Peter Nguyen SJ, Drew Bowling, Mark Gordon, John Médaille, Patrick Deneen, Chad C. Pecknold, Matthew Tan, Justin Tse: The latter is the central theme of the essays that compose the book as well as the guiding principle that brings Reinhard’s reasoning close to that of Karl Marx. For Reinhard, capitalism ‘has perhaps never been in so much difficulty in the last century. And all of this, just twenty years after its victory against its great historical enemy, i.e., soviet communism’ (26). Accumulated wealth has not been redistributed according to principles of merit and equity but has been concentrated increasingly in the hands of a very few; capitalism has globalised but so, too, have exploitation and inequality. ‘To observe global economic development today,’ writes the bishop in an imaginary dialogue with the atheist of Trier, ‘it seems that you were right; it seems that capital always tries to multiply, that in its constant aspiration it knows no borders, in the most authentic sense of the term. And it seems that you were also right in foreseeing that it would be above all the capitalist who would profit from this development, accumulating evermore capital in his pocket’ (21). Thus, alongside recognition from financial newspapers the world over, it would seem that Marx’s analysis of crisis as inherent to the economic formation dominated by capital has now also been legitimated by the upper echelons of the Church. Yet, this is not a case of conversion. Confronted with the possibility that ‘history in the end’ will admit ‘that Doctor Marx was right, that capitalism will end up destroying itself’, Reinhard Marx has no doubts: he very much hopes that this will not occur. He cannot in fact see how ‘outside the market economy, it would be possible to provide goods and services for all the great number of people who now live in the world’ (29). The ten chapters that compose Reinhard Marx’s Capital all propose, therefore, the same Leitmotiv: if there is no doubt about the fact that the Catholic church ‘accepts’ in toto the market economy, the point is to moralise it. It is thus necessary for Reinhard Marx, firstly, to favour the strong presence of the state in order for it to be able to implement mechanisms of solidarity and equality, forms of protection of ‘everybody’s interests’ (95). Secondly, the self-determined individual of free initiative that the State must protect is not the homo oeconomicus who ‘aims only at his/her interest’, but the moral individual, respectful of the principles and precepts of the community based upon solidarity’ (157). Finally, ‘insofar as it works and it is not subjected to constraints, the market guarantees equality. Those who offer their goods on the market must confront the competition, and consumers decide democratically who and at what prices provides a good deal’ (158). In such a context, the work of Amartya Sen is said to provide a central theoretical point of reference for contemporary Catholic social teaching. According to Sen, as R. Marx puts it, ‘the degree of justice of a society can be measured according to the effective possibility of its members to lead the life they have chosen to live’ (178). Social justice therefore coincides with the freedom of choice of individuals; a freedom, however, that poverty and unemployment in every corner of the planet render increasingly impracticable. Here, Reinhard Marx does not fail to recognise the potentially empty and abstract character of the concept of freedom which was affirmed by liberalism and the Enlightenment. The empty shell of freedom, if it is genuinely to enable individuals to exercise the faculty of choice and to implement social justice, must therefore be filled with a concrete content. Yet, R. Marx’s ‘concretisation’ of freedom does not consist so much in mundane provisions as in the affirmation of the commitment to realise ‘the truth of the good’ (55). Freedom thus coincides with truth, and the latter in its turn, as Augustine taught, is nothing but God (Truth is God - Deus est Veritas). In thus spelling out the concretisation of freedom according to Catholic social teaching, it becomes clear that freedom of choice assumes a very specific form of concreteness: the freedom to announce the Gospel.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 16:42:14 +0000
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