The Pope in times of crises

Alberto Rabilotta

23/03/2013

Opinión

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Crises are coming one after another and the effects are cumulative, at the level of economics – in its widest sense – and within political, social and environmental affairs. One civilization, that of “industrial capitalism” is morphing into a retrograde plutocracy, a financial-rentier system of exploitation which has assumed power and unashamedly uses any means at hand – including violence and corruption – to destroy any gains and conquests achieved by popular struggles since the end of the 19th century.

It is enough to look at what has been happening for several years in the European Union, where in one country after another – Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and now Cypress, not to mention what has been happening in the Baltic countries, the Balkans and Central Europe – the people are deprived of social, economic and political gains in the name of a fiscal austerity that favours creditors and the dominant plutocracy. The same is happening in the United States, Canada, and other countries of “advanced capitalism”.

All the means of protest that people had at their disposition, such as political parties, trade unions, even the system of representative democracy, the courts, the press, etc., have been neutralized by the “new order”.

It is scarcely surprising that electoral results that fail to coincide with the directives of the “new order” – which will be increasingly frequent – are disqualified, and that the people who have “voted badly”, as happened recently in Italy, or legislatures that do not accept the dictates, as now in Cypress, are being warned or directly threatened by the technocrats or governors of the European Union, by the IMF and the financial centres, all of whom demand that the dictates be followed without protest.

Nothing works as it used to. The system is paralyzed. Social insecurity due to unemployment, the lowering of wages and pensions, “labour flexibility” and the increase in rentier extractions, among other things, is dissolving the social “fabric” of the “advanced countries” and in particular that of countries on the periphery, where Catholicism has very old roots.

It is impossible not to note that we now live in a de-stabilizing “permanent state of exception” where previous certitudes no longer hold or will soon cease to be valid, and in which the new requirements of our times become socially and individually unacceptable. This is a world run by politicians and technocrats and supported by institutions created to serve the business firms and interests of the oligarchs who make up the dominant plutocracy.

Finally (but not to end these comments), today we and the new Pope live in a world that is being pushed – as Thomas Leif and Chris Hedges have written – towards a dystopia (anti-utopia) that constitutes a mixture of the absolute totalitarianism of George Orwell and the “artificial paradises” of Aldous Huxley (1).

Capital and Labour in the Papal Encyclicals

From the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the first Industrial Revolution revealed its potential and its socially destructive consequences in England, Germany and France, clergy and laity of the Christian churches began to denounce the situation of exploitation and desolation of the working classes, and to outline the need for a Christian social doctrine (2).

In 1891, while Europe was still feeling the effects of successive economic, financial and monetary crises of industrial capitalism that culminated in the “Long Depression” of 1873-1896, as unemployment and famine stimulated socialist, anarchist and communist movements as well as massive immigration to the Americas, Pope Leo XIII published the Encyclical Rerum novarum, also known as the Rights and Duties of Labour and Capital, or the Social Doctrine of the Church.

This Long Depression was the result (as was the one in the 1930s) of the collapse of a phase of economic liberalism, of self-regulating markets that because of technological revolutions (in the 1930s the Second Industrial Revolution was at its peak) had led to speculation and financial bubbles, as well as colonial looting, wars and immense social disasters, to commercial protectionism and to corporatism.

In the face of this great crisis of industrial capitalism and the fact that the Church was out of step with economic, social and political transformation of the times, the Encyclical of Leo XIII assumed and extended the reforms that Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire, had adopted at the instigation of Christian clerics and advisors between 1883 and 1889 with the aim of countering the growing socialist movement (2).

Starting from Rerum novarum and other Encyclicals, the Social Doctrine of the Church established the principles of conciliation between bosses and workers that – in order to counter the ascendant socialist and communist movement – give a direction to reform parties until the advent of neoliberalism: the rights of workers to a just wage, to rest, to a work environment and to manufacturing techniques that were not prejudicial to physical health or moral integrity; to respect in the workplace for the conscience or the dignity of workers, to subsidies necessary for the subsistence of the unemployed and their families; to pensions and insurance for old age, sickness and accidents in the workplace; to social security in case of maternity; and finally the right to meet and form associations.

Leo XIII, who in 1878 had published an Encyclical to denounce socialism as “a moral plague” because it called for the equality of all and questioned the inviolable nature of the right to property, established de facto, in 1891, “a Charter of the rights of the working class in all countries, rights that are based on human nature and its transcendental dignity” (3).

One should not underestimate the impact of Rerum novrum and of the legislation of Otto von Bismarck on societies and the new responsibilities of States in this phase of industrial capitalism (and of the inter-imperialist race to grab colonies), but these still never resolved the basic problem of the inherent contradictory relation between capital and labour.

Forty years later, in 1931, when Pius XI released the Encyclial Quadragesimo anno, the problem had gotten much worse because of revolutionary struggles in the preceding decade and a half, and because of the political polarization that arose when the traditional political parties failed to find solutions to the monetary, economic and financial crisis. It was the forces of the extreme right that stepped in to face the growing movements on the left that proposed a social revolution.

To achieve “social order”, that is to say terms of conciliation in the Capital-Labour relation and to head off social revolutions and the growth of communism and socialism, Pius XI preached conciliation and supported the corporatism (State-employers-unions) that the fascist Benito Mussolini was installing in Italy.

