Pbro.
Julio Meinvielle CATHOLIC CONCEPTION OF THE ECONOMY Data of the original edition: Catholic Culture Courses Printed by Francisco A. Colombo, September 19, 1936 Electronic edition by Arturo Ruiz Freites IVE, 2017.
PROLOGUE CONTENTS..
CHAPTER I ECONOMICS AND THE MODERN ECONOMICS Matter and form of the economy.
Formal Elements of Capnahsm Essence of Capitalism: Malen'al Elements Definition of Capitalism...........................
Capitalism is uneconomic...
Greed, essence of capitalism The Catholic economy.
The economy, an ethics..
Transcendence of the Catholic economy.
CHAPTER II.
PRODUCTION OF THE LAND Production hierarchy.
Production type domestic and rough: The common use of external goods Private property....
The state can limit private property... A radical corollary solution to this doctrine A consideration about our country..........
The return to earth...
CHAPTER III.
INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION Industrial production.......................................
Moral justification of capital.
The company.....................
The profit of the company The salary Justification of the salary The machine............... Burgucsía and prolctariatado..
CHAPTER IV.
THE FINE Real riches The money The money trade......
The loan at interest....Irlicitness of the loan at interest.
The money in capitalism The trade in the currency The prolific money The money and the capital The interest loan in the capitalism The interest loan divides humanity into oligarchy and miserable crowd It is nefarious because it breeds a nefarious mountain of money A typical case among us “It takes money”.............
Money, pure instrument of change Usury - vice, usury - system..
Usury, finances and Jews: CHAPTER V.
THE CONSUNE.....
Advertising...
Fashion... CONSUMER Credit................——Wweeeeeeeeeer eee DO Inverted consumption Trade The bankruptcy of an economy - profit.
The fair price.
CHAPTER VI.
ECONOMIC - SOCIAL ORDER.
Liberalism Socialism Catholic Doctrine on the Human Person: Need for Social Functions.
The workers' unionization Corporate regime.
Professional organization.
Interprofessional organisation.
The state and the corporate regime.
Establishment of the corporate regime.
The international economic collaboration EPÍLOGO APPENDIX I Bula Detestabilis by Sixto V APPENDIX II.... Bula Vix Pervenit by Benedict XIV.
APPENDIX III On the loan at interest: Appendix IV Note on the Jewish question.
PROLOGUE “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all else will be given to you in addition,” said Jesus Christ.
These words are not a pious maxim.
They're a law of reality.
The modern world, which has sought before all economics, not only failed to achieve this, but also lost the kingdom of God.
This book is intended to record this fact.
Above all, he wants to show that the Gospel and the Doctrine of the Church, expressed so wonderfully by St.Thomas Aquinas, contains the essential principles of human life, which no economy can forget.
The economy has no end in itself, as if it were a God.
The economy is man-made.
It must serve the man.
And not to a man forged in the brain of a philosopher, but at the service of real man, as a creature created by God with, all the hierarchical virtualities that it contains in itself.
If one forgets this truth of common sense, one is exposed to forging truly wonderful but nefarious creations.
This is what happens with modern economic regimes and with the theories of economists, which seem to be extremely grand constructions.
But what are they worth if they sacrifice the human community instead of serving?
It is worthwhile to contemplate the waste of complicated technique of many economists in admirable elucubrations that fall into the void for not keeping in mind this elementary truth that an economy is worth to the extent that it is beneficial to man.
For this reason this book is not and cannot be a technical book.
It is simply a reflection of common sense, on the realities of economic life.
When economic life is ordered in a human sense, technique can play a beneficial role, making the different organs of economic activity more adjustable with a more humane performance.
But if this human order is lacking, every technique will be sterile, if not evil.
It's not that the technique is depreciated.
The technique has a useful but secondary mission.
The technique is myopic.
It must be illuminated by the higher senses.
Possible, p. 3.
e.g., that, in the “set x of economic phenomena”, a technician comparing the financial movement discovers progress in activities that can be translated into an ascension of mathematical curves; but does it follow from that that real economic life has progressed, bringing real improvements of wealth and well-being to all those who have acted in the “set x of economic phenomena”?
Is it not possible that this progress of curves indicates a real increase in the total set, but since there is inequality in distribution, that progress has been made for the benefit of a few and at the expense of the social body?
And where the technique is to check a progress of curves, the truth of human well-being points to a decline?
Is it not a manifest thing that there has never been in humanity, a financial movement, a stock market movement above all, as huge as today, and yet human well-being is no better than in other times?
This shows that the technique of your myopic must be illuminated by superior views of intelligence.
Of intelligence, I say, that he sees the reason and essence of things, and that sc calls common sense when it proceeds well by the proper instinct to attain truth, and that it is called Aristotelian-Tomist Philosophy when it can reflexively justify that it proceeds well.
Hence, this book is, indeed, a Catholic philosophy of economics.
But when you say philosophy, don't imagine that it's an eager creation of the brain.
True philosophy is nothing more than reflective penetration into beings, trying to determine their essential laws.
The true philosopher does not create or invent, but reads.
