LIBERATION THEOLOGY

Michael Novak, Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology
(New York: Paulist Press, 1986).

Click here for the PDF version.

[Page 3] The most stark contrast between North American and Latin American liberation theologies, however, lies in their judgment upon economic activism, commerce, invention, discovery, entrepreneurship, enterprise, investment — in a word, capitalism. For centuries now, Latin American humanism has been hostile to commerce and to economic dynamism, which it considers vulgar, low, of little esteem, and more than a little tainted with evil. Latin American humanism prefers the mode of the aristocratic spirit on one side, and the simplicity of the rural peasant, on the other. Its basic enlivening vision is feudal, whereas that of North America is post-feudal. Mark Twain in 1876 was the first writer in history to submit a manuscript typed on a typewriter, the first model of E. Remington & Sons. Just so, North America delights in economic inventions: among them, the invention of Scotch tape, the stapler, the telephone, the electric light, the refrigerator, the [4] sewing machine, the dishwasher, the electric fan, air-conditioning, and hundreds of other humble instruments of daily life, in all their tumbling profusion….

[Page 4] Often in Latin America I have been told by journalists, lawyers, academics, and others that I must learn to understand what it has been like to live one’s whole life apart from the genuine consent of the governed. Latin American history, they remind me, displays several generations under tutelage to foreign thrones [1 Ne 13:16–19; 2 Ne 10:11; do these verses apply to N. Am., Latin Am., both?]; later generations under the tutelage of political elites over whom there was very little popular control; too many decades under cruel dictatorships; and still other periods under fragile democracies, in which rights to dissent, the principle of a loyal opposition, and the acts of practical compromise in favor of the imperfect but achieveable [sic] second-best were scarcely honored. Even the word “liberty” has a different ring, therefore, in Latin America. North Americans understand this term in the light of law, historical institutions, and unself-conscious habits. Latin Americans, having a different history in all these respects, must imagine what they have scarcely experienced.

[Page 5] In Latin America, the government — the state — and often enough the military have played roles analogous to those played by the traditional colonial powers as agents of Spain and Portugal. The tradition of reliance upon the state is in Latin America at least as strong as it has been in modern France, perhaps much stronger. Typically, in Catholic Europe, especially in Latin Europe, Communist parties are larger and stronger than in Northern Europe. Those who are not Communist tend also to be attracted to socialist approaches in economics. These trends are also powerful in Latin America. That is why many astute observers of Latin American politics believe that socialism, in one version or another, is a likely or even natural outcome in Latin America.

Liberation theology says that Latin America is capitalistic and needs a socialist revolution. Latin America does need a revolution. But its present system is mercantilist and quasi-feudal, not capitalist, and the revolution it needs is both liberal and Catholic. The present order is not free but statist, not mind-centered but privilege-centered, not open to the poor but protective of the rich. Large majorities of the poor are propertyless. The poor are prevented by law from founding and incorporating their own enterprises. They are denied access to credit. They are held back by an ancient legal structure, designed to protect the ancient privileges of a pre-capitalistic elite.

This elite invents virtually nothing, risks virtually nothing, takes virtually no new initiatives. It is parasitic upon and distributes the goods and services of foreign enterprises, whose inventiveness and dynamism it does not emulate. Thus do the Latin American elites sit behind a thick wall of law, whose purpose is to prevent capitalism from arising. These elites fear economic competition. Their greatest preoccupation is the protection of ancient privilege. They are willing to buy and sell, but only behind protective walls, designed to keep others out. They are not creators. Too few were born among the poor….

[Page 6] … anti-capitalism is a motif in Latin American life that far antedates, and has deeper cultural roots than, liberation theology alone. What is distinctive about Latin American theology is that it offers a Christian re-interpretation of Marxism and socialism. Theology in Latin America used to be traditionalist, of a form compatible with the Holy Roman Empire and its worldview, and it maintained integral links to the traditional societies of Latin America. What has always been missing is a theology of enterprise, of commerce, of economic dynamism — in short, of capitalism. Indeed, some liberation theologians today think of economic growth, or (as they symbolize it) money, as “Mammon.” Some associate capitalism with Death, in a kind of manicheism that assigns socialism the contrasting lightsomeness of Life.

This radical discontinuity between North American liberation theology and Latin American liberation theology — this disparity in the practical judgment rendered upon the free economy — should not blind the unwary to a powerful unity of aim. The aim both of democratic capitalism as the liberal societies of North America conceive of it, and of socialism as the liberation theologies of Latin America conceive of it, is to lift up the poor. The theology of both the Americas is “an option for the poor.” The radical question is a practical one. Which sorts of economic institutions, in fact, do lift up the poor? On this, persons of good will often disagree. What works in one place, some argue, does not or will not work in another. The principle that all Christians are committed to — at least now, when the methods of attaining it have become so well known — is that the condition of the poor must be bettered. There is today no excuse for the sort of imprisonment inflicted on the poor by material destitution….

[Page 8] It is my hypothesis that the liberal society, built around a capitalist society that promotes discovery and entrepreneurship among the [9] poor at the base of society, will succeed more quickly, more thoroughly, and in a more liberating fashion, than the socialist societies so far conceived of by liberation theologians. The liberation theologians, of course, hold the opposite hypothesis. Most opt for socialism. My own hypothesis is based on historical observations. It is subject to future disconfirmation. Their hypothesis is explicitly based upon hope and, as many of them admit, a kind of blind hope without much specificity yet concerning the concrete structures and economic institutions that will embody their socialism. In any case, the issue between us is empirical and will, accordingly, be settled by historical experiments….

[Page 13] “Christ led me to Marx,” bluntly declares Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest at whom Pope John Paul II wagged an admonishing finger at the Managua airport in 1983. “I do not think the Pope understands Marxism,” says the world-famous poet, and the Sandinista Minister of Culture. “For me, the four Gospels are all equally communist.” Cardenal summarizes his belief against the Pope: “I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.” [Chris Hedges, “Strife within Church ‘Really War of Western Socialist Mores,’ ” National Catholic Reporter, 7 September 1984.]

Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian Franciscan summoned to Rome in 1984 to defend his vision of the Church today, wrote shortly afterward in the left-wing Rome newspaper Paese Sera that Pope John Paul II’s view of Marxism is “a kind of caricature.” Frier Boff says that the Vatican document, which endorses the Church’s commitment to the poor while condemning Marxism, seems “to believe what is on the label of the bottle before trying the real contents.” He sets aside Pope John Paul II’s lifetime experience of Marxism, asserting: “Marxism is a principally European theme. In Latin America, the big enemy is not Marxism, it is capitalism.” [“Friar Says Vatican ‘Caricatures’ Marxism,” New York Times, 25 September 1984; and “Brazilian Priest Feels Exonerated After Vatican Trip,” Washington Post, 22 September 1984.]

This debate between Pope John Paul II and such Latin priests as Father Cardenal and Friar Boff deeply involves the United States. For the main enemy of liberation theology, make no mistake about it, is the United States. So writes the founder of liberation theology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez:

Liberation is a term which expresses a new posture in Latin America…. Among more alert people today, what we have called a new awareness of Latin America reality is making headway. They believe that there can be authentic development for Latin America only if there is liberation from the domination exercised by the greatest capitalist countries, especially the most powerful, the United States of America. [Gustavo Gutierrez, S. J., A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), p. 88.]

[Page 14] Liberation theology is a method of defining Christian faith in the political context of underdevelopment, in a side-choosing spirit committed to action. It is not distinctive for wishing to apply Christian faith to social action. It is not more concerned about “the working class” or “the poor” than Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical underlined Catholicism’s responsibility to these groups. Nor can it be universally defined as Marxist. Yet it gains its excitement from flirting with Marxist thought and speech, and from its hostility to the “North.” …

[Page 15] Pope John Paul II is considerably less trusting [of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua] than Mr. Sirey [Quaker businessman from New York] or House Speaker [Tip] O’Neill, Ernesto Cardenal or Leonardo Boff. Before the entire world, on television, the Pope rebuked Father Cardenal for the priestly support his official role as Minister of Culture brings the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And on September 3, 1984, in Rome, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], a longtime ally of the Pope and Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a firm denunciation of the red thread running through a great deal of the “theology of liberation.” [Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation,’ ” Origins, 13 September 1984.]

Truth to tell, liberation theology forms a tapestry much broader than its Marxist part and is woven of many colors. Marxist movements always hide in “popular fronts,” and so forms of Marxist analysis do hide within liberation theology. But it would be a great mistake — which the Vatican was careful not to make — to think that all liberation theology is Marxist. [(Footnote): …By Marxism, I mean precisely four commitments: (1) that history is accurately characterized as a theater of struggle between social classes; (2) that this struggle entails passion, violence, and armed conflict, whose cessation will commence only in some future utopian social order; (3) the abolition of private property {anti-law of consecration and stewardship}, as the key to class struggle; and (4) a theory of truth identifying truth with the cause of a particular social class in history. The dangers of such commitments have been made manifest in both Nazi and Marxist-Leninist movements in our century. Finally, I should note that over the past fifteen years [c. 1970–1985], many liberation theologians have been progressively modifying their initial infatuation with Marxist analysis, in response both to real experiences and to public criticism….]

[Page 36] In fact, as Gertrude Himmelfarb makes clear in her magisterial study, The Idea of Poverty, one of the great motivating drives of the first liberals, as distinct from the Malthusians, was their recognition that poverty is a form of tyranny, and that that tyranny can and should be broken. [“For [Adam] Smith political economy was not an end in itself but a means to an end, that end being the wealth and well-being, moral and material, of the ‘people,’ of whom the ‘laboring poor’ were the largest part. And the poor themselves had a moral status in that economy — not the special moral status they enjoyed in a fixed, hierarchic order, but that which adhered to them as individuals in a free society sharing a common human, which is to say, moral, nature.” Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 63.] Because they, particularly Adam Smith, had discovered the causes of wealth, they knew that poverty could be broken, systematically and in a sustained way. And if it could be, it must be. A new moral obligation thereby entered human history. Concerning poverty, resignation is not enough. Humans must act to diminish it. Underdevelopment is not good enough. There is a moral obligation to achieve development, along all its human axes….

[Page 40]`More original [in the creation of the U. S. government] was the principle that political leaders should not be trusted with power over economic institutions….

… The cause of wealth is creativity. Not natural resources. Not labor. Not planning. Rather, human wit, intelligence, inquiry, invention — in a word, the old caput (L.: head), from which the name for the system, “capitalism,” is appropriately derived. Until Adam Smith, wealth (identified with gold, silver, and the like) was thought to be limited. It could not be created, only taken. “If the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” This traditional conception held that wealth is a zero-sum: if some gain, others must lose….

[Page 54] There are many ways to acquire wealth without buying cheap and selling dear. One can invent a new process, a new product, or a new service. [Jose] Miranda’s world [Communism in the Bible] is the world of the zero-sum, a world without invention or creative wit or cooperation….

Miranda begins with the Marxist labor-theory of value and an angelic idea of “liberty without constraints.” … he imagines a sort of liberty in which there are no constraints — a situation virtually unknown to human beings in any sphere. He attacks economic acts between consenting adults because neither party is wholly needless, and is thus “coerced” into consent. This is absurd. Economic life begins with the fact of universal human need. Each of us has needs for whose fulfillment we depend on others. As scholars, Miranda and I have needs for food that we do not grow for ourselves, upon its processing, and upon its delivery to markets near us. These needs make us quite vulnerable. We are not self-sufficient. To live we must have bread. Now what system will bring us bread at a lower price, in greater abundance, in greater variety of choice, and routinely? Miranda may believe that Marxist societies do so best. He is free to argue for that belief. Having visited and studied Marxist lands, I know he is wrong. More than that, even most Marxist and socialist theoreticians know he is wrong. The issue has been decided in the world of fact. It is Marxist and socialist societies today that are widening the scope of markets, private property and incentives, precisely on the ground that these better serve the common good than Marxist and socialist techniques….

