NEITHER CAPITALIST NOR MARXIST Discovered: Karol Wojtyla's 1953 book on social ethics
Kwitny, Jonathan
NEITHER CAPITALIST Karol Wojtyla's social ethics MARXIST Jonathan Kwilny Romuald Kukolowicz, now in his seventies, is the son of Polish Catholic intellectuals. In 1953, he was working as a...
...What is incompatible is Marxism's subjugation of the individual human spirit to a grand economic design after the revolution...
...Individualism and totalitarianism," he declared, "remain opposed to the principle of correlating the individual good and the social good, which Catholic ethics accepts...
...The second volume of Catholic Social Ethics was more specifically concerned with "rebuilding the economic system [and] defining the many moral obligations of owning and using property...
...The class struggle...grows stronger when it meets resistance from the economically privileged classes...
...You can't imagine how libraries looked...
...Regarding capitalism, Wojtyla said, An economic enterprise based on capital is ethically justified if it contributes to social prosperity...
...Wojtyla wrote that "ethical evil is caused" not by those wishing to rebel but "by those factors of the socioeconomic system that have spawned the need for a radical movement...
...To my knowledge, this is the book's first Jonathan Kwitny is a former features writer for the Wall Street Journal...
...Wojtyla separated Marx's analysis of economic exploitation, which he largely accepted, from Marx's solutions, which he rejected...
...The Catholic social ethic," he wrote in 1953, "agrees that in many cases a struggle is the way to accomplish the common good...
...Private property is suited to human nature...
...But if its main goal is to maximize the profit of the owner, then it is ethically wrong...
...Copies went to priests who taught students in all the major cities of Poland...
...All printers were registered by the government...
...Wojtyla wrote: Demonstrations, protests, strikes, and passive resistance all these are means of class struggle that need to be considered appropriate...
...Primary was the family, the success of which depended on its "close cooperation" with the church and the state...
...If the security forces found such a book in your apartment, you would be subject to ten years in prison...
...He explicitly embraced Marx's essential theory that "the economic factor...explains, rather substantially, the different facts of human history...
...Marxism, he wrote, sought a classless society...
...Regarding labor, Wojtyla again rejected strict free-market doctrine, returning instead to the ideal of the Polish poet Cyprian Norwid (1821-83), that "work cannot be treated as merchandise...
...Marxism...does not see any other way to solve the burning social issues....Catholicism sees the possibility of solving...social issues by evolutionary means...
...It also shows that by age thirty-three, Wojtyla had adopted unreservedly both the welfare-state economic ideas and the courage of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Polish primate...
...Wojtyla's rationale for private property differed from that of free-market theorists, and what he wrote about it makes for fairly explosive reading in the 1990s: "The church realizes that the bourgeois mentality, and capitalism with its material spirit, are contradictions of the Bible...
...When I saw him it was always [to discuss] what to publish and how," Kukolowicz remembers...
...Government had "a superior function" that was "very useful in achieving the common good of society...
...Although many thought the pope was reversing himself, he was in fact using almost the same words he had used forty years before in class lectures and in his book, and had been using ever since...
...Kukolowicz found an underground printer in Lublin...
...While the church clearly sees and proclaims the need for reform of the socioeconomic system, it does not consider necessary a radical upheaval in attitude toward property....The re-creation of the socioeconomic system may be achieved while maintaining the institution of private property, and should be based on the enfranchisement of the proletariat...
...The struggle for rights, after exhausting all peaceful means...is a necessary act of justice that leads only to the achievement of the common good, which is the goal of social existence...
...The answer, Wojtyla decided, lay in distinguishing worthy ideals from practical possibilities...
...We learned about capitalism for the first time from Wojtyla's text," Bishop Pieronek recalls...
...Some 250 reams of printing paper were stolen by the members of this "conspiracy" from the state institutions where they worked...
...Criticism of capitalism the system of exploitation of human beings and human work is the unquestionable 'part of the truth' embodied in Marxism...
...Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, now secretary of the Polish episcopate but in 1954 a student in Wojtyla's social ethics course at the Jagiellonian, remembers being stunned to learn that Father Wojtyla had written a manual, several copies of which were passed around at the school...
...The university had a library, but the books were not accessible to the average reader...
...But he stressed that class should be among a person's secondary loyalties...
...If it is caused by social and material injustice, and if its goal is to reinstate the just distribution of goods, then such a struggle is not [hatred]....Social justice is the necessary condition for realization of love in life...
...The class struggle leads to this...
...The answer is yes...
...The main task of the Catholic social ethic is to introduce the principles of justice and love into social life," Wojtyla wrote in the first volume, on politics...