For this reason, this book wants to highlight the essential ordering of every economy that is truly in the service of man: simply, of the economy.
Because an economy that does not place man is a contradiction.
It would be an uneconomic economy.
'Let him serve the whole man with the hierarchical virtualities that he contains.
Man is not a mere stomach.
In addition to the stomach, man is rational; in addition to man, he has, by the mercy of God, a divine destiny.
Economics must provide the social man with the goods of his body, so that man may attain that divine destiny.
Only by respecting this essential law of man will the pursuit of material goods be truly an economy.
CHAPTER 1.
ECONOMY AND MODERN ECONOMY The world today lives under the sign of economic unrest, because the sense of the economy has been lost.
An infinite number of economic phenomena, called production, land, capital, labor, finance, consumption, are known; so-called economic laws are recorded; theories are constructed and economic schools are created; but the meaning of the economy is not possessed, because that of human life has been lost.
The modern world — I call the modern world the one engendered by the anti-traditional action of the Protestant Reformation, perpetuated in 19th century liberalism and now ready to be buried in Bolshevik anarchy — the modern world, I say, does not know and cannot know what life is, because sc has deprived of the act proper to intelligence, which is “judgment”.
In the “trial”, intelligence knows the real (ontological) value of things.
It's an essentially teleological act.
Faced with a being, not so much wants to know his functioning, his mechanism, his phenomenal reality, as his essence determined by his purpose: “For what is such a being?” and known his purpose, to adjust to it his functioning.
For this reason our constant concern in this book will be to formulate a judgment of value on economic reality.
We will have to penetrate into the very depths of modern economic phenomena, to discover their essential conformation and see if there is an ingenital perversion in them, and in this case, to propose the conditions of the effective medicine.
As the economic phenomena around us are essentially capitalist, nothing more just than to specify the nature of the capitalist economy.
Matter and form of the economy In any specific economic construction e.g.
the libcral capitalist economy, we can distinguish two distinct elements, substantially united in a single being; using the Aristotelian-Tomist language, we will call matter the passive element and report that receives as a soul and conformation of the other element, which we will call form.
From the substantial union of this matter and in this way a concrete economic construction is generated, just as every material being, water for example, results from a certain amount of matter informed by the determining and specific principle, which is the form.
Matter is a common element that may be informed by different forms, thus giving rise to different beings or essences.
When, for example, we drink water, and it becomes our flesh, the form of water disappears and gives rise to the form of flesh; but matter remains the same, and now sustains the form of flesh as formerly supported by water.
This means that there may be two distinct beings successively having the same matter.
Let us apply this doctrine to the liberal capitalist economy.
In it, the machine, the credit, the world exchange of products, p. 3.
e.g., it is like the matter of the economic building, and the conformation given to these elements is like the form.
If these elements were given a different shape, if they were determined in a different way, a different economy could also emerge.
For this reason, the interesting thing for the knowledge of an economic construction is the determination of that formal principle that constitutes as its soul.
However, the material elements also offer interest, since a certain form cannot inform a matter if it is not found in certain propitious provisions: for example, the food we eat is not assimilated into our substance but after a process of transformation, carried out by the action of gastro-intestinal juices, which arrange the matter for the reception of a certain form.
And the form, on the other hand, as it binds substantially to matter, imprints on it a characteristic seal.
This aristotelian-tomist distinction of matter and form applied to the economy is fundamental if we want to specify the scope of the criticisms that will be formulated against capitalism, These criticisms will not reach the material elements (p.
for example, to the machine, to the world trade exchange, to capital), but to the conformation that capitalism has printed to these material elements, to the use that it has made of the machine, of capital.
Let us therefore specify the essence of the Capitalist Economy by determining its matter and form.
Formal elements of capitalism The form will be manifested to us by the state of man at the moment when he prints, as officially, the impulse to the liberal capitalist economy.
This happens towards the end of the 18th century, when, agonizing the ancient world, he undertakes a victorious career of physical-mathematical science with its technical applications, liberal democracy with the crushing of aristocracy and bourgeois exaltation, and political economy with the theories of the physiocrats and liberal school.
At the same time, there are such phenomena as American Independence and the French Revolution, the construction of the steam engine and the freedom of trade.
What is the state of man at this very moment?
The man was on a slope, on which he had been rolling for more than three centuries.
The Middle Ages had achieved the unique miracle in the history of human equilibrium.
With his passions calmed, man lived in peace with himself, and lived in peace with his brothers, in the hierarchical order of social life.
There was order without violence, because all parts of society moved freely within the scope of their functions, each in its own sphere, without absorbing the inferior or running over the superior.
At the top of the hierarchically ordained social universe, the Servant of God’s servants dominated, as at the top of human concerns dominated “the only thing necessary”: the love of the One who manifested himself to us as Father.
It is not a question of making the apology of medieval civilization, “more beautiful in the refined memories of history than in the lived reality”,’ but of making glimpses of the normal type of a human civilization.
Luther officially breaks this beautiful order by destroying religious life, which, without attempting to do so, also supported the intellectual and moral life of man.