[Page 55] The views of [Jose] Miranda are primitive, to say the least. “But the real question,” he writes, “is whether a system ought to exist in which anything has to take risk….” [Jose Miranda, Communism in the Bible, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), p. 25.] He thinks entirely in pre-capitalist, mercantilist terms …

[Page 58] The economy of Mexico, his [Jose Miranda] own country, is not capitalist. Some estimates place the proportion of Mexicans on the payroll of the state as high as seventy percent. The space for free economic activity is exceedingly narrow. To start a new corporation or partnership is fraught with obstacles and difficulties. Encouragement for enterprise is virtually nil. The middle class is not large and, such as it is, prudently encourages a disproportionate share of its young to seek government jobs. If Mexicans seek higher education, there are virtually only state universities to attend. Newspapers depend upon state subventions and government advertising. By every known standard, Mexico has a pre-capitalist, mercantilist, state-directed economy of the sort roundly attacked by such early liberals as Adam Smith, Bastiat, Montesquieu, and others. To say that capitalism is causing the sufferings that Mexicans endure at the hands of their own system seems patently absurd….

[Page 59] … Sometimes Latin American intellectuals seem desirous of blaming everyone but themselves (and their own theories) for Latin American woes.

[Page 60] “Unless a demand of buying power is foreseen which makes a profit likely, “Miranda writes i…, “there is no production.” [Miranda, Communism in the Bible, p.74.] This is demand-side theory. Was there demand for word processors before they came into existence? Quite often, advances on the supply-side induce the efforts which bring demand into balance. No doubt, it is crucial to expand the buying power of the destitute and the poor of Latin America. One way to do that is to increase the supply — not only the investment in production, and the employment that results from it, but also to engage those multiple millions of the unemployed and the underemployed in economic activism. Poor persons in Latin America have few places to turn to for credit. Simple institutions such as Savings and Loans, Credit Unions, the Farm Bureau Credit, and other devices that in other nations enable poor persons to borrow enough to launch enterprises of their own are scarcely to be found. No wonder so many millions of talented and able people are, economically speaking, inert. Development in Latin America must begin (as elsewhere) at the bottom. Latin American intellectuals ought to be studying the ways and means of realistic economic activism. The Spanish and Portuguese Crowns taught them, alas, to look to the state for their needs; they still do. The lure of communism for Latin American intellectuals has its roots in ancient habits of dependency. These must be broken. Only economic activism among the poor and the lower middle classes can effect the necessary transformation.

[Page 62] As for “the robber barons,” similar principles apply. It should be noted, however, that the left sometimes uses such phrases generically, without intending to single out any specific breach of morality except the very existence of successful builders of commercial and industrial establishments. The accusations of the left often attack the institution, not its specific behaviors. As a matter of historical inquiry, historians from many points of view need to assess the moral record of corporations, domestic and international. Ironically, the history of business corporations is little attended to by historians. One should also note that a large majority of “the captains of industry,” at least in the United States, were of low birth and humble means. Many were persons of extraordinary talent. Some were inventors of a very high order. The history of labor unions — to which in The Guns of Lattimer [Michael Novak, The Guns of Lattimer: The True Story of a Massacre and a Trial August 1917–March 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1978).], concerning the United Mine workers in Pennsylvania, it has been my privilege to contribute — illustrates many ways in which the professed “good intentions” of some owners and managers needed to be corrected and enlarged by bitter struggle, by the advance of law, and by the raising of public consciousness and standards. Moral progress seldom occurs without such struggle. Traditional ways are discarded painfully. Higher standards, achieved through the culture and made routine in daily practice, come only with strenuous effort. But they do come.

[Page 67] The Pope observed that “our age is the one in which man has been most written and spoken of,” yet it is also “the age of man’s abasement to previously unsuspected levels, the age of human values trampled on as never before.” Like Solzhenitsyn in his commencement address at Harvard the year before [See Solzhenitsyn, “The World Split Apart,” in Ronald Berman, ed., Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflections (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980).], Pope John Paul II attributed this to “the inexorable paradox of atheistic humanism.” By contrast, “the primordial affirmation of [Catholic] anthropology is that man is God’s image and cannot be reduced to a mere portion of nature or a nameless element in the human city.” He rejected a “strictly economic, biological, or psychological view of man.” insisting instead that “the complete truth about the human being constitutes the foundation of the Church’s social teaching and the basis of true liberation. In the light of this truth, man is not a being subjected to economic or political processes, these processes are instead directed to man and subjected to him.” It is necessary, in short, to reject a materialist interpretation of history [Marxist] and to defend the primacy of the spiritual….

[Page 68] In the real world, Marxism has been immobilized for decades as the ideological internal life of totalitarianism states and of parties aspiring to that status. As an explanatory system, Marxism “explains” little. There is nothing in the Latin American system, to which the liberation theologians point, for which Marxism affords the only or the best explanation. Marxism offers no “method” either of inquiry or of action by which modern life is to be accurately understood, its future predicted, or its utopian hopes realized. Contemporary Marxist literature, as Kolakowski shows, is dogmatic, sterile, helpless, out of touch both with modern economics and with cultural life. But what Marxism does do very well today is to inspire millions with fantasies of utopian fulfillment, and blithely to identify as the roadblock to that fulfillment some malevolent other. One would wish that the works of liberation theologians were less innocent of the sophisticated criticism aimed at Marxist theory in the light of its historical praxis. Pope John Paul II has not been able to afford to be so innocent.

