| A Review of 'Can A Catholic Be A Socialist?'

A Review of 'Can A Catholic Be A Socialist?'

In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine, and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

As a criticism of Catholic Socialism, Horn and Pakulak (H&P) offer a thoroughly mediocre rebuttal. As a defense of capitalism as an economic system, H&P offer an underwhelming picture. On the other hand, as an exemplar of current Republican polemics, H&P give it to us, par excellence, with several chapters feeling as if they could have been lifted straight from a Glenn Beck book from when he still had a program on Fox News.

The book is hampered on the first two counts by several issues:

Poor organization and editing of the book,
A failure to take socialist theory or socialists seriously and engage them on the deepest terms, betraying inconsistency or an apparent lack of knowledge on the topic itself,
An apparent lack of self reflection on the failures of capitalism beyond the bare minimum on a historical and economic basis and finally
A refusal, whether deliberate or not, of the totality of the moral and anthropological effects of capitalism on the human man in the West.

I have ordered these concerns in what I perceive to be of ascending importance, and I am myself about to punt somewhat on the second point thanks to the review of Daniel Walden recently in Bias Magazine where he apparently noted many of the same issues that I did a couple of months before I brought myself to reading the text.

I have a great appreciation for H&P keeping their text accessible for anyone and a fondness for examples in my own attempts to teach, but I think that these two qualities do not overcome some of the flaws that openly detract from an actual enjoyment of the text. In their attempts to use examples, H&P often introduce an episode from history which promptly disappears without much consideration later- in fact, the only consistent historical figure mentioned in this book would be Pope Pius XI.

Take for example, Huey Long, a genuinely fascinating populist figure whom they spent a paragraph discussing as a socialist only for Mr. Long to not even be considered a socialist by their own definition and who is never mentioned again after their first chapter. Another (living figure) whom they mention multiple times is one Mr. Jose Mena as well as some of his coauthors under the “Tradinista” label, yet one finds references to Mr. Mena and his ideas not in a single place, but scattered throughout the book. References abound throughout the book in a seemingly haphazard way to the Soviet, Maoist Chinese, North Korean, Cuban, and Chavez regimes creating a disjoint narrative that works far less effectively than, in my opinion, a more in depth case study would have. No argument I’ve ever heard has been as compelling for the evils of the Soviet regime as spending a day with a friend’s father who grew up as a Jewish man in 1970s and 1980s Russia. To borrow from Whittaker Chambers, it is far easier to “hear the screams” when one focuses on depth, not breadth.

But this disjointedness is not limited itself to the breadth (and not depth) of examples nor to the multiple places where I am forced to keep track of the same authors, but also to the thematic messages of each chapter. H&P present a chapter entitled “Pius XI and Socialism’s Victims”, wherein we are treated to dialogues or mentions of gulags, the Biblical figure Jethro, and the importance of family in only three pages, with little segue between them. Nevertheless, as I am an economist and not an editor, I shall move on to the objectively bigger fish.

An incredibly irritating point of the book is the lack of engagement with socialist theory, which infects much of their criticism. As Walden has rightfully pointed out, H&P seem somewhat lost on the exact nature of Marxist class when they argue that hazard pay would bring about social class. Fundamentally, a well paid lawyer and a grocery store clerk are both of the same class, the proletariat, while the man who has just opened a business repairing A/C units with his own workers is fundamentally (petite) bourgeois. Whether we ought hold to this class analysis is a different question entirely and would make for a much more interesting question (albeit at the risk of doing PMC discourse) than what was actually asserted. The assertion that we will have an unskilled morass of workers during Marxist superabundance and this would be bad once again is another example of H&P fundamentally missing the point. This would have been an opportune time for them to rightly criticize early Marxist theory and its beliefs about superabundance or to bring up the shift to the service economy since Marx’s time (a thing they do later in an offhanded criticism), but instead, H&P are content to ask me if I wanted to have a plumber who started doing it as a hobby.