Without supernatural grace, the instincts of the human beast, especially greed, the execrante thirst for gold, which is like idolatry, according to the Apostolic.
“While Mercantilism of the 16th and 17th centuries announces the liberalism of the 19th century and the legalized piracy of Isabel leaves the modern speculators behind”, Descartes and Kant, destroying the life of intelligence and replacing it with reason, that is: a faculty that perceives not the essences but only abstract, mechanical realities, of a comparable magnitude, lay the foundations of a physical economy, adjusted to invariable mechanical laws, like the course of the stars, and like this, substrated to the proper regulation of the human being.
The funny thing is that as the domination of greed and the rationalistic or mechanical sense of life grew, it felt weakened within it and therefore anxious to break them!
].
Maritain, Religion et Culture.
♪
Marcel Malcor, Nova et Vetera, April-June 1931. Links that forced her to stay in order.
Rousseau officially proclaims the age of omnimode freedom, because, as there is no God, there is no sovereign, and the individual man is constituted in his own law.
With Rousseau, on the other hand, the exhaustion of the Protestant and rationalist impulse, and therefore the definitive loss of the supernatural and intellectual vitality of modern man, coincides.
Without spiritual and intelligent life, the type of man-stomach, the bourgeois, must have emerged, committed with all his mind, with all his heart, with all his strength to the economic.
Hence, at the end of the 18th century, it sounds like the hour of the economy, of an avara economy, for which Luther prepared it (see note 1 at the end of the book), of a rational or mechanical economy, for which Descartes prepared it; of a liberal or individual economy, for which Rousseau prepared it.
The conception (the soul, the form) that will then be forged the man of the economy will be that of a mechanical structure, subtracted from the human regulation (Discards) with unlimited individual expansion (Rousseau) destined to multiply in an unlimited way the gain (Lutero).
In simpler words: a machine, in the hands of the individual, moved by the infinite lust of profit.
Essence of Capitalism: Material Elements This form of Economics found in the material conditions of then a body, we would say, in its point, to sustain this form, which in turn seemed to be purposely made for such a body.
Thanks to the physical-mathematical sciences, the domination of the mechanical laws governing the movement of the universe was achieved, and with this, the practical conquest of the world.
In the mouth of all are the loas of the technical transformations operated by the foundry of the minerals in the coal furnaces in 1738, the production of cast iron in 1750 and the application of the machine in the cotton and wool industry in 1760, precisely in the colossal industries of Lancashire.
Thus, the machine conformed to the mechanical conception that Descartes had made of the economy.
At the same time as the machine increased production possibilities rapidly and mathematically in Europe, the agricultural state of the world opened up an unlimited market for European industry.
It is easy to imagine that a nascent industry, in the face of huge and unlimited markets, would also demand the limitation of production.
The former customs barriers to free movement, the regulations limiting production and the moral and political disciplines contained in private initiatives were thus broken down.
The unlimited market thus offered a material condition conducive to the liberal conception that Rousseau had made of the economy.
The increase in speculation of high finance, represented as a typical case by the Maison Rothschild, while accelerating with credit the capacity of the machine and the illimitation of the market, will provide a favourable condition to the instinct of the luero who was open in man since the Protestant Reformation.
The material conditions of the world conform to their formal conditions.
Everything is prepared, at the end of the 18th century, for liberal capitalism to emerge, as it is now, in the last strokes of capitalism, the world, both by its material and formal conditions, is ready to plunge into gigantic anarchy.
Definition of capitalism We can then define capitalism: It is an economic system that seeks the unlimited increase of profit by the application of mechanical economic laws.
Capitalism is every system that seeks unlimited profit, for which it wants unlimited production and consumption.
It is defined, then, with the same formula that Dr. Angelico used to condemn every business that seeks profit as an end: “The unlimited increase of riches” (S. 7n.
H-II.
q.
77 a4).
Definition that applies to liberalism and Marxism.
They are both imperialists; they both seek to speed up economic acceleration in order to obtain the highest yield and impose economic happiness on this land, which should not be a valley of habitable tears as Christianity wanted but a comfortable paradise.
But while liberalism concentrates wealth in the oligarchy of billionaires, Marxist greed accumulates it in the oligarchy of a proletarian minority that has become a state.
In an identical generic configuration, however, there are specific differences, because liberalism comes to an unjust concentration based on individual wealth and unlimited freedom, and Marxism implants it by virtue of collectivist property.
Moreover, while liberalism, by virtue of Cartesian influence, assimilates human labor into the operation of a pure mechanics, Marxism (theoretically) makes of it an irreducible, biological clement.
This discovery of the biological character of work is symptomatic, because it announces a new economy; disastrous economy, if man is not purified from his instinct of greed, because proletarian tyranny will be implanted as in Russia; charitable or Catholic, if purified.
Exposed to the nature of capitalism and quickly indicated its two main species, we will formulate its critique, which will preferably be directed towards liberal capitalism.
