physical secu­rity at the local and national levels. Radical capital­ism, however, denies that there is any natural politi­cal order that could place morally binding restric­tions on the acquisition and use of private property.

It also denies that capital has any duty to con­tribute directly to the common good, broadly conceived. For radical capitalism insists that it already pays its “social dues” through the economic productivity it generates. Indeed, for the radical capi­talist the concept of a common good is woefully abstract. What is paramount is the economic vital­ity that only a free market stimulates. An unrestricted market, so goes the argument, contributes to the preference-satisfaction of everyone.

But the central claims of the radical capitalist are seriously flawed. The point at which a critical response should begin is with the claim that indi­viduals enjoy an absolute right to private property. Part of what is perverse about this assertion is that it presupposes that everyone has had an equal op­portunity to acquire private property. Given our physical and intellectual inequalities, compounded by generations of inherited wealth and advantages, the fancifully shared “starting line” in the race for property does not, in fact, afford us with anything approaching equal opportunity.

Another deep mistake affecting the radical capitalist’s posture is that it places property over per­sons and their basic needs. Given the equal worth and dignity of persons (regardless of physical, intel­lectual, and other differences), it is perverse to credit an absolute right to a superabundance of resources while some people, through no fault of their own, cannot meet their most pressing needs.

No one is clearer and, for bourgeois Christians, more surprising than Thomas Aquinas in challenging absolutist views about private ownership. In a striking passage, he insists that “whatever goods some have in superabundance are due, by natural law, to the sustenance of the poor.” It does not fol­low from this, or from anything else Aquinas writes, that he opposes private property. His argument for private property is that it offers the best method for distributing property so that it meets basic human needs: “each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need.” Yet Aquinas is not naïve about the probity of our stewardship. Sup­pose we do not distribute to those in grave need that property which we hold as stewards. Aquinas is shockingly blunt:

if the need be so manifest and urgent that it is evident that the present need must be rem­edied by whatever means be at hand (for in­stance, when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible rem­edy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, taking it either openly or secretly, nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.

Property, he insists, is for persons. Property calls for common use, not a grasping and private domination. There is, indeed, a place for private property. It is a vehicle to distribute material resources as widely and efficiently as possible, one that fits well with the fact that we take far better care of property which we ourselves own. Aquinas’s position recognizes the dignity of all persons, which radical capitalism largely ignores.

And what of the radical capitalist thesis that the political sphere cannot legitimately direct or regulate the economy? Were there some absolute right to property, one might sustain this claim. But there is no such right. Moreover, the broadly politi­cal order — culminating at the national level, but beginning with the most basic groupings of society, for example, the family and local community — has a prior and natural standing. Because the human person is social by nature, basic community struc­tures (family, neighborhood, local schools, and churches) in which the person experiences his social character have an authority that allows him to shape the economic processes that affect him. Thus capitalists, who owe their very existence to basic sustaining communities, cannot rightly claim to be able to operate independently of any re­strictions those communities set forth.

To be sure, radical capitalists might answer that capitalism meets its social responsibility whenever the market freely realizes its own goals. If we are to pursue a common good, their response might continue, the economic system best promotes this good when left unrestricted and autonomous, for the ge­nius of the free market is that each person enjoys a forum in which to realize his desires. Indeed, the radical capitalist might claim that the free-mar­ket model offers us the best account of how con­cretely to realize the common good.

This line of argument faces at least three ma­jor objections. First, the free market often fails to give a voice to many of those its transactions affect. Consider how this failure colors ecological concerns. Narrow market interests might dictate selling off for development great parcels of privately or publicly owned land, despite grave ecological risk. Whole for­ests can be logged, their harvest sold to eager buy­ers, while endangered species come closer to extinc­tion and future generations face an impoverished ecology.

A second objection is that often even individu­als who are party to market decisions do not make them in a truly voluntary way. The status of farm workers in California and other states offers a tell­ing example. Because of consumer demand for cheap produce and because of the press of impoverished labor from Mexico, farm workers must now accept wages and working conditions worse than they experienced some 10 years ago, and efforts to build effective unions suffer serious reversals. Technically, farm laborers function freely in the market; no one holds them physically hostage. But the economic pressures they face painfully limit their practical free­dom. It is nonsensical to present them as willing partners in their own exploitation.

Perhaps the most heinous example of a free market manipulating the terrible needs of its “free” participants is the buying and selling of vital organs. Banned in the U.S., this odious practice is allowed in Europe and elsewhere, including some Third World countries. A person who sells, say, a kidney, does so only because of crushing economic pressure. In Europe the sellers of vital organs have often been migrant workers from Third World countries. The scope for “entrepreneurial” profiteering is enormous.