Throughout his pontificate, Pope John Paul II has elaborated on the clear-eyed account of Marxism he gave in Puebla [Mexico, January 1979]. He has attempted to awaken theologians, to beg them to become more critical, lest they ally themselves with those bent on the creation of totalitarian processes whose consequences theologians do not allow themselves to foresee and whose dynamics they cannot control. Throughout, the Pope has insisted upon the independence and integrity of the Church. He has based himself on sound political philosophy. He has invoked a liberal conception of the transcendent status of religion with respect to politics and the state, and he has appealed to a liberal conception of the dignity of the individual person vis-à-vis such collectivist notions as class, party, and state. He speaks for the authentic interests of the poor and the oppressed, against those who would transmute their sufferings into envy, hatred, and coercion. He has refused to adopt the role of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who offered bread in exchange for liberty….

[Page 77] … Despite the teachings of certain philosophers of Scotland and London, despite Karl Marx, labor is not the source of economic value. The source of economic value is human intellect.

If labor were the sole source of value, why would there be unemployment? Why would companies not seek to hire more and more laborers, rather than invest in labor-saving machinery? Marx was never able to cite evidence for this theory. [Igor Shafarevich has remarked that Marx’s “theory of value, a cornerstone of his political-economic theory, proved to be in complete contradiction to well-known facts of economic life!…” (The Socialist Phenomenon, trans. William Tjalsma, with an Introduction by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 211.] Böhm-Bawerk demolished it nearly a century ago. [Böhm-Bawerk’s first rebuttal of Marxist theory appeared shortly after the first volume of Capital appeared. See Eugen v. Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory, trans. William Smart (New York: Kelley & Millman, 1957), Book VI, Chapter 3, “Marx.” After the third and final volume of Capital was published, Böhm-Bawerk wrote an essay conclusively demonstrating Marx’s fail-[273]ure (and those of his apologists like Werner Sombart) to justify the labor theory of value….] Most socialists today have abandoned it. [James A. Yunker, Socialism in the Free Market (New York: Nellen Publishing Co., 1979), p. 179.] Human wit creates employment through inventing goods and services never seen before. The labor theory of value is a fundamental error in Marx. It is a serious economic error. Worse, it is a profound error about the human spirit.

[Page 85] I recognize that, in much of Latin America, the word “capitalism” is always used pejoratively. Marxists certainly describe it so. But, significantly, so also do many traditionalists, of the pre-capitalist world-view. Often, clergymen, whose traditions are pre-capitalist, are opposed to capitalism. So are most literary traditions, whose roots are pre-capitalist. Therefore, I will not insist on the word “capitalist.” Some may prefer to call the economic institutions to which I am pointing “the creative dynamic, social market economy.” The word is not significant. What is significant is the reality — that is, the creative set of institutions which do, in a regular and predictable manner, produce development from the bottom of society upwards.

In Latin America today, I do not see a single capitalist economy. In virtually every state of South America and Central America, the state plays a disproportionately weighty role, much as it did in pre-capitalist Great Britain, before Adam Smith. Often, the banks are nationalized, as are many, if not most, of the major corporations. Often, half or more of all citizens receive the major part of their income directly from the state. Often, the two most powerful classes are the landholders and the military. Relatively speaking, the middle class is small. Economies seem to be organized from the top down. The small-business sector, which ought to be the largest and most dynamic sector, is relatively small and powerless.

[Page 86] Liberation theologians often assert that the early success of capitalist economies was based upon “exploitation.” As evidence, they invoke the mythical Marxist concept of “surplus value.” They entirely overlook three features of the immense transformation introduced by the new ideas of democratic capitalist liberation beginning about A.D. 1780. The first important fact is that the explosion of capitalist dynamism welled up from the bottom, in the new economic arrangements of many small farms and many small enterprises. The second is that many of the early capitalists arose from the lower classes, from among the poor. The third is that the motor force of capitalist liberation is not so much “capital” (i.e., financial resources) as the imagination and daring of a new type of economic activist: the entrepreneur. Too many economists in the West neglect this point, as Israel M. Kirzner has pointed out. [Discovery and the Capitalist Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 1–2.] The spirit of capitalism is preeminently the spirit of enterprise: the imagination to conceive of new products, new services, and new methods, and the practical wisdom to achieve successfully what at first seemed impossible. The center of the capitalist spirit lies in the creative imagination. Capitalism is the mind-centered system, and its social base lies in a legal structure that liberates human imagination and human praxis in the economic sphere.

Before the birth of the capitalist spirit, nations such as the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and France had social structures rather like those of Latin American nations today: a sharp division between feudal classes such as the nobility and the peasants, strict controls over virtually every aspect of economic life imposed by [87] the state and its extensive bureaucratic apparatus, and a more or less “organic” conception of the corporate nature of social life. The role of the individual was constrained in all spheres, but perhaps more in the economic sphere than in any other. It was against such historical realities that the capitalist spirit burst into history as new, revolutionary, and threatening to established orders. Among books to consult upon this background, I have found most useful Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis; A History of Economic Doctrines by Charles Gide and Charles Rist; Henry William Spiegel’s The Growth of Economic Thought; Max Weber’s General Economic History; and Barry W. Poulson’s Economic History of the United States. It may be useful here to recollect several examples of capitalist creativity, some from the past, some from the recent present. The Swedish economist Sven Rydenfelt contrasts these cases with fifteen stories of “socialist failure,” particularly in agriculture and in the continued oppression of peasants….