Capitalism is anti-economic Let us forget the fact that an economy governed by the lust of profit as a fundamental law must be a Moloc devourer of the economic well-being of the operator, which turns out to be a vile commodity subjected to the sway of the market: - devourer of the interest of the consumer, which does not take into account but insofar as it allows the acceleration of production, and with this, the acceleration of profit (for this reason, as a general thing, it is provided with superfluous goods, or of poor quality, at a relatively expensive price); - devourer of the producer, who must live feverishly in the acceleration of his production and in the improvement of the technical utensils, if he does not want to succumb in the industrial competition; - devourer of the trader, who must submit to the febrillant dynamism of the consumer governed by the infinite speed of the whim and the acceleration of the industrial innovations, without having time to liquidate his obsolete stocks; devourer of the financier, who must go to the hunt of the consumer, the producer and the trader, in order to accelerate himself, without falling asleep, the productivity of his money.
Let us omit, I say, all these delusional upheavals, and note only that capitalism, precisely by virtue of its capitalist essence or lust for profit, carries in its entrails its own ruin without power ever, even for a moment, to provide the economic well-being of man.
In other words, it is essentially uneconomic.
In fact, we can define it: “acceleration of profit by the acceleration of production and consumption”.
Now, as long as we do not reach the limit that balances production with consumption, while there are unlimited markets open to production, it is clear that the unbridled acceleration of machinism and credit is favourable to the development of the capitalist economy, better to say its numbness, like that of certain tumors that seem to be full of health; but once production comes to balance the possibility of consumption (note well, I say the possibility), liberal capitalism has died.
Because, in order for it to continue living, it would be necessary to print an equal acceleration of consumption as to production, which is impossible, since it can reach 25% to 40% per year.
He has died: because if he cannot accelerate production, he cannot accelerate profit; and since it constitutes its essence, once consumption is saturated, he must break and get rid of.
6 The current crisis of capitalism – its definitive crisis – makes this sense.
You will ask one question: how is it possible to speak of saturation, of balance between production and consumption if today we do not consume what can be consumed and there are immense riches left to exploit and enormous comforts to reach?
This objection has been prevented when it has been said: “balance the possibility of consumption”, because capitalism has died, not when it comes to producing what is consumed but what can be consumed; that is, that capitalism has not had and will not have, even for an instant, the fleeting consolation of fully satisfying consumption, and this is in the essence of capitalism.
Indeed, in capitalism, production and, even better, the financing of production takes precedence over consumption; then, the greatest production must be sought at all costs, subjecting consumption to it.
Thus, production, in the period of non-saturation, is more profitable for workers not to be assured of the right wage, the necessary means of subsistence, because this way more productive wealth is available; then, in that period subject to the immense multitude to the law of hunger.
It is the history of libcral capitalism in the 19th century.
On the other hand, when saturation has been achieved, as production has to be violently stopped, there is forced unemployment, and the case is that, today, our eyes contemplate an enormous wealth, capable of feeding, dressing and amusing the whole human race and, on the other hand, an immense multitude immersed in misery, without being able to consume because they do not have the means of acquisition.
Then capitalism succumbs without ever ensuring the economic well-being of the human race.
Capitalism is essentially futuristic.
A liberating economy of human life can be affirmed, because it hopes to be a liberating economy for everyone in the future, although in the meantime it is for the benefit of only a few.
It is the same language and method of Soviet Capitalism.
But this future, this morning can never come, because that impossibility is in its essence.
The profound contrast between Capitalism and the economy advocated by Christ in the Sermon of the Mountain.
Afanaos for enriching you, says Capitalism, that only counts.
Do not be grieved, says Eternal Wisdom, for the care of finding what to eat to sustain your life or where you will get clothes to cover your body.
Look at the birds of the sky, they neither sow nor have barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them.
Look at the lilies of the field... (Lk XIIL, 22-31).
Capitalism is busy, accumulating for tomorrow.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand, tells us: “Do not be grieved for the day to come; for the day to come shall be full of care for itself; his own desire shall be enough for him every day.”
Words of Jesus Christ, which are not pious counsels.
They express the law of economic life.
The economy must think first of all about the needs of the present.
Today we must produce what today's consumption demands.
Because, if driven by greed, what is needed for the whole year is produced today, and so is worked every day, with the purpose of increasing profit, it will happen that today will not be consumed in order not to decrease the production that is reserved for tomorrow (Capitalism during the nineteenth century with hunger wages), and tomorrow, because production will have to stop to liquidate the stocks stored; and in stopping there will be no wages, with which there will be no possibility of consumption.
(Capitalism in the apogee period) (see footnote 2 at the end of the book)".
Greed, essence of capitalism There is an essential perversity in capitalism, whatever its kind, for this is a system founded on a vice capital that theologians call greed.
It seeks the unlimited increase of wealth as if it were a f in itself, as if its pure possession constituted the happiness of man.
"And it is impossible," says Angelico (1-II, q.
2, a.1) — let man’s happiness consist in riches.
Two kinds of wealth are natural and artificial.
The natural ones are those that remedy the natural needs of man, such as clothing, food, vehicles, room and other similar things.
Artificial and are those that in themselves do not remedy any natural need, such as money, but that the industry of man has adopted it as a measure of the venal things, to facilitate change.