...Wojtyla was very concerned with pay...
...According to the tradition of...monastic/religious life, the church also can appreciate the idea of communism...
...Wojtyla said that collecting interest on loans "is ethically justified, given the current state of the world's economy...
...Wojtyla's biggest problem with Marxism, though, wasn't its advocacy of struggle but its opposition to the institution of private property...
...While this idea was somewhat Marxist (Marx said, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"), Wo-jtyla rejected the determination of compensation by need alone...
...it is sometimes necessary to Christianity...
...The common good is best achieved when individual members of society evenly attain material prosperity...
...Because] money...
...He tried to explain each system...
...Justice and love" must govern international relations as well, he wrote: "War is evil...
...Yet, war, he said, isn't permissible and isn't likely to improve conditions...
...Till the 1980s, whole lists of books were banned...
...Society should take special care of those in poverty...
...Even typewriters were registered, but authorities allowed you to type...
...Wojtyla and King each believed the struggle should be aimed at persuasion, not at violent, Marxist-style upheaval...
...In a chapter on Marxism, Wojtyla saw beyond the system that tyrannized his own life and into the issues that would later present themselves to him as pope...
...Revolution, though best avoided, is permissible and can improve conditions: Can the opposition that brings down [an unjust] government surpass all the damage that was caused by an armed struggle, and thus make the revolution ethically justified...
...But, he added, "the goal of these thoughts is not to criticize Marxism entirely...
...But he said interest rates should be limited not by what the market will bear but by ethical considerations...
...As a priest in the 1970s, Pieronek visited Cardinal Wojtyla for dinner and found parts of that old manual on a bookshelf in the dining room...
...It was published in two volumes, the first in 1953, the second the following year, with only 200 to 250 copies in each edition loose pages in an envelope, to be bound, if desired, by the recipient...
...The profit gained from work in the form of compensation is the main factor in the just division of the income of society," he wrote...
...It was a very strict conspiracy...
...In 1953, he was working as a clerk...
...And "the just solution to the problem of pay is the principle of family pay...
...After several years of close reading of Wojtyla's published words as both priest and pope, I cannot cite an instance of his saying anything to contradict what he wrote in Catholic Social Ethics...
...Pressure from the class struggle should bring appropriate changes in the socioeconomic system...
...During World War II, Kukolowicz had done work as an underground printer...
...He did not, however, dispute Catholic teaching that violence could be used to repel violent attacks...
...After a subsection headed "The Objective Superiority of the Communist Ideal" (the text of which I was unable to obtain), Wojtyla noted, At the present state of human nature, the universal realization of this [Communist] ideal...meets with insurmountable difficulties...
...Its power "comes directly from society, indirectly from God...
...is very important in the socio-economic process...the state should supervise monetary and credit policies for the good of the whole society...
...A struggle in does not have to be caused by hate...
...Rather than allying him with market capitalists, these views ring closer to those of supporters of "liberation theology," a Catholic movement that Wojtyla would later encounter in Latin America, which sought to redistribute capital...
...Revolution is not the doom of society, but at most a punishment for specific offenses in socioeconomic life...
...Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt & Company...
...Copyright © 2997, by Jonathan Kwitny...
...The goal that should be pursued is to achieve, in the system based on private property, such reforms as will lead to the realization of social justice...
...Wojtyla made a major distinction between revolution within a country and international war though in some ways, the distinction seems paradoxical: Revolution causes much more damage than war, because the unity of the natural society the nation or state is much greater than the international unity of humanity that gets torn in war....Hatred for those who are close to us is much more dangerous and inflicts much more damage than hatred for people who are further removed...
...But one cannot hate the human being himself...
...It is clear that from the view of the ethical assumptions of the Bible, such a struggle is a necessary evil, just like any other human struggle....It is also evident from the Bible that struggle itself is not the opposite of love...
...Not only is class-conscious revolution compatible with Christianity, he argued...
...A World War II press was used that required each page be rolled by hand over a typed matrix...
...It can be accepted that the majority of the people who have taken part in revolutions even violent ones have acted on their convictions, in accordance with their consciences...
...It was impossible to publish a manual in those days," Bishop Pieronek explains...
...Achievement of social justice in one element of achieving God's kingdom on earth...
...Although it does not have to be an act of hatred...such a struggle undoubtedly provides an opportunity for acts of hatred....One can hate negative characteristics of human beings...
...Although Marxism saw struggle as inevitable and desirable, Wojtyla goes on, "Catholicism cannot accept struggle as the principal ethical dictate....Regardless of all the factors that set people apart in society...there exist deeper factors that foster unity and solidarity...
...His statement on war went significantly beyond other current Catholic teaching, which allowed war if all else failed...