[Page 90] Marx had written that capitalists “steal” wealth from laborers. Yet in capitalist countries not only did the wages of workers rise to historically unprecedented heights, but many who began as workers launched enterprises of their own. Marx had predicted that the processes of capitalist production — which he failed to understand — would inexorably “immiserate” the workers. Quite the opposite happened. The myths that Marx purveyed as “science” were one by one refuted by history. [C Wright Mills criticizes seventeen central tenets of Marx’s predictions in The Marxists (New York: Dell Publishing, 1962), Chapter 6, “Critical Observations.”] Marx had overlooked the role of enterprise and the powers of creativity. Missing those, he missed the essential point.

The heart of the capitalist idea is to begin at the bottom, by releasing the economic creativity of the poor. Several nations of the East Asian rim — Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — observed the lessons to be learned from the Fabian socialism of India and from Communist socialism in China and North Korea. They also observed Japan….

Economic creativity, like every other form of creativity, is nourished by conditions of liberty. Governments that try to control every [91] aspect of economic activities end by paralyzing them. The suppression of the economic liberties of poor persons prolongs their poverty, offends their dignity, and suffocates their creativity. In this respect, creation theology speaks for the liberation of the poor in a way liberation theology does not.

[Page 92] … small business needs relief from punitive taxation [and regulation]. On one island in the Caribbean, a tax rate of 60 percent begins at under $2,000 of earned income. At such rates, who has any incentive to extend his activities? The extension of economic activism at those rates is punitively expensive. Moreover, there is a sharp distinction, terribly real, between high tax rates and high tax revenues actually obtained by governments. When tax rates are too high, actual revenue declines. A government can lower tax rates in order to receive higher actual revenues….

[Page 106] Until recently, liberation theologians have been more preoccupied in establishing the distinctiveness of their point of view than in showing that this point of view is valid and true. In this sense, liberation theology is still in the form of an hypothesis. “Look at the world this way,” it says, “from this point of view. Stand over here with us.” All this is a useful exercise. But at some point there must also come the question: Is the point of view true? Can it be sustained? Is it too narrow? Is its fulcrum set down at the wrong point, so that everything else is distorted?

[Page 108] Initially, it is instructive to note that liberation theologians first of all conceive of themselves as oppressed. They imagine themselves as victims, dependent, outside the “CENTER,” dominated by others. Such concepts are the foundation of their basic vocabulary. Everything else is seen in relation to these.

… This first step serves one clear purpose. It shifts responsibility. If I am oppressed, then I am not responsible for my condition; the op-[109]pressor is. Furthermore, if I am oppressed, then my primary duty is to fight against the oppressor. This first step, then, has three consequences. First, it shifts responsibility for my condition from myself to others. This is already a great relief. Second, it forces me to imagine my life as primarily constituted by war, division, and struggle: the oppressed versus the oppressor. Third, this step places me within a vision of history at least analogous to that of Marx and Lenin: struggle between oppressed classes and oppressor classes in the fundamental interpretive key to history itself. History is combat, of one class against another. History is class struggle. The basic ethical question is: “Whose side are you on, oppressor or oppressed?” Taking sides becomes the first ethical choice.

Yet this vision cannot be metaphysically true. It carries within it a self-contradictory principle. On the one hand, it says that history is class struggle. On the other hand, it says that justice ought to prevail. But if the last is true, then the main interpretive key to history is not oppression but justice, not struggle but reconciliation. Which is it? Are oppression and conflict the fundamental law of history? Or is the fundamental law justice?

At war here are the Marxist and the Christian philosophies of history. Liberation theologians have flirted with combining both. That is incoherent. The problem begins in their very first step. Once their first self-defining act is to declare themselves “oppressed,” they have sided with Marx and Lenin. Their hope, then, is to “humanize” Marx and Lenin, to “Christianize” them, at later stages in their argument. “We will begin with the category of oppression,” they say, “and with the category of class struggle. But later we will show that this does not necessarily lead in the direction of atheism, materialism, and brute power.”

However, if they will wish to make moral claims later, they need a moral conception as their very first principle. If the chief interpretive key to history is liberty and justice for all, the descriptions of the early stages of history is not precisely expressed as “oppression.” One of the favorite prayers of St. Gregory the Great (A.D. 540–604), which I keep displayed before me on my desk, is “Ut possit florere cum libertate justitia” — “That justice with liberty may flower.” …

[Page 110] In short, liberation theology makes its very first step too hastily. It concedes too much to powers of darkness, division, and brute power. If the fundamental law of creation is oppression, then the most cynical will conclude that history entails the necessity of further oppression. In the name of the vision emanating from their own egos, the oppressed will struggle against their oppressors (with whom they have nothing in common) until they, the oppressed, gain the upper hand and become themselves the oppressors. This is the logical — and also the concrete, historical — outcome of Marxism….

[Page 114] For reasons sketched earlier, it does seem likely that the statist traditions of Latin America will lead at first toward a socialist organization of the economy. But, while this trend is probable, it will run into harsh realities. Socialism is not a system designed to create a dynamic, growing economy from the bottom up. Socialism is designed to produce a redistributive, relatively static and gray society. One must consult socialist experiments in North Korea, North Vietnam, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere. For Latin America, socialism may be a likely path. But it exacts its price and imposes serious penalties. These ought, at least, to be considered.

Many who claim to desire socialism actually desire not a particular set of economic institutions, but “a new man.” They want a society characterized by caring, generosity, compassion and unselfishness. To some extent, they naively combine the picture of a society in which citizens are saintly Christians with a picture of socialist economic institutions. Their claim is that institutions “condition” humans. Thus, if one can somehow construct the “right” sort of institutions, humans will be conditioned to walk in the paths of Christian righteousness. About this claim, there are two questions, one theological, one pragmatic. The first is: Is it theologically orthodox? Christian theology does not hold that the establishment of an order congruent with Christian principles will “condition” citizens to act as virtuous Christians. The Christian doctrine of sin is far more realistic than that. There are no institutions in history that human beings have not corrupted by the deadly vices to which the human heart is prey. The ravages of human sinfulness cannot be stayed by external arrangements. Existing socialist institutions offer no grounds for believing that they produce a new, uncorrupted, caring man. “Realism” means particularly one thing,Reinhold Niebuhr said in 1969, “that you establish the common good not purely by unselfishness but by the restraint of selfishness. That’s realism.” [Christianity and Crisis.] The trouble with socialism is that it lacks checks and balances. It does not restrain selfishness. It channels selfishness into the quest for military and bureaucratic power.