Now, the Angelic continues, man’s happiness cannot consist in natural riches, since they are used to sustain man’s nature; they are medium and not end; from where all natural riches have been created for the benefit of man and placed under his feet, as the Psalmist says, VII.”
With much less reason it may consist of artificial riches, since they have no purpose but to serve as a means of acquiring the natural riches necessary for life.
Now, (says the Holy Doctor) if both natural and artificial riches are intended to satisfy the material needs of man, according to the condition of each one, their acquisition is only good insofar as it serves to satisfy these needs; then their possession and production must be regulated.
If this measure is broken and they want to retain and possess it without limitation, a sin called greed is committed, consisting of “an immoderate desire to persipate outward things” (II-II, q.118, a.
(2).
It is precisely this lust for profit that constitutes the essence of the modern economy.
Not that greed has only existed in it; there have always been covetous, and the Holy Spirit says by Solomon's mouth that "money obeys all things"; but never as in it, this perverse impulse that nests in the sinful flesh of man sc has organized in an economic system, no one like her has made a sin a trivial construction.
And, since greed is a capital vice with many daughters, as explained by Dr. Angelico (III, q.118, a.8), Capitalism has erected with it a offspring of sins, systems that economists call economic laws.
“For, as greed consists in a superfluous love of riches, there is in it a double disorder: because, either it is improperly retained, or it is illicitly acquired.
There is disorder in its retention, in the case of inhumanity or hardening, when the heart does not soften of mercy in the presence of those in need, and so capitalism, like, every greedy one, closes its entrails to the misery of the poor; capital, an anonymous monster with a thousand powers and without any responsibility, is not interested in charity, piety, or even equity, is not even believed with duties: for the individuals whom it employs, or in any case this duty is of the same order as the sc has regarding the capital machine, to sabr: a scrupulous and methodical maintenance, while this maintenance produces business: unemployment or unemployment when the figures demand it or prefer it.”
(Marcel Malcor.
Nova et Vetera, July 1931.
There is also disorder in greed, because wealth is acquired, or by disorderly exertion, or by resorting to illicit means.
Because greed engenders a “morbid inguietud and a feverish concern for the superfluous,” which makes Ecclesiastes, V.
9, that the covetous will never be fed up with money; and so, capitalism, dynamic, dizzying, insatiable, uses every minute (“time is gold”) to accelerate profit, and with it, production and consumption; life, is a race without rest in the pursuit of gold; wealth is not sought to live but is lived to enrich itself.
How far we are from the Catholic economy, governed by the provision of daily bread!
Greed also breeds, like so many other daughters, violence, fallacy, perjury, fraud and betrayal.
And capitalism sins with violence, because, with its hunger for concentration, it devours small industry and small property; it sins with fallacy, because it promises the liberation of the whole human race and daily plunges it deeply into misery, for to the concentration on the one hand corresponds the desolation on the other; sin of perjury, when to fallacy joins the oath, and capitalism initialles with the credit its deception.
As will be explained in the 4* chapter; it sins of fraud, because with the credit or loan at interest it seizes the savings of the human race and manages them as if it were owner, because it subjects the worker to the law of hunger, and because it ensures a bad and expensive consumption; it sines, finally, of betrayal, because it annihilates the human person, making man a mere individual, a simple wheel in the gigantic machinery of the economic building, because it shatters the family, in the factories as in 8 trollilla to men and women, because it destroys education with the standardization of the school and the suppression of learning.
In short, that capitalism is like the eruption of an entire family of sins, is the kingdom of Mammon.
And this applies to both liberal and Marxist capitalism.
The Catholic economy The economy, on the other hand, the only possible economy, is founded on the virtue that St.Thomas calls liberality, which teaches us the good use of the goods of this world granted for our sustenance (I-II, q.117).
Should artificial and natural riches be produced and accumulated by themselves?
Certainly not.
They are things destined for the benefit of man, for his use; let us say the word: “for consumption”.
They result in goods and not simply things to the extent that they profit or can profit man.
Then, the whole economic process, because of the demand of the economy itself, must be consumer oriented.
Hence an uneconomic double failure in capitalism, whatever its kind, because it is consumed to produce and produced to profit.
Finance regulates production, and production regulates consumption.
And the goods, what are they consumed for?, that is, the total economic process, where is it directed?
To satisfy the needs of man's bodily life.
And since it does not have an end in itself, but its integrity is required to secure the spiritual life of man, which culminates in the act of love for God, the whole economy must be at the service of man so that he may put himself at the service of God.
“Saint Thomas teaches that to lead a moral life, to develop in the life of virtues, man needs a minimum of welfare and material security.
This teaching means, says Maritain, that poverty is socially, as Leon Bloy and Péguy have clearly seen, a kind of hell; it also means that the social conditions that place most men on the near occasion of sinning, demanding a kind of heroism from those who want to practice the law of God, are conditions that in strict justice must be denounced without rest and that one must strive to change” (Religion et Culture).
St. Thomas has exposed in the “Summa vs. Gentiles” the place of economy in a hierarchy of values.