Furthermore, even when H&P get the theory correct, they manage to drop the ball. They define socialism as collective control of the means of production in line with traditional definitions of it, but following that they immediately equivocate collective ownership with state ownership of enterprises. In doing so, they immediately ignore the syndicalist tradition long associated with socialism, but they quickly move on to asserting the equivalence of state ownership of enterprises with planned economies. It’s a dizzying tour that almost makes one forget that Soviet bloc theorists long contemplated questions of market socialism, that pre-Thatcherite Britian had an extremely significant state ownership of what would become private enterprises, or that the Nazis (asserted to be socialists in the text) and the Soviets were not the only planned economies during the Second World War as the Anglosphere saw planned economies.

Following on this tour de force of equivocation, H&P then lack apparent consistency or depth in their actual attempts to follow through on this definition. As I have noted, Mr. Mena and the Tradinistas seem to loom large in their minds, but a quick glance at their own manifesto finds that the Tradinistas explicitly support a right to private property and market economies yet H&P are content at calling them socialists while simultaneously asserting that the Nordic model is not socialism as a result of private property and market economies. H&P assert that Marxism is the inevitably outcome of socialism yet foray into a discussion of democratic socialism which is neither a child of Marxist theory nor is it an exemplar of planned economies.

Finally, and perhaps most frustratingly on this point, is that H&P show the same lack of engagement with Church documents on the matter. As I hinted by leading with a quote from Pope Benedict XVI during his time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church has routinely condemned socialism as an ideology while apparently dropping hints that they are potential allies. Take for instance, Octagesima Adveniens by Pope St. Paul VI. H&P rightly quote the good Pontiff when he writes in paragraph 31:

Too often Christians attracted by socialism tend to idealize it in terms which, apart from anything else, are very general: a will for justice, solidarity and equality.

Sadly, H&P seemingly leave out another sentence in the very same paragraph when St. Paul VI added the comment

Distinctions must be made to guide concrete choices between the various levels of expression of socialism: a generous aspiration and a seeking for a more just society, historical movements with a political organization and aim, and an ideology which claims to give a complete and self-sufficient picture of man. Nevertheless, these distinctions must not lead one to consider such levels as completely separate and independent. The concrete link which, according to circumstances, exists between them must be clearly marked out. This insight will enable Christians to see the degree of commitment possible along these lines, while safeguarding the values, especially those of liberty, responsibility and openness to the spiritual, which guarantee the integral development of man.

Likewise, H&P make heavy reference to Pope Pius XI and his encyclical Quadregismo Anno condemning the propositions of socialism. Yet in 1931, upon questions of the practical implications, Time Magazine reported that Francis Cardinal Bourne of Westminster declared that Catholics could in good conscience be members of the Labour Party of the UK (then a member of Socialists International) so long as they were not socialists in the technical sense but in the nontechnical sense.

After their explorations of what socialism was and is, H&P then attempt to mount an admittedly brief defense of capitalism as a system. This defense relies on economic platitudes and hints of a misplaced Whiggian history. The moment I had to step away from reading it briefly out of sheer confusion was when H&P mounted a defense of Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. While I have personally benefited from the Commodore’s fortune and the Standard Oil Empire (through the Harkness family) through their lasting contributions to my own alma mater, one has to be kidding themselves if they think these men to be captains of industry and not robber barons.

Even in their own day, the anticompetitive practices of Rockefeller, Archibold, and Standard Oil were actively decried and targeted by state and federal authorities. In fact, it is thanks to the “creative” legal arrangements of Mr. Rockefeller that we today use the word “trust” to refer to a monopoly or near monopoly undertaking anticompetitive practices. Rockefeller, in addition to his secret rates with the New York railway lines, had controlling interests in much American industry (including finance with his friend John Pierpont Morgan) and used this to reduce his costs and drive his competitors out of business. This is not an example of a man bringing value to Americans and being rewarded for it, this is pretty patently an example of market failure through the creation of barriers to entry. For H&P to claim otherwise is slightly mind boggling given that Standard Oil is one of the few monopolies so egregious as to be actually broken up.

