the interview, at Distributist Review
An excerpt:
Getting to the heart of what you publish, some people like to call Distributism Communism, mind you these people often misspell Capitalism as Catholicism, but how do you respond to the communism claim?
People who throw these labels around rarely understand what they mean in a real and historical sense. Communism, in its essence, is the denial of the existence of the right of private individuals or families to own productive property. It’s not the “curtailing” of that right, the “limitation” or “direction” of it, or the denial of it in limited, particular circumstances. It is the principled denial of the idea that families and individuals have the right to own productive property, and absent that denial there is no Communism or Socialism. And unless you can prove that someone engages in that categorical denial, you can’t, either accurately or validly, call him a Communist. You can look that up in Cathrein’s “magisterial” work on Socialism.
If you take the broad definition of Socialism or Communism that many neocons and Capitalists use, everyone who mails a letter at the Post Office – which is owned and operated by the government -- is at least implicitly “conspiring” with Communists for the destruction of private ownership. But that’s pure and simple nonsense, isn’t it? Indeed, how do these people react when they read the words of Pius XI where he says, “certain kinds of property, it is rightly contended, ought to be reserved to the State since they carry with them a dominating power so great that cannot without danger to the general welfare be entrusted to private individuals”? Was he a Communist too because he allowed for public ownership of certain kinds of enterprises?
As for Distributism, how one gets from a doctrine or philosophy that says that there should be MORE widespread private ownership of productive property to a doctrine which denies ownership of productive property to men and families is a complete mystery to me. Frankly, it is intellectually dishonest to even imply that there is any similarity between Distributism and Communism (unless you’re operating at the level of the absolutely absurd, like saying Distributism and Communism are somehow ideological “cousins” because both are, quite similarly, not the word “catfish”). Those like TIA who try to hint at that similarity by reviewing books by Arthur Penty and illustrating the reviews with pictures of Joseph Stalin are coming very close to LYING. If advocating that the use and ownership of private property be controlled and limited in view of the common good is Stalinism, then Pius XI is a Stalinist. Look at QA §49: “when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service....”
Finally, if these were honest scholars were making honorable investigations into Distributism, they’d feel compelled to read the primary sources of the Distributists, which denounced Communism and Collectivism time and time again. Think of Penty’s Communism and the Alternative (1933) or the Belloc pamphlets against Socialism or the “manifesto” of the Distributists, before Penty’s of 1937, called Liberty and Property by H. E. Humphries from 1930, in which he calls Communism “utterly opposed to Distributism”; “Our difference with the Communists,” he says, “is on philosophy and therefore on everything else.”
Also, people who haven’t bothered to read a single Distributist work characterize it as a “forcible equal redistribution” of land a la the land confiscations of the communists. Beyond the fact that this absurd idea is not to be found in any single work of any single distributist, do you characterize your work as aiming for such a goal?
No. One who would maintain the contrary would be obligated to provide proofs that we pursue such an aim; and those proofs would be 100% impossible to find.
As for the Distributists generally, one might profitably recall Chesterton’s remark at the end of What’s Wrong with the World: “In speaking of a sweeping redistribution, I speak of decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the means. It is not at all too late to restore an approximately rational state of English possessions without any mere confiscation.”
Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? But then I know that it’s a lot to ask of some people that they take the words of me, my colleagues and contacts, and our much more worthy predecessors at face value. There is always the more-or-less unsubstantiated imputation of some kind of sinister motive – like your friend’s suggestion that I’m clamoring after the “instruments of power.” But again, none of this can be substantiated by anything I or any Distributist has ever said or written.