...The society must use all ethical means to save its members from poverty and lead them to prosperity...
...At the time, Poland was firmly part of Stalin's Soviet empire...
...In 1993, John Paul II would provoke mocking headlines when he criticized Poland and other post-Communist countries for accepting pure market economics from the West and thus abandoning the "grain of truth" in Marxism...
...Many times Jesus Christ has proven that God's kingdom cannot be achieved in man without a struggle...
...Did Kukolowicz know anyone who could do it...
...So we must strive to limit luxury and excessive wealth...
...Such a struggle is a necessary evil...
...To achieve this order, one must get rid of private property because it is the only source of class opposition...
...He wrote: The relentless materialism in Marxism contradicts Catholicism, [which] sees man as spirit and matter in one, [and which] proclaims the superiority of the spirit...Ethics is...the science of spiritual good, such as justice or love, that provides the material activities of human beings with specifically human values...
...This gives ethics primacy [over materialism] in economics or biology...
...Kukolowicz's is the only copy I have encountered...
...The exchange of goods complements the economic process....Therefore it is ethically justified, like production, so long as it does not lead to unjustified, speculative profits....A just profit depends on a just price for merchandise, which is determined by using an appropriate value theory...
...An entrepreneur has a right to a reasonable, moderate profit, considering both his own work and his financial investment...for example, for renting land...
...It should be avoided even as a last resort to restore justice between countries, because it may result in even greater evil and injustice than it combats...
...In determining family pay," he wrote, one should consider the economic state of the enterprise and of the whole country...
...The work, called Catholic Social Ethics, is nowhere described in Kalendarium (the official diary of John Paul II's life up to his pontificate) or any other available literature...
...This article is from Man of the Century by Jonathan Kwitny...
...Kukolowicz calculates that his friends had to press some 112,750 sheets of paper separately to make the book...
...Tracing economic history from feudalism to the industrial age, he endorsed the Marxist notions of a working class and a class struggle...
...Communism, as a higher ethical rule of ownership, demands from people higher ethical qualifications...
...Catholic Social Ethics reinforces the notion that Wojtyla was a Thomist rather than a phenomenologist...
...They weren't given [directly] to students because of the need for secrecy," Kukolowicz says...
...Grappling with this forced him to think through, perhaps for the first time in print, what Saint John of the Cross had said about material wealth...
...As the manuscript was typed, edited, and published, there were more meetings between Kukolowicz and Wojtyla, but little small talk...
...The entire tradition and teaching of the church is clearly opposed to capitalism as the socioeconomic system of life, and as a general value system...
...Determination of the price is a function of society...
...The Vatican confirms his story...
...The opposite of love is hate...
...No longer a novice or small-parish priest, Wojtyla instead marked himself in this book as a serious, innovative thinker with his eye on the world...
...Although many anti-Communists would later try to co-opt Wojtyla into their military policies, he condemned war unequivocally in 1953, even as a means to correct injustice, because he believed it tended only to create new injustice...
...Bn Catholic Social Ethics, Wojtyla set down rules for social struggle that are strikingly similar to those that would be enunciated less than a decade later by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States...
...The struggle of the oppressed classes against their oppressors becomes the stimulus for the evolution to proceed faster...
...Police agents infiltrated the classes...
...The question must have crossed Wojtyla's mind before: If Saint John, about whom Wojtyla had written a dissertation in Rome in 1948, had been right about abandoning physical property, why weren't the Communists right about it...
...His friends arranged for him to pick up the manuscript from the professor Father Karol Wojtyla at a convent in Krakow...
...it asserts at its inception that Aquinas's natural law "allows theories of ethics" to be stated with "scientific" precision...
...public disclosure, and it belies much that has been written in the West about Wojtyla in recent years portraying the pope as an ally of free-market Western politicians...
...His PBS series, "The Kwitny Report," won the George Polk Award for investigative reporting...
...Wojtyla condemned "individualism," a word that he and other European scholars used to refer to unregulated capitalism...
...Today...a class struggle...is the undeniable responsibility of the proletariat...
...Its premise was: "Because private ownership of property is ethically good if the property is used appropriately, individual owners and especially the state should carefully watch its use...
...The nation, as the natural society, must be respected," he wrote, but "the common good demands" a balance between "loyalty to the nation...and, on the other hand, avoidance of overzealous nationalism...
...He has championed the "family pay" concept ever since, arguing that the size and needs of a worker's family should influence the amount of wages or salary...
...Some friends from those days, now students at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, approached him, raving about a young professor whose lectures on Catholic ethics and communism were inspiring and ought to be published...
Vol. 124 • October 1997 • No. 17