“If things are well considered, he says, all the operations of man are ordained to the act of divine contemplation as to his own end.
For what are the servile works and commerce for, if not so that the body, being provided with the things necessary to life, is in the state required for contemplation?
For what moral virtues and prudence, but to seek inner peace and calmness of passions for which contemplation is in need?
Why the civil government, but to ensure the external peace necessary to the, contemplation?
From where, if considered well, all the functions of human life seem to be at the service of those who contemplate the truth” (L. IV, chap.
37).
Until this hierarchy of values is accepted, capitalism will not have been overcome, because either God is served or Mammon, the god of riches, is served.
Economics, an Ethics It turns out that the economy is an ethics (against the mechanical conception of Descartes) whose specific purpose is to procure material goods useful to man; I say goods, that is: that they respond to the demands of human nature, not to their whims or lusts.
Hence, all those things that are left over, once the needs of the state itself are met, are superfluous and do not result in goods if they are kept accumulated or used to satisfy the thirst for pleasures.
There is a serious obligation, as we will determine in the next lesson, to participate in its use to all members of the social community, so that it may be useful goods to man, that is, human material goods, which must be used only as soon as they lead to the rational fullness and supernatural destination of man.
We must use the wealth as children of God that we call ourselves and are.
Then the economy is a part of prudence, as St.Thomas teaches (II-II, q.
51, a.
3), which has as its object the right order of human actions aimed at seeking self-support or of the family or society.
And as in the law of grace in which we live there can be no perfect virtue - as the Angelic teaches - but by the ordination of everything to “God loved above all things”, it is necessary that prudence, and thereby economy, be perfectly subordinated to charity, which is the most excellent of virtues, and without which there can be no true virtue.
It follows that “economic laws are not purely physical laws such as those of mechanics or chemistry, but laws of action, human, which imply moral values.
Justice, liberality, and the right love of others are an essential part of economic reality.
Oppression of the poor and wealth taken as an end in itself are not only forbidden by individual morality, but are economically bad things, which go against the very end of the economy, because this end is a human end” (Martain, Religion et Culture, p.
46).
Hence the justification of economic elements and values must be sought in the demands of human action, and, let it be its morality, its intrinsic morality, the condition of its beneficial effects on man.
Transcendence of the Catholic economy I do not know if the fundamental opposition of the economy (because it can only be called the truly human economy) and the modern economy or Capitalism will have been clearly exposed.
One is founded on one sin, and the other rests on one virtue.
The one, like all sin, in wonderful disguises, enslaves man, because he who commits sin is a slave to sin, according to the Apostle.
The other, humbly, without ostentation, sets him free, because the truth makes us free, as Christ taught.
If modern economy is born of sin, it is essentially perverse and nefarious.
There may be many good material elements in it, but the conformation of them is intrinsically satanic.
Hence, the economic doctrine of the Church, born of virtue, is a doctrine that is infinitely above all other economic doctrines, call themselves socialist or liberal.
absolute schools, you can't and shouldn't parangor it with them.
It's not in the middle of them.
Like the summit of a high mountain, it collects, transcending, all the points of truth contained in the different economics; for, since there is no evil or error in this way every school, however uneven it may be, has in its bosom many adulterated truths.
Liberalism, for example, insists on the individual character of the possession of earthly goods; socialism in a social character; and fascism wants to balance both.
But only the Church.
which rests on the eternity of heaven, it can obtain true balance of man and wealth, because incorporated into Christ, and by Christ united to God, it can subject wealth to man and man to God.
Man is placed in a middle, between riches and God.
He can never rule.
Therefore, if you do not want to come to God, if you refuse to accept God’s government, you will have to fall under the rule of riches.
Either God or Mammon.
You can't serve two gentlemen.
But it must serve: if he refuses the paternal government of God, he will fall under the bondage of the golden calf.
There are only two truly opposite economies: the Christian economy, which uses wealth to ascend to God, and the modern or capitalist economy (be it liberal or Marxist), which abandons God to enslave itself in wealth.
It seems that divine mercy, pitied by the dreadful fate of man, who has lost the supernatural paradise and lives in an earthly hell, wants at this hour to set us free from capitalist oppression.
This is the sense of the deep crisis that weighs on the world.
But there are two ways for liberation to take place.
For if man understands the plan of God who wants to free us from bourgeois oppression, from the slavery of gold, he lends himself to the 10 of Selor.
.
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CHAPTER II.
THE PRODUCTION OF LAND In the previous chapter we discovered to the living the essential and fatal perversion of any economy that, like capitalism, is ruled intrinsically by the lust of profit.
Being an insatiable instinct, infinitely dizzying, dynamic, accelerating, it is rebellious to every measure, and for this reason it matters a radical reversal of all human values, and even of the same economic values.
From human values: because instead of putting the economy at the service of the bodily life of man, so that he can attain the integrity of his intellectual and spiritual life and put himself at the service of God, the only Lord who deserves full adherence, modern economic conception absorbs all the spiritual and material energies of man and places them at the mercy of the gigantic economic building, around which everyone — from the last unemployed to the powerful financier — is obliged to prostrate himself in religious dance.