All that said, I think that intellectual honesty demands that we admit that the question of the state seizing (or “facilitating” the sale of) an unused or neglected piece of surplus land from a wealthy landowner – again, after compensating him for it in some fashion – and making it available for sale to the landless proletarian at an affordable price, so that he too can own a piece of productive property, is perfectly acceptable according to Catholic doctrine. No one is proposing this today, and no one can even think about doing it today (at least not in this country...). Anyway, the author of Quadragesimo Anno – Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S. J. – says as much explicitly in his commentary on the encyclical he drafted for Pius XI, and in a way the entire history of the land movement in Ireland bears the point out. The great Cardinal Manning of England supported this Irish movement, and he was hardly squeamish on doctrine. Again, not that it’s likely to happen in this country today, or that’s it’s even an approach that anyone’s seriously recommending, but it is worth knowing what the Church’s experts and thinkers have said and written on a given topic before hurling epithets.
Well is the label Distributism problematic, since it may imply a RE-distribution?
Let’s start with a counter example, the term ‘Collectivism.” What exactly does someone mean by “Collectivist”?
First, he means someone who thinks that productive property should be owned in some fashion by the community, and second he means someone who views that collective holding of productive property as a refutation of the idea that productive property can be privately owned. So the essence – as we looked at a little before – is a denial of the right of private ownership of productive property. But it implies nothing about how that denial is to be realized. It might be Stalinist-style, murdering everyone who doesn’t give up his land, or it might be Fabian-style, implemented through voting, bureaucratic reform, and propaganda. The point is that the term “Collectivism” says a lot about the ideal form of society, according to Collectivists, but it says quite a little about how that form is to be brought about.
So with Distributism. The goal is a widespread distribution of ownership of productive property. How one gets there is another question, and those who say that Distributism necessarily implies a wholesale “re-distribution” make as much sense as those who insist that “Collectivism” necessarily means a wholesale “re-collection.”
Now this isn’t to say that “Distributism” isn’t a bit of an awkward word. Would it, however, be too much to ask that those who criticize the term – and point out that the Church never herself used it – familiarize themselves with the actual works of the Distributists? These Distributists themselves admitted that “Distributism” was an awkward, novel, and even undesirable word invented to express an idea that was so common as to, in fact, lack a specific term, owing indeed to the idea’s commonness. Will Titterton’s 1936 memoir of GKC records Belloc even jokingly “apologizing to God and man” for having invented the term, if he did indeed invent it, during the first official meeting of the Distributist League in 1926. But of course this doesn’t mean that the term is necessarily vague. It’s actually quite clear, and the articles of Irish political economist Charles Stanton Devas in the old Catholic Encyclopedia do quite a nice job of hinting at exactly what Distributists are aiming for, if in case GKC’s Outline of Sanity and Belloc’s few essays aren’t enough. Devas says: “the proper unfolding of human liberty and personality is historically bound up with [private property], and cannot develop where each person is only a sharer in a compulsory partnership, or, on the other hand, where property is confined to a privileged few. Suitably, therefore, the same Pope who had defended the true dignity and true liberty of man urged the diffusion [emphasis mine; he almost says “distribution”...whew, that was close] of property as the mean between Socialism and Individualism, and that where possible each citizen should dwell secure in a homestead which, however humble, was his own.”
As for keeping the term “Distributism,” let’s also bear in mind that we do have some obligation to historical accuracy and continuity. Catholics, of all people, should recognize the importance of doctrinal and even semantic continuity – remember how sacred the formulas themselves of our Faith are, along with the actual Faith they express. The fact of the matter is that for the last several hundred years priests and laity alike, thinkers and doers alike – all loyal sons of the Church – have risen up to speak with Christian Faith on matters of society, politics, economics. In England in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, a good portion of the men who did this were known as or called themselves Distributists. It’s simply a fact. Why not just admit it, live with it, pick up their torch, and carry it on?
Isn’t it intellectually dishonest for people to pretend they know what they’re talking about when they have never bothered to read a single Distributist work, such as the seminal An Essay on the Restoration of Property?