If the theological objection is severe, the pragmatic question is even more telling. In practice, socialism creates centers of unchecked political power. Political power is morally far more dangerous than economic power. The latter is checked not only by political power, by law, and by moral traditions. It is also checked by internal necessities of many kinds, including competition among regions, entire industries, and individual firms. In addition, the social function of markets is to prevent economic agents from working their naked will; the market forces them to satisfy customers. Markets force behavior to be [115] other-regarding, not solely because of a natural sense of mutuality and cooperation but also for reasons of survival. If American customers prefer Japanese autos, even great firms like Chrysler can be brought to the edge of collapse — unless and until they can win back their customers in the marketplace. Under socialism, there is little if any competition in the marketplace, and customers have virtually no choices. There are few if any restraints upon government firms. In the last analysis, all power in socialist systems is political. It is supported by police, informers, and the military. There are no checks upon socialist elites. Criticism and dissent are regarded as treason. There is a reason for this. Socialists regard their system as the embodiment of a moral vision. To criticize it is deemed immoral.

This confusion between socialism as a moral ideal and socialism as an economic institution causes much vague and fuzzy idealism, until the ship of state is actually launched. Then it will shatter on the rocks of reality. The record of the voyages of socialist experiments is full of shipwrecks. Most failed for want of checks and balances. All were at first utopian about institutional power, until the cynics seized its levers. In socialist dictatorships, savage human passions have no check. Latin Americans who choose socialism, therefore, will have to be extremely clear about the checks and balances they will introduce into it, so that Latin American experiments in socialism do not end as have socialist experiments elsewhere….
… liberation theologians may wish to reconsider their opposition to private property. Many link private property to selfishness. They think of it as the fundamental institution conditioning citizens to self-interest, self-enclosure, and separation from the community. Yet the main reasons for the institution of private prop-[116]erty are quite different. The first is that private property is to human liberty as incarnation is to the spirit. It is the bodily means by which human beings express their liberty to act in the world. Without material instruments, spiritual liberty is deprived of a capacity for autonomous action in history. The second is that private property is, effectively, a limit against the power of the state. If the state owns everything, citizens have no place on which to stand over or against it. Against literature, e.g., the state can decide not to make newsprint or presses available.

The third reason is a lesson from human experience, already apparent to the Fathers of the Church and embodied often in Catholic social teaching, viz., that human nature is such that humans work more diligently at what is their own, attached as it were to their own dignity as human subjects, than (except rarely) at tasks performed in common. The fourth reason is that private property gives incentives to families and their heirs to improve upon family endowments across the generations and even the centuries. Thus private property is an institution encouraging social dynamism and social satisfaction. These reasons do not suggest that the institution of property is without problems….

Another absolutely central term in liberation theology is capitalism. Dennis Goulet writes that liberation theologians “reject capitalism — even a capitalism which is rectified or attenuated by welfare policies — as radically immoral and structurally incompatible with social justice.” [A New Moral Orderi (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974), p. 83.] José Miguez Bonino writes: “For us Latin Americans today socialism, as a socio-economic structure and a historical project … represents our obedience in faith and it is the matrix of our theological reflection.” [“Historical Praxis and Christian Identity,” in Rosino Gibelllini, ed., Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1975), p. 279.) Alfredo Fierro holds: “Political theology is the specific and proper form of theology in an epoch dominated by Marx.” [The Militant Gospel, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977), p. 102.] And [117] again: “Political theology is a theology operating under the sign of Marx, just as truly as scholasticism was a theology operating under the sign of Aristotle and liberal Protestant theology was operating under the sign of Kant.” [Ibid., p. 80.] And yet again: “Many of today’s theologians, and almost all those who have concerned themselves with political theology, seem to admit unreservedly the validity of the Marxist analysis insofar as socioeconomic realities are concerned.” [Ibid., p. 114.]

It may well be, as some assert, that not all the liberation theologians are Marxist. Certainly, some are socialists, who reject important elements of Marxism. It is impossible to discovery any, however, who are in favor of capitalism or a free economy. I have not found any who, in naming the “enemy” and the “oppressor” from whom they seek liberation, are not anti-capitalist. Capitalism, in the eyes of liberation theology, is the enemy. Concretely, this means that the economic system of the United States is their primary target….

Most of the elites of the United States who are well-educated in the humanities and social sciences have also been taught to be anti-capitalist. The humanists of Great Britain and the U.S. have long denigrated “the dark satanic mills” (William Blake), the “philistine” (Matthew Arnold), “babbittry” (Sinclair Lewis), the “booboisie” (H. L. Mencken), “robber barons,” and the rest. Even many conservatives are anti-capitalist, for aristocratic reasons. The ideal class romanticized by many is the aristocracy. Upon the bourgeoisie, the businessman, and the nouveaux riches (“fat cats”), ridicule is heaped. Anti-capitalist sentiments are part of a capitalist education. [“Would anyone dispute that, apart from certain religious schools and certain colleges in the South and perhaps in Utah, the reigning ethos in American colleges and universities today is the anti-capitalist ethos? … the better — or, to be more precise, the more prestigious — the school, the more the ideas of anticapitalism tended to hold sway. From the schools to the culture at large: Joseph Schumpeter … had foreseen the process years before it had quite come about: ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture,’ he wrote, ‘is the extent to which the modern bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion hostile to its very existence.’ ” Joseph Epstein, “The Education of an Anti-Capitalist,” Commentary, August 1983, pp. 58–59.] …

Three notions are crucial to the concept of capitalism shared by [118] most liberation theologians: (1) the labor theory of value; (2) the theory of surplus value; and (3) the primacy of the exchange function or merchandising. None of these is unique to capitalism. All three are found in pre-capitalist systems. In fact, the origin of capitalism lies in the insight that all three of these principles are false.