A last objection to radical capitalism contests its claim that an unrestricted market gives concrete meaning to the concept of the common good. It is a deep misunderstanding of the common good to sup­pose that a combination of (sometimes) free choices and the commodities so chosen can blindly achieve it. When one thinks of the range of basic goods cen­tral to human flourishing, one would surely include life and health, friendship and authenticity, knowl­edge and truth, and excellence in work and the de­light of play. Without these goods, we cannot pre­tend to a common good. But there is no market where we can buy these goods. True, certain mate­rial pre-conditions of such goods can be commodi­ties. A hospital service might be a condition for health, but no guarantee; books might be a condi­tion for knowledge, but no guarantee. Still, to con­fuse material pre-conditions with the goods them­selves is a simplistic materialism, which runs counter to our actual experience, for what is truly best in our lives has no price.

Such a reductionist view of the common good also characteristically distorts our understanding of freedom. Agnostic about the authentic basic goods, this reductionism presents freedom as pure process and the only value more fundamental than the com­modities from which it selects. Such a freedom is a negative freedom only. One is free, in theory, from coercive factors outside the market. But what is one free for? Moreover, no activity in the market, apart from the criterion of productivity, is of more worth than another. From the market’s perspective, a pimp can be as welcome as a professor — more so, if he generates greater wealth.

Thus, radical capitalism distorts the nature of both person and community, and is a profound obstacle to the development of a decent society. Still, it would be badly misleading to suggest that all capi­talism is radical capitalism. While theorists of radi­cal capitalism are influential, most practicing capitalists would probably disavow radical capitalism.

What, then, does personalist thinking make of a more familiar and more restrained “mitigated capitalism”?

Discussion of the differences between radical and mitigated capitalism has developed around John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which he renewed long-standing and sharp Catho­lic criticisms of radical capitalism. At the same time he offered, doubtless by way of commentary on the economic transformations pursued in eastern Eu­rope and the former Soviet Union, favorable com­ments about the potential of a market economy. John Paul did not aim to be either systematic or ex­haustive. His point, rather, was to present a theological context for pressing political and economic questions, among them the legitimacy of capitalism.

Indeed, while the Pope proposes certain ideals for capitalism, he does not give a precise definition of the mitigated capitalism we need to assess. Let me offer, then, the following account. Mitigated capitalism recognizes that economics is not indepen­dent of the larger political and juridical framework of society. In this regard, mitigated capitalism is a marked improvement over radical capitalism. If it is not yet “capitalism with a human face,” we might still think of it as “capitalism with accountability.” Such a capitalism indirectly contributes to the com­mon good, if the political and juridical processes which regulate the economy themselves support the common good (such processes sometimes undermine the common good).

Nonetheless, mitigated capitalism remains a system in which the ownership and direction of economic processes is almost exclusively controlled by those who possess private capital. Moreover, it sees the primary goal of the economic processes thus controlled to be gaining profit for those who provide capital. This mitigated capitalism remains flawed — for at least three reasons.

First, it does not acknowledge a direct respon­sibility to contribute to the common good. It is hardly enough for institutions, or their practitioners, to pursue self-interest restricted only by external political and juridical factors. Would we congratu­late teachers or artists or physicians who practiced their professions wholly for the sake of self-interest if they reassured us that they remained accountable to basic political and juridical restrains? We expect more of the professions: that they directly contrib­ute to the common good. What a transformed capital­ism requires, and what mitigated capitalism seldom offers, is a direct commitment to the common good.

A second reason mitigated capitalism remains flawed is that it sharply restricts the control of economic and productive processes to those who pro­vide capital. And why is this unacceptable? After all, without capital it is impossible to build a factory or to launch a business or to offer a wide range of services. Since capital is essential, why should not those who provide it control a society’s economic produc­tion? The short reply is that without labor there would be no economic production to direct. Given that labor is as essential as capital, it is a fundamen­tal error to leave the direction of our productive pro­cesses solely in the hands of capital.

It is true that indirectly labor influences, and sometimes greatly, our economy. Organized labor especially can exert pressure to improve working conditions. The individual worker, too, if not locked in by financial need, can bring his labor to an employer whose policies are more constructive and who recognizes a greater role for employee initia­tive. But such contributions are indirect; moreover, they often take place in an adversarial fashion. The dominant pattern is that worker influence comes into play chiefly as a result of competition between the self-interest of capital and the self-interest of la­bor. Co-operation is an afterthought.