From Pius XI to Benedict XVI, all the popes re-affirmed and re-accommodated somewhat the principles of the Social Doctrine of the Encyclical of Leo XIII on the relations of Capital and Labour, attempting to adapt to the changes that came from technological development and the concentration of capital that had been established in the capitalist mode of production, and which were changing the fundamental relationship between Capital and Labour.

A Pope for the structural crisis of industrial capitalism?

However, if the shared aim of the Vatican and of Capital has been conciliation in order to “domesticate” the brutal nature of the relation between Capital and Labour and thus prevent the social revolution born of exploitation, the nature of capitalism leads it to betray this objective, since its essence is to constantly develop the means of production to reduce the input of human labour and increase surplus-value, thus inevitably increasing production and unemployment, to move production to countries or regions where cheap labour can be found, and thus continue a process that inevitably leads to more serious economic and financial crises, greater monopolies, more automation and further unemployment...

As some analysts and economists, among them Paul Krugman, have recognized, the time has come to think that in the Capital-Labour relationship the robots are winning the war against the workers.

The desolate panorama that we have described above is the product of this revolution in the means of production, which not only continues to reduce the amount of labour force needed – and because of this the total wages – but in proceeding in this way is creating a growing obstacle to increased consumption, and thereby to the conversion of “use-values” produced into merchandise, and hence the incapacity to create surplus-value, with the inevitable fall in the profit levels of businesses.

This process is taking place, although with different degrees of development, in the “advanced countries” of industrial capitalism and in the close peripheries, as we see in the European Union.

Consequently, state of relations between Capital and Labour that existed in 1891 and 1931 no longer corresponds, for at least the last two decades, to the reality in the “central countries”, with Japan as the first example since it was the country that went furthest in automating production and the first to fall into a “controlled depression” beginning with the crisis from in the early 1990s.

What is today defined as “structural unemployment” is, in other words, permanent unemployment accompanied by total labour insecurity, and hence insecurity of income, of housing, etc., for the rest of society. Because of this there is a new flood of emigration acting as an escape valve: twenty thousand Spaniards emigrate every month to other countries, to cite one example.

This reality, that I define as a “process of social dissolution” has no solution in capitalism. There is no economic recipe that would allow for reactivating economies in terms of the creation of jobs in the present system, and because of this the conciliation between Capital and Labour preached since Leo XIII is simply not possible.

This is the reality facing Pope Francis in the countries of “advanced capitalism”. Curiously, this Pope comes from a country and a sub-region where the political, social and economic reality is very different, due both to the lag of Latin American countries with respect to industrial capitalism and to the results of the neoliberal experience applied from the mid-1970s (Chile and Argentina) that provoked the rise of strong social movements of protest where there was a massive collaboration, elbow to elbow, of Christians and non-Christians, Marxists and non-Marxists.

In the majority of South American countries, the neoliberal experience ended in total disaster at the end of the twentieth century, leading in the beginnings of this century to the election of nationalist and progressive governments, the rejection of neoliberal policies and, in recent years, the adoption of policies of national economic development destined to combat poverty and create jobs, and on a regional level, the creation of institutions of cooperation for development, such as CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States).

Thus we have a Pope who comes from a region that is hard at work looking for a way out of the disasters of neoliberalism and that in the space of a few years, with policies contrary to those promulgated by the European Union, the FMI and the United States, has succeeded in substantially reducing poverty and improving the quality of life of millions of citizens. This is also a region in which the majority of countries are taking democracy seriously, to the point where Hugo Chavez, of beloved memory, never said no to the challenge of a referendum or an election, and with governments that strive to make democracy effective for all, and not only for the rich.

Will Pope Francis employ the experience of his country and of the region – that he himself has called the Patria Grande, which particularly pleases me – and his own experience as a shanty-town dweller, to open a debate on the changes that are needed in the Social Doctrine of the Church? This has to be a debate within the Church in the widest sense, including priests and laypeople who are involved in the real world, and not only in ivory towers. Will he do this? There is something more that this Pope naturally has, since it is no longer a sin in Latin America, and that is the potential to be a caudillo, a leader of the masses, and thus the power to explain to the world of parishioners in a simple, straightforward way, with sentiment and conviction, the urgent changes that need to be made, and in which they should be called to take part.

In reality there is not much choice, since the future of the Catholic Church is seriously compromised without these changes that would allow it to find a new place in a world that is undergoing great social, economic and gender changes, a world that sooner or later has to take on an unprecedented social transformation, the beginning of the construction of post-capitalist societies.

For this the Bishop of Rome – as he prefers to be called – as head of State should shake up the Vatican apparatus to achieve the fall of the corrupt and of the bandits, prune the Curia so that churches that have local roots will not be deprived of soil and nutrients, and make those who remain practice the humility that he himself is accustomed to.

La Vèrdiere, Francia.

(Translation: Jordan Bishop).

1.- This dystopia has been formulated, among others, by Thomas Leift: Enter the Fifth Estate http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-12-31-leif-en.html and by Chris Hedges in “2011: A Brave New Dystopia”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/

2.- To combat the emerging socialist movement and reduce the emigration of young Germans to the Americas, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had laws adopted that established insurance for health, work-place accidents and incapacity and a workers’ pension fund.

3.- See “Catholic Social Teaching and the Welfare State”,

http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/03/23/catholic-social-teaching-and-the-welfare-state/ also the very detailed analysis titled “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Tradition Around Rerum Novarum”, by Bruce Duncan, in http://www.frbruceduncan.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=38&limit=10&limitstart=0&order=hits&dir=ASC&Itemid=30

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/74777