[Page 125] Theologians have an obligation to think ahead for the Church, experimenting with new ideas and institutions, which may one day form the basis for Catholic social thought, as it develops in the future. Liberation theologians deserve credit for challenging us to think more seriously about the problems of such nations as those of Latin America. But it is necessary to examine further whether their own option for the future — they call it “socialism” — is sufficiently different from what Latin America already has. In the past, liberation theologians say, the Catholic Church was at fault for too easily baptizing the existing order. There remains the danger that one day a future generation will blame the liberation theologians for too easily baptizing the existing revolutionary project of the left. In that charge, there would be an especially poignant cutting edge, precisely because the practical results achieved by socialist revolutions in the twentieth century are dreary and oppressive.

Thus, it is important to know what liberation theologians mean when they use the symbol “socialism.” In order to grasp that meaning, it is necessary first to examine two concepts fundamental to liberation theology, “dependency” and “the poor.”

[Page 147] Four points require comment. First, for Marx, truth means siding with the weak-willed proletariat, helping it to grasp its “scientific” mission to seize political supremacy. To be faithful to truth means siding with the oppressed, the carriers of truth. Second, truth means understanding revolutionary praxis. What matters is the triumph of the proletariat in history. Everything else is false and immoral. Third, not all who are poor are true carriers of revolutionary praxis. Many are called, but only the proletariat is chosen. And even among the proletariat there are dupes and deceivers. Some are reactionary. Some are easily bought off by social improvements. The worst of all are those socialists and other “progressives” who would sell out for something less than the full dictatorship of the proletariat. Some who are “tactical” allies must be recognized as “strategic” traitors. Finally, in the words of the Communist Manifesto: “The theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: ‘Abolition of private property.’ ” [Marx & Engles, Communist Manifesto, p. 51.]

[Page 149] Oddly, in Gutierrez’s economics of “liberation,” individuals drop from sight. Gutierrez prefers to speak of a vast abstract collective: class. And it is not at all clear what he means by “class.” The difficulties inherent in the term are well known to social scientists.

[Page 164] What does Father Segundo mean by socialism? “We give the name of socialism to a political regime in which the ownership of the means of production is removed from individuals and handed over to higher institutions whose concern is the higher good.” [Juan Luis Segundo, “Capitalism — Socialism: A Theological Crux,” in Concilium 96: The Mystical and Political Dimension of the Christian Faith (1974); reprinted in Michael Novak, ed., Liberation South, Liberation North (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), p. 15.] For Segundo, the choice for socialism is the crux of theological discourse today. Socialism is the way to the Kingdom of God on earth. But this is to place an old-fashioned faith in government officials. How does Segundo know that “higher institutions” will automatically practice “concern for the higher good”? Will politicians become by some magic sin-proof? In addition, as Arthur F. McGovern, S.J., points out [Marxism, p. 201.], Segundo has illicitly declared socialism successful in advance by adding into it by definition “concern for the higher good.” This tactic unfairly stacks the deck. And it displaces the “option for socialism” from the realm of practical reason to the realm of pure definitional logic.
Segundo’s definition of capitalism is not much better. “By capitalism we understand the political regime in which the ownership of the goods of production is open to economic competition.” [“Capitalism — Socialism,” p. 15.] Actually, that is not quite the way Adam Smith put the argument. In Smith’s day, the state controlled and regulated most economic activities, including where individuals should invest their savings. That way of proceeding, Smith observed, was of little benefit to the common good. Economic progress was blocked. Economic activism was paralyzed….

[Page 165] … In Latin America today, most large enterprises are already owned by the state….

[Page 166] The main content of “socialism” here [in Gutierrez] seems to be the destruction of the existing order. No information is conveyed about the order that will replace it.

[Page 168] … History shows that popular majorities are typically conservative, much more so than intellectuals. Moreover, popular majorities tend to desire private property and the right to make their own economic decisions. In particular, the peasant class is naturally capitalist. For peasants, owning one’s own property means an end to peonage and serfdom. Peasants resent price controls imposed by socialist bureaucrats as much as they resent feudal lords; the one set of lords is as bad as the other. Insofar as Gutierrez desires a truly democratic order, he need not call it “socialism.” Some forms of socialism do not install “political power” that serves “great popular majorities.”

The third claim of Gutierrez is that socialism will eliminate the private appropriation of wealth created by human toil. Does he mean that the bread earned by the toil of the worker will be taken from him? Does he mean that all wealth created by labor will be appropriated by the state? He may mean that workers will organize themselves into communes, in which wealth will be appropriated by the community. There have been many such experiments in history. Characteristically, they have failed in three crucial respects. First, individual excellence is not rewarded; hence, individual effort tends to fall to the level of the least productive. Second, invention ceases. There are no rewards, only social punishments, for proposing better methods, goods, or services. Communal societies stagnate. Third, communal societies have been obliged to repress entrepreneurial talent, because it inevitably leads to differentiation and to inequalities. They have had to suppress even tiny shoots of individuality, in the name of conformity. By contrast, popular economic dynamism arises from creative ideas among those of the poor who have entrepreneurial talent. In short, this claim by Gutierrez is, and has been, subject to historical testing. The results of these tests are not favorable to his project.

[Page 172] Concerning how to analyze the existing defects in the Latin American economic system, liberation theologians call the existing economic order in Latin America capitalist. That is a serious error.