Investment of the same economic values: because instead of using money as a pure means of change that facilitates the distribution and diffusion of natural wealth, it is precisely the opposite, that is, an ultimate end, with a powerful force of attraction that concentrates in few hands more money, and with it the same natural riches.
In such a way is the capitalist economy armed, that everything goes to the multiplication of gold: riches and credit serve to multiply gold; if it is traded is to multiply gold; if it is produced is to trade and thereby multiply gold; if it is consumed is to produce more and thereby trade more and to multiply more gold.
So life is a perpetual dance around gold, to which, to the end of the paradox, no one sees why he sleeps in the mysterious caves of the great banks.
So consumption, which was to be the next regulatory end of the entire economic process, is ultimately subordinated to production, trade and finance; and, on the other hand, finance, which had to occupy the last place as a pure means, obtains the first of a regulatory end.
Hierarchy of production This morbid acceleration was to cause at the same time a profound disorder in particular economic phenomena, such as production Without entering into metaphysic considerations that may seem profound, let us apply common sense and ask: what is the purpose of the production of wealth?, why does man engage in labor, and produce?
No doubt to dispose of goods you can consume.
This does not mean that it will only produce what it consumes daily.
No way.
He can and must produce more, and save what he does not consume, and form a stable heritage that will ensure life in the morning for him and his family and that will remain among his heirs.
But even this which it immediately does not consume, produces it in anticipation of the consumption that it will need tomorrow without being able to produce it then.
Then, it will always be true that it produces to consume.
And what are the first goods for which man needs to consume?
: enjoy, live in a convenient room, get dressed or eat?
No doubt it is first eating, and then dressing, and then having a convenient room, and finally enjoying honest hobbies.
And since the land is the one that almost directly provides us with what is necessary to eat, clothe and inhabit, and instead industry gives us the superfluous, it follows that, in an orderly economic regime, the production of the land and its riches must obtain primacy over industrial production, the life of the countryside over urban life.
That is to say: exactly the reverse of what happens and must necessarily occur in the modern economy.
The capitalist economy is, in its essence, pure acceleration.
The production of the land and the sum of its products is subject to acceleration: it is not possible, for example, to obtain wheat in a few days or in a few hours, or to consume 10 kilos of bread instead of one.
Instead production 13 of the superfluous can increase unlimitedly, because it is always possible to create new superfluous needs and meet them infinitely.
Then the capitalist economy, by its very essence, is driven by the phenomenon “contra naturam” (which violates the natural demands) of making industry, the factory, the normal type of production and, instead, imagining agriculture as a coupling carried by industry.
Henry Ford has had the frankness to confess when he considers agriculture to be an “auxiliary or subsidiary” industry, according to textual words.
(In Aujourd hui et demain, p.
230; cited by Marcel Malcor, Nova et Vetera, Janvier et Mars, 1929).
This dislocation of production had to engender phenomena as typical of capitalism as the production and consumption of an article are all the greater the more useless.
Thus, for example, the American woman: in 1925, on average, she spent three times more on cosmetics than she spent on bread, and now, in the midst of a crisis, we see that, with an evident sub-consumption of food and clothing, there is a waste of cigarettes, amusements, newspapers, alcohol, etc.; then, the phenomenon of human apelotonamientos in the so-called big cities, where one spends a miserable life but full of diversions, while the fields are deserted; that of these same fields, in possession and benefit of a few owners, who have fun in the harem of the city, while the settlers are consumed in the sweats that do not yield it but misery; and finally, that of the industrialized and mercantilized agricultural exploitation, so that it does not guarantee the decent life of the farmer.
This total reversal of the hierarchy of production, this absorption that the market and Industry make of the land and its production causes a radical disruption of the same field.
It is necessary to be persuaded that the problem of the countryside has no solution in a capitalist economy, in an economy that is driven by greed as at last.
Harmful error of all those who see the anguish of property and agricultural exploitation want to remedy it by appealing to a fair distribution of land or a solidarity cooperation, without first straightening out the crooked or reversed order of economic life.
Even if an ideal distribution of the land and an ideal exploitation were to be established, nothing would be remedied until the same modern economic conception was reformed and the sense of the natural economic hierarchy was restored.
Because, as I said before, the economic disarray of the countryside, which among us fills all measures, is caused by industrial, commercial and financial causes, and has no real solution, the tick and natural products do not regain the regulatory function of the production to which the very nature of the economic reality is destined.
Note that many will seem impractical but can be seen by the simple fact of the crisis: an abundant harvest and a first-class livestock that cannot be placed in the world markets at an advantageous price is enough to plunge into misery and hunger for all, the peasant population Domestic and rural production So that this simple fact that is invoked only as a mere example does not serve to diminish the scope of this observation, it should be noted that the disarray of the countryside is permanent because its life is permanently attracted and impersonated by the anemic life of the city, because its production is dragged by industrial and commercial production; although obviously the disarray will be greater when in turn there is a disorder in the same industry and commerce.