We need, however, to move past this adversary relationship and recognize that all who contribute in an essential way to an economic process should play a direct role in its governance. Different capacities, of course, will lead to different roles. No one suggests that, say, a business can function without some sort of executive leadership, and no one sug­gests that workers might at random hold these lead­ership roles. (Nor, by comparison, does any propo­nent of political democracy hold that citizens should at random serve as senators.) But if all who share in making possible an economic process share in its direction, their commitment to that process will in­crease enormously. Thus, even for the capitalist such a state of affairs should be desirable.

A third reason mitigated capitalism is badly flawed is that its paramount goal is gaining profit for those who, in providing capital, direct economic production. Of course, profit is a basic and legiti­mate goal. In significant part, profit should come to those whose capital, voluntarily put at risk, makes it possible. In awarding profit, risk should have its re­ward. However, we must recognize that workers also take a risk in choosing long-term employment with a particular firm. Should the firm fail, they might find their benefits depleted or lost and their possibil­ity of comparable employment elsewhere minimal. But risk is surely not the sole basis for the awarding of profit. Every kind of contribution to a productive enterprise ought to bring with it a corresponding reward in the form of a share in profit. The good of a common enterprise should not be restricted to the private good of only a few.

Related to these three objections, in particular the first, is mitigated capitalism’s addiction to a system of marketing that depends on relentless, gener­ally stultifying, and often manipulative advertising. Perhaps there is no essential link between mitigated capitalism and the pervasive and alienating advertising we have come to expect. But in practice the two are closely joined.

Apologists for the advertising agencies instruct us that advertising informs us how to acquire useful goods and services. There is perhaps a kernel of truth here. Yet advertising regularly operates on a prin­ciple of numbing repetition. Even the cleverness which we associate with effective advertising serves chiefly to induce us to keep in mind a “message” with which we are already familiar. The classic advertising genre, “the jingle,” induces us to rehearse a commercial to ourselves and do so in a way that lessens our resistance to its appeal. Such a process, even when we are inveigled into co-operating with it, is stultifying. It undercuts critical thought and wins its objective by wearying repetition.

And yet the example of the jingle is now almost antique. A whole arsenal of new “high-tech” stratagems aims at identifying markets whose sales resis­tance is already weak and then deliberately exploit­ing these vulnerabilities — hence the appeals to al­coholic escapism and athletic fantasies in minority neighborhoods.

Even if advertising is in order, it is wasteful if the products it sells satisfy largely artificial needs. And in our consumer culture such is the case with a great many products. There is only an artificial need for junk food and most cosmetics. While there is a real need for transportation, the need for luxury cars must be carefully and cynically nurtured. There is a need for footwear, but the need for gimmick-laden luxury tennis shoes has to be deliberately and cal­lously cultivated.

What, then, does personalist thought offer us? It rejects state socialism. But is also rejects both radi­cal and mitigated capitalism. So where are we to turn? Isn’t it presumptuous, perhaps even quixotic and irresponsible, to suppose that there are real al­ternatives to the standard economics of our time?

Personalists endorse what Catholic social thought calls the principle of subsidiarity. This prin­ciple, which Pope Pius XI first articulated in the en­cyclical Quadragesimo Anno, finds fresh affirmation in the work of E.F. Schumacher and, still more re­cently, in studies by Robert Bellah and his associ­ates. Seeing subsidiarity as a cornerstone of citizen participation in a complex society, Bellah offers the following helpful statement of it: “power should de­volve on the lowest, most local level at which deci­sions can reasonably be made, with the function of the larger unit being to support and assist the local body in carrying out its tasks.”

What would an economics that respects subsidiarity be like? The key economic embodiment of subsidiarity is worker participation, substantive and direct, in organizing work and managing production. Such worker participation, while it would ordinarily move toward a leading role for workers in the owning and directing of the means of produc­tion, distribution, and communication, is not a form of state socialism. The state has no more legitimate a claim to the direct control of the means of production and distribution and communication than does capital. Either claim, if accepted, violates subsidiarity; either limits the sphere of freedom nec­essary for human development.

Genuine worker participation, though it would naturally tend toward a major worker role in ownership, allows for its own gradual development and takes on a wide variety of forms. A first step might simply be profit sharing. A second might be worker representation on executive boards. A third might be progressive stock ownership on the part of work­ers, both individually and as a group. In time such measures can transform a society dominated by capi­talist models into a society shaped by co-operativist models.

But might this become in practice an organi­zational nightmare? Would we confront a new source of paralysis? Any substantive decision would now de­pend on a seemingly endless process of collaboration within and among the units constituting the whole. More and more people would be drawn into economic deci­sion-making; as a result of this democratization, deci­sions would take longer and longer to make. Would we not lose as much as we gain?

The objection does identify a core truth. Col­laboration has limits. Because of these limits, a reasonable decentralization does not eliminate the “cen­ter.”