[Page 174] Notwithstanding the demolition of Marxist principles by many scholars in the nineteenth century, von Mises says, Marx saved socialist ideas by four shrewd steps. First, Marx denied that human reason could properly criticize a social system, since all thinking is determined by one’s social class. Thus, “bourgeois” criticism of socialism is invalid. Second, Marx held that history will necessarily bring about the abolition of private property and the socialization of the means of production, through expropriating the expropriators. True science consists in being in tune with this necessity. Third, no one is to be allowed to put forward any concrete proposals for the construction of the socialist Promised Land. Socialism is not allowed to be identified with any concrete program. Since socialism will inevitably come, reason should not try to imagine it in advance, but docilely yield to its immediate imperatives. Fourth, anyone who is in tune with historical necessity is to be [175] defined as good, noble, and moral. Anyone who attempts to criticize the socialist project is to be defined as serving the egotistical interests of a doomed class, lacking in intellectual credibility, and exemplifying selfishness. Socialists, therefore, need never to meet the arguments of their critics but only to attack their persons (and their class).

… Gertrude Himmelfarb, reviewing the history of British historians who have been members of the Communist Party during the period 1920–1985, shows from their own writings how they deliberately ruled out of bounds any criticism of socialist experiments — even during the Ukrainian famine, the Stalinist purges, and right until today. [Himmelfarb points out that “both as historians and as party members, they had more reason than most to be aware of the highly publicized purges and trials of the 1930s, the executions and mass imprisonments, the precipitous changes in the party line requiring comrades to be Bolsheviks one week and Popular Frontiers another, pro-war and anti-Fascist one day and anti-war and pro-German the next. (For almost two years, while their country was at war with Germany, British Communists had to defend the Hitler-Stalin pact.)” Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Group: Bourgeois Britain and Its Marxist Historians,” The New Republic, 10 February 1986, p. 35. The best work on this phenomenon is probably Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Hollander has also written about his phenomenon in Latin America; see his “The Newest Political Pilgrims,” Commentary, August 1985.]

[Page 179] Bertrand Russell admitted that Marx more desired the destruction of the bourgeoisie than the improvement of the lives of the proletariat. [“as Bertrand Russell once put it, [Marx’s] aim was far more the unhappiness of the bourgeoisie than the happiness of the proletariat.” Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, rev. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), p. 477.] … Marxism is neither a practical nor a scientific theory but an expression of mystical will.

[Page 180] George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under Socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well. Also you would not be allowed to have half a crown [two shillings and sixpence] an hour when other women had only two shillings, or to be content with two shillings when they had half a crown. As far as I know I was the first Socialist writer to whom it occurred to state this explicitly as a necessary postulate of permanent civilization; but as nothing that is true is ever new I daresay it had been said again and again before I was born.” [The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (NY: Brentano’s Publishers, 1928), p. 470.]

What is the meaning of this Shavian drive toward “equality of income”? The phrase is not to be taken literally. I have never met an intellectual or a literary socialist who actually cuts his income to the national median (let alone to the level of the poorest), in order to live according to his own beliefs. Moreover, sophisticated socialists will tell you that they do not mean literal equality. They intend, they say, to limit excessive inequalities of wealth.

Some assert that this means something on the order of 9:1 or 10:1, as between the best paid and the least. (Socialist intellectuals think intellect and education should receive the higher level.) … [181] socialist hatred for the rich is directed at a very narrow target….

Liberation theologians use the symbol “socialism” to name the future society of which they dream. They show surprisingly little interest in discerning or describing the actual institutions in which they intend to embody that dream in history. They do not point to any existing historical models, and they do not describe even in large brush strokes any hypothetical future model. It is hard to be convinced that they actually give the word socialism any socioeconomic content whatever. To believe that they do, one must also believe that they are holding that content secret; that they know it, but do not want to reveal it.

No, the only hypothesis that fits the way liberation theologians actually use the word socialism is that, in the socioeconomic order, it stands for something “new,” “radical,” and “revolutionary,” and that it will usher in an era (miraculously) of the “new man.” But what this order is, institutionally, they do not care enough to inquire. Therefore, one is forced to seek out the psychological satisfactions that using the word socialism affords them. Using that word certainly gives them no guidance about the shape of the non-capitalist institutions of their desire.

Just the same, socialism is an ancient idea. It is at least as old as Plato. Thus one can use the word to name an invariant inner will, expressed in analogous institutions in various strata of history. This inner will of socialism is not best characterized as the pursuit of science. On the contrary, writing of this inner will in his introduction to a study of socialism by the Soviet mathematician Igor Shafarevich, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn notes “the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism” and its “instinctive” aversion to scientific analysis. [Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Introduction to Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon, trans. William Tjalsma (NY: Harper & Row, 1980), p. vii.] Socialism has always been a kind of mysticism. In some ways its passion is directed more toward religious or moral values than toward economic institutions. Socialism rejects the world that is; what a socialist world will be it has always protected in obscurity.

[Page 182] As in the case of Gutierrez, so with Plato and the Gnostics, socialist doctrines are always reactions: Plato as a reaction to Greek culture, the Gnostics as a reaction to Judaism and Christianity, Gutierrez as a reaction to the existing order. But these reactions always have a consistent direction. Their invariant features are two: first, to destroy the existing present order; second, to enforce equality of a certain type. Solzhenitsyn again: “Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and ‘God-like’ aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua [as being] identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity.” [Ibid., p. viii.]

[Page 189] … socialism is hostile to religion …

[Page 191] Socialism is holistic.

[Page 237] [Hugo Assmann] speaks of Pope John Paul II with a passionate ferocity of hatred and opposition…. He speaks with detestation of Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI]…. [238] It is clear that he hates [President Ronald] Reagan and everything he stands for….

[Page 290] Tocqueville devoted the concluding three chapters of Democracy in America to his fear of a new, soft despotism. He said it would stand over men as “an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. The power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (NY: Doubleday & Co., 1969), p. 692.