Agreed. But, interestingly, that doesn’t stop them from pontificating about all the evils of Distributism and those who advocate it. A more honorable, honest, and even Catholic approach would be to figure out what Distributism is, and then praise it or condemn it insofar as it is deserving, one way or another. If Distributism is so obviously against the Faith or condemned in light of Catholic doctrine, why are these very noisy critics so short on critical substance? The only piece to attempt – and I give him credit for at least sticking to substance – such a critique was John Clark’s scandalous hatchet-job of Belloc in The Latin Mass some years ago, and anyone who knows what Belloc believed and what the Church teaches knows that Mr. Clark was way off the mark. It’s a shame and a disappointment that TLM ever printed it. But again, it illustrates, by contrast almost, how plainly obvious it is that the Distributist vision is perfectly compatible with the Faith.
John, getting back to the idea of private property, there are some people in America, and lamentably, even some Traditional Catholics, who believe that private property comes with unlimited rights. No one can tell me how much property I can buy with my money.
That’s an outrageous assertion, at least for a Catholic. Narrowly considered, it’s fine to argue that a Catholic social order would not set a specific limit as to how much money you would have or how much land you would own. But that completely misses the point, because the issue isn’t how much property you have to consume (although I think it’s safe to say that the capitalistic “spirit,” indeed the whole mood of secular economics, whether Capitalist or Socialist, which sees man’s purpose as amassing and consuming as much property as possible, militates against the Catholic spirit of poverty which looks only for a frugal and becoming sufficiency of material goods, and therefore consciously rejects pursuit of more than necessary, and even feels an obligation to dispense surplus to those in need).
Rather the issue is, first, about productive property, and, second, what having too much does to the opportunity of others to have their share and to employ it productively. The argument against Wal-Mart isn’t simply that it’s big and sells lots of junk (though from a cultural or aesthetic standpoint those are probably valid criticisms), it’s that its bigness enables it to exercise an unfair advantage over smaller firms that are unable to compete – even while those firms represent people’s livelihoods and people’s fair share of productive property, the ownership of which everyone is entitled to, as Leo XIII and Pius XI made so perfectly clear. Note that I didn’t say “resources are finite” and people shouldn’t have more than their share. There’s a little truth to that – as in the case of land, for instance – but it’s not completely true. The more compelling point is that a certain huge mass of wealth enables companies to take competitive actions that shuts out their smaller competitors, and which they simply wouldn’t be able to do if they weren’t possessed of so much productive property.
When Henry VIII and his “nobles” confiscated the common lands that were held in trust by the community or the Church for use by those who would otherwise have been landless, the question was not really one of how he shouldn’t have enriched himself (by feudal law he was overlord of all England, anyway, so he had more than he could have ever been able to use or enjoy). It was more one of what the enclosures did to those who needed their small share of productive property, even if commonly held in trust, to provide themselves with both physical sustenance and also with – and this is even more important, and it’s an argument against the technology worshipers who say that people don’t need gardens and plots of land because technology makes all the “stuff’ (for consumption, mind you) we could possibly need – the sense of ownership, control, stewardship, and responsibility over the material means of their livelihoods, which has its own spiritual, moral, intellectual, and psychological benefits, and which is absolutely essential for all of us truly to work out our salvation while on pilgrimage toward heaven. These enclosures not only directly deprived peasants their share of ownership of common land, they massively enriched the textile manufacturers and merchants so that their newfound concentration of wealth could be employed to crush small competition – the guilds, basically – and enable the further amassing of wealth, unto the vicious cycle we have today. If anyone doubts this, let him look at the Shared Capitalism Institute’s statistics, which until recently (evidently) were available on the net, and quite convincing.
Thanks to Traditio in Radice.
IHS Press books are moderately priced; I'd love to have their entire collection, but that is out of the question at the present moment.
Notes:
Fringe Watch v. Catholic Neocon Observer
plus this link
It is inevitable that there be a political dimension to Catholicism, because everything needs to be ordered to God and Christ, including the life of the political community. It only underscores the need for a definitive "Catholic social teaching" to provide the principles (and limits) for discussion.
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