But this core truth is by no means at odds with the principle of subsidiarity. In fact, subsidiarity acknowledges the need for larger units of control where smaller units are ineffective. Moreover, a critical as­pect of the decentralizing process is to structure the tasks at hand to fit better with the way in which we can optimally address them. While some production technologies require a centralizing of labor and its direction, others do not. Subsidiarity will not elimi­nate all centralized units, but a personalist economy will aggressively and imaginatively seek out decen­tralizing alternatives wherever they are practical.

Here an important clarification is in order. Personalist worker ownership is not meant to ex­clude co-direction on the part of capital. The per­sonalist goal is not to bestow a “victory” on either labor or capital. The goal is to achieve a real democ­racy — and, more, a solidarity — at the economic level. When personalists urge greater worker owner­ship, they emphasize that both exclusive state own­ership and exclusive capital ownership disenfran­chise most of the very people who have deep and immediate connections with our economic enter­prises — those who contribute their daily labor to them. But it would be a blunder to suppose that any complex economy could function well without sig­nificant amounts of private capital. Nor need capi­tal, by some sort of internal dynamic, subvert the worker share in ownership and economic direction.

What personalism seeks is, to be sure, difficult to secure: a genuine and far-reaching co-operation. Such co-operation is impossible without an enor­mous increase in worker participation in ownership. But neither is it possible without capital.

Personalism, to be sure, has never been the di­recting political philosophy of any country. In one way this “outsider” status is a drawback. Yet the re­verse is also true. No government has drawn on the personalist perspective and found it wanting. Still, the core vision of personalism has enjoyed a careful and sustained institutional articulation, albeit not in the political framework of a nation-state. Where, then, are we to look? We find this articulation in the social teaching of the Catholic Church.

In Catholic social teaching the person plays the pivotal role in the order of values. John Paul’s Centesimus Annus urgently underscores the central role of the person:

the guiding principle of…all the Church’s social doctrine is a correct view of the hu­man person and of his unique value…. God has imprinted his own image and likeness on man (Gen. 1:26), conferring upon him an incomparable dignity…. In effect, beyond the rights which man acquires by his own work, there exist rights which do not corre­spond to any work he performs, which flow from his essential dignity as a person. (#11)

It is no surprise that John Paul II, surveying the enormous changes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, identifies the basic flaw of state socialism in the language of a personalist anthropology:

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 moral order. (#13)

How does capitalism fare in John Paul’s en­cyclical? In some quarters there has been a determined effort to give the document a decidedly capi­talist spin. The Pope does speak of the genuine prom­ise for private initiative that a market economy can bring. But nothing he says gives comfort to radical capitalism. Answering the question whether capi­talism should be the goal of countries emerging from Communism, John Paul makes critical distinctions:

if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not cir­cumscribed within a strong juridical frame­work which places it at the service of hu­man freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (#42)

At the same time, the potential for capitalism, dif­ferently understood, can be positive:

If by “capitalism” is meant an economic sys­tem which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free hu­man creativity in the economic order, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more ap­propriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” (#42)

But sort-of capitalism or “free economy” is not the equivalent of the mitigated capitalism I have been challenging.

John Paul characterizes a “free economy” as one which “presumes a certain equality between the parties [capital and the state] such that one party would not be so powerful as practically to reduce the other to subservience” (#15). The state must protect the worker and the common good by regu­lating the market. He also says that “it is unaccept­able to say that the defeat of so-called ‘real social­ism’ [Communism] leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization” (#35). Toward what is he pointing? In an adjoining footnote, he cites his Laborem Exercens, where he recommends “profound changes” in capitalism by which workers come to “share in running businesses,” an idea which he repeats later in Centesimus Annus.

Nor does John Paul accept profit as the impe­rial factor in a free economy. Profit is legitimate — it shows that production is efficient. But there is a deeper consideration: the regard for persons. “It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for people — who make up the firm’s most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended” (#35). Thus he asserts that “the pur­pose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit” (#42) — business, he insists, is for people. If John Paul’s “free economy” is capitalism, it is a capital­ism that has yet to be born.

The Pope also distinguishes between genuine human needs and the relentlessly contrived and manipulated needs consumerism stimulates. The economic system, on its own, cannot draw this criti­cal line: “Of itself, an economic system does not possess criteria for correctly distinguishing new and higher forms of satisfying human needs from artifi­cial new needs which hinder the formation of a new personality” (#36). The advertising industry is a major part of the problem.

However ascendant capitalism now is, the bur­den of John Paul’s thinking is that it does not offer us morally adequate direction for either our mate­rial development or our larger self-understanding. To realize either goal we need a much deeper vision of the nature and dignity of the person in community.