There is, in general, a lack of critical examination of market failures and inefficiencies that are seriously examined. I should have hoped that Professor Pakulak would have helped in the drafting of the manuscript to add much needed nuance. At several points, H&P refer to profit as an indicator that a business is providing value to the population- putting aside the moral implications of this for the moment, an underlying assumption here seems to be an idea of competition. Yet, recent empirical work in macroeconomics and theoretical work in macroeconomics assume imperfect competition and markups in goods. If this imperfect competition is genuinely driven by a love of diversity, then H&P’s economic point can still stand, but if this imperfect competition comes from elsewhere (tacit collusion) or from marketing actually creating new preferences, then their economic point that profit represents created value is far, far weakened.

Allowing myself a brief tangent, one of the most concerning trends I’ve seen in the microeconomic theory literature has been the recent literature on the use of machine learning pricing algorithms that represent a somewhat dark future. A growing strand of literature suggests that it is becoming increasingly possible and even probable that we will have market equilibria approaching near perfect price discrimination allowing, in effect, the sellers to collect the entire surplus of the transaction. This, of course, nullifies one of the greatest arguments defenders of capitalism mount of the system, namely that trade happens when it is “win-win” as it is now just “win-indifference”.

At no point are market failures seriously discussed (even though it is widely understood that asymmetry of information creates serious efficiency issues, and asymmetry of information isn’t exactly an uncommon thing), nor is regulatory capture and rent seeking actually discussed. I do not wish to suggest that H&P are actively in favor of market failures or rent seeking, as they most certainly are not. However, not even mentioning them, despite the not uncommon occurrence of them (especially if we want to include perfect price discrimination as a market failure under a very broad sense), creates a sense that this book is not taking seriously the economic issues of today. Even further, by not critically examining market failures, H&P fail to respond to some of the most cogent arguments that socialists deploy. This is without even touching into the extremely bizarre couple paragraph diversion into the economics of development, which thankfully they only limited to a couple of paragraphs.

But the biggest thing that struck through this whole book was that perhaps H&P failed to recognize the water in which they swim, which is really quite a testament to the power of capitalism and the liberal order of the modern world to propagandize and totalize. Little moments here and there stick out in my mind, but starting with an example I’ve already hinted at, let’s take the example of the competitive business that makes a profit. It obviously provides an “economic value” to the population in an ideal world, but why should I really be concerned with an economic value? I say this not to be edgy, but as a serious concern- what moral benefit is there in programming a fun game for my iPhone that I drop a couple bucks on? It seems like a morally neutral action to me, which is no argument for its restriction, but also no argument for its allowance. Yet such a thing is presented as a good at several points in the text, including in a brief discourse on why the authors believe entrepreneurship to be good. Perhaps I’ve been disappointed by the promises of Silicon Valley one too many times, but call me a critic of entrepreneurial optimism and moral benefits.

This failure to recognize the propaganda of capitalism is on full display in their discussion of the just wage, where they utterly punt and disappoint. They point to Pius XI’s command that family wages be paid to workers if possible, and then waffle a bit as they sort of say that it’s not REALLY possible to do that because industry would collapse, and immediately move on without a deeper analysis of the situation. What they fail to recognize (yet recognized by multiple moral manuals written by priests in the early 20th century) is that while a family wage can sometimes be forgone, a living wage can only be forgone in times of dire need, and it cannot be a regular state of affairs. Yet in contemporary society, man is not guaranteed even his living wage, much less a family wage. Fr. Heinreich Pesch, SJ offers excellent insight when he notes that if an industry cannot pay their workers a living wage, then perhaps said industry overproduces and should produce less so as to raise their prices. For Fr. Pesch, a trained economist who influenced Pope Pius XI, the economy must be order towards the natural law, and this sometimes means a change in the organization of industries.

Likewise another moment that struck me was in H&P’s previously mentioned discussion of marriage and the family in “communist” societies. There’s a deep sense of irony that Trent Horn writes that from our shared home state, California, a state which has a reputation for it’s sexual progressivism; there’s a deep sense of irony that Pakulak writes from the DC metropolitan area (my previous home), the capitol of a nation where so many children are born out of wedlock and half of all marriages regularly end in divorce.

H&P claim that the problem with socialism is socialism and the problem with capitalism are capitalist, but one reaches the limits of reasonable Catholic doubt of this proposition in contemporary American society, a society which has so deeply internalized capitalism.