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Pope Francis Takes On Neo-Liberalism
Pope Francis released an Apostolic Exhortation which explains his views about how and whereto the catholic church should move. A part of it is a critic of the current neo-liberal economic system prevalent in the "west" and spreading through globalization.
Here are some excerpts from Francis' Evangelium Gaudium (emphasis added):
No to an economy of exclusion
53. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. […]
54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. […]
No to the new idolatry of money
[…]
56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. […]
No to a financial system which rules rather than serves
[…]
58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings. […]
No to the inequality which spawns violence
59. […] When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized. […]
Conservative politicians in the U.S., many of whom are catholic, will have quite a problem with these theses. Will they now denounce the pope as a communist anti-semite?
If the church, its followers and sympathizers sign up to and start to work along this papal opinion, it will have great and positive consequences for all of us.
Rowan @43
The point that you make is certainly the Whig theory of history. It is from a theory of history centred around the sanctity of private property, a theory which is quite modern, that I dissent.
I do so because it is not true. Private property in the land, the means of production in pre-modern societies, was very rare if known at all. The reasons for this were legion, but one of them was that land was not scarce. In most countries there were large tracts of unoccupied “wasteland.”
It was labour in the form of the individual peasant or the village community that was scarce, prized and protected/enslaved. There was private property often enough but it was in the form of labour power.
Tawney was essentially a student of Tudor era history. His interest in protestant ideology seems to have originated in his studies of the social crisis in the time of Edward VI, the time when “sheep ate men”, when land was being enclosed in order to farm it for capitalist commodity production rather than to employ it as the economic basis of the village community linked loosely with the fairs and markets of the medieval city.
One of the problems the enclosers and the contemporaneous exploiters of monastic and clerical lands- the fruits of the Henrician Reformation- encountered was the widespread rejection of the idea that agricultural lands could be privatised. The belief that, regardless of legalities, the first charge on the land’s product was the sustenance of the community, the peasants, their families, their dependents and the poor, was pervasive.
This was the bourgeois revolution: the institution of private property in the means of production. This is the basis of capitalism and the definition of imperialism: the privatisation of communal resources in order to produce commodities for the market. As opposed to production for use: the employment of land in order to sustain the community, firstly by feeding, clothing and lodging its members and also by producing a surplus to be traded for vital necessities obtainable elsewhere etc.
Never mind the parable of the talents or the Ten Commandments: the mere fact that received wisdom is that they sanctify private property, per se including inthe means of production, ought to alert you to the fact that these are ideological interpretations.
That is the trouble with you atheists, you growl at the church but you swallow the ideologies they preach wholesale. Such is the long history of anti-clericalism, a petit bourgeois obsession which capitalism, for all its supposed reliance on religious “opiates” is very happy with.
Francis deserves to be taken seriously. He may be a hypocrite, who knows. But what he says about capitalism also fits in well with what many catholics, including Thomas More, were saying when the capitalist era began.
The capitalist system is in crisis. Unsurprisingly among those who see that it is failing and whose eyes are opened to the suffering of the poor, now realised to be not unfortunates, -eventually to be rescued by development, education, jobs- but products, indictments of the system itself.
Look at the world. In every continent peasants, hundreds of millions of them, are being pushed off the land towards the cities, towards wage exploitation, selling themselves, casual labour, prostitution, selling their organs, gangsterism… this is the nature of a crisis of unprecedented intensity.
And it begins not in the deserted chapels of the dying religions but in the privatisation, by thieves in cahoots with lawyers, of hundreds of thousands of arable land, forest, and pastures. “Sold, by the President of Ethiopia to the King of Saudi Arabia. One hundred thousand acres.”
“Sold by the Armed Forces of Honduras to the international palm oil cartel, fifty thousand acres!” “Sold, by the Peoples Republic to the Macao Casino Corporation…” “Sold by the Workers government of Brazil to Weyerhauser Lumber…” “… by the Crown in Canada to Koch Enterprises oil company…”
Much has been happening in the world, Rowan, since Karl Marx died. If he’d been living he’d have paid attention to it. Why cannot his disciples?
Posted by: bevin | Nov 28 2013 21:06 utc | 54
What Fuller says, foff, is very interesting. I only read your excerpts but he seems to have been one of the pioneers in the re-interpretation of the imperialist era.
To me the thing which is so often neglected is the coincidence of:
The Discovery of America
The Reformation
The Renaissance
and the birth of Modern Capitalism
not to mention post-Raphaelite art.
The conventional historical narratives came up with the most extraordinary and unconvincing explanations. Most of them suggested that, if God had not designated the Briton to be his champion and take the world by the scruff of its neck, for its own good, it was only because he was wise enough to know he didn’t need to ask.
My own view begins with the idea that America was such a vast treasure house of minerals, fertile land, lumber, protein (e g cod from the Grand Banks) and new food resources (maize, beans, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, peppers, etc etc) and was so unprotected, thanks to the susceptibility of the natives to eurasian diseases, that, after 1492, all bets were off. It was just a matter of time before the Europeans ‘bulked up’ to the extent that the empire was inevitable.
Is that not what Fuller is suggesting?
And, of course, the country in Europe that was almost bound to dominate was going to be strategically placed on the sea lanes, while insulated from invasion over land borders. It would be a country able to mobilise its capital into trade and to put its military strength into naval power. etc etc.
The Dutch, who paved the way, excelled in almost every respect-including the fact that Amsterdam became the refuge for successive waves of exiled traders, iberian jews, huguenots among them- but it had land borders over which Spanish, French, German armies continually marched.
It had to be Britain. And it was.
jfl @57. I have here, unread but saved, a file of letters sent by a Canadian, employed by the UN and an expert in community organisation, living in Thailand, in the early fifties to his father living in western Ontario, near Lake Huron.
It is a reminder of the Cold War that he was probably driven there, because McCarthyism made it hard to find employment here in Canada, and ended up if not working for, very closely related to the CIA (cf Obama’s mother in Indonesia).
I used to live, as a child, in Taiping and Penang, so I’m a former neighbour.
Posted by: bevin | Nov 29 2013 2:48 utc | 60
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