When the land loses its own life and is coupled with industrialism and mercantilism, the uprising of the countrymen is imminent; the landlords living in the city can get ready for the degiiello.
It will be useful to remember what happened in the 4th century in North Africa: Numydia Y Bizacena, in the 3rd and 4th century, supplied olive oil to the civilized world; ahead of modern formulas, established a specialized and export-oriented crop and industry.
And, obviously, these two reasons why large domains, better organized, equipped with better resources, especially from the point of view of trade with foreign countries, absorb small ones.
And so, in the fourth century, Africa is divided into 14 small farms.
The owner farmer has disappeared, the servants are less numerous; the settlers or free countrymen of old, reduced to a true proletariat, must pay their bread dearly in domains where everything is sacrificed to industrial holdings.
Impersonal troops of wage earners invade the fields.
One good day, an agrarian revolution sweeps away with a whole class of land owners, and luxury cities, towns of Lambesa, Tirngad, Aquae Regiae, Thisdrus, suddenly disappear.
The settlers divide the lands, and weakened power passes into the hands of the so-called vandals, by them.
(Marcel Malcor, Nova et Vetera, April-June 1931).
It's not my attempt to scare anyone.
I just want to make it clear that orderly land production requires that economic production should not be primarily (i.e. primarily) nor finance, nor mercantilist, nor industrialist.
Land production must be more widespread and should be preferred to industrial production.
And within the same land, production must first be domestic and only after mercantile.
If none, obsessed by the monster of capitalist progress, suffer scandal, I will write the word: economic production must preferably be patriarchal.
That is to say: that it must dominate in the possession of the type of plot in which a modest family can live frugally, and in the production, the type of domestic and farm products, so that the common type of family, being able to produce in the house itself, is not seen, by any eventuality, in the misery.
I have said preferably: for there must be cities and industries, even with salaried staff, but they must not dominate; they must occupy a secondary place, as must large-scale farming.
Therefore, if one contemplates the general physiognomy of an orderly, humane, economic production regime, it must be rural as opposed to urban, domestic as opposed to commercial.
Think of the glorifiers of the capitalist economy that all their ditirambos to Progress, to Industry, to Urbe, are undone like balloons of soap, when at the foot of these colossos, lifted up with the sweat of the poor, one contemplates the spiritual and material misery of the family proletariat and the ruin and uncertainties of the tenant in the fields.
If certain pretended progress is to serve to enslave man, providing him with joys that he does not need and depriving him of the spiritual and material bread that he sustains, let Progress sink in good time.
As perhaps some naive socialist imagined cl idcal scría raise the prolctariat and sit him in feast of bourgeois paradise, it is good to remind him not to delire.
Because the stomach paradise of the bourgeois has risen precisely because it is bourgeois, that is: because an economic conception was in force that favored individual enrichment.
If the economic conception had been state, collectivist, socialist, one of two: either compulsory labour had been implanted, and then perhaps sc would achieve a powerful collective wealth, but at the expense of also collective slavery as in Russia; or it would have been left free, and then it would not be produced even to eat, because if the collectivity produces and feeds, the individual does not need to worry.
For this reason, without euphemisms, without the desire for practical solutions, I say that if capitalist slavery and Marxist slavery are not wanted, it is necessary to opt for a patriarchal, rural, domestic economy.
I do not say — understand well — that it is possible soon or of immediate practical application.
It could not be: because this economic physiognomy is determined by liberality, just as liberal capitalism and Marxists have been engendered by bourgeois or proletarian greed, and now the instinct of greed is more virulent than ever.
I say yes it is the only economic configuration that can free us from capitalist or Marxist oppression.
The common use of external goods All this doctrine on the hierarchy of factors of production and on the necessity of a patriarchal type economy is corollary of the admirable teaching of Aristotle and St.Thomas on the use of material goods.
Man comes into the world, and stands before an infinity of external goods: the earth with its immense riches of plants and animals, of fish in the water and of birds in the heavens.
For whom and for what are these goods?
They have put everything under their feet, the psalmist answers in Psalm VIIL.
So everything is at the service of man; it is all so that man can use, that is, eat, dress, form his dwelling, and enjoy a human delight in family life.
But everything is for man: for which man?, for those of a race, of a nation, of a city, of a social class?
No way.
Everyone, the humblest of human beings, has the right to use, I mean to use and not to possess, that which he and his family need for a human life.
No one can be excluded.
And an economic regime that did not permanently assure all families what was necessary for a human subsistence would be a nefarious, perverse, unjust regime.
And this is why Saint Thomas (II.
II, q.
66, 2, ad, 7), following Aristotle (Pol.
I, 4), says: Another thing that man has to do with outer things is their use.
And as for this man should not possess outward things as his own.
The reason is clear: every man has the right to live in a family; then he has the right to the means that assure him a family human subsistence; but since these means are the external goods, every man has the right to the external goods that ensure his subsistence and that of his family.
And notice that I now determine the minimum of what a man should use.
This minimum is the human subsistence of the family; human, I say: therefore, something more than it takes to eat and clothe.
Certain permanent human well-being.
He may be poor, that is: not having superfluous riches, but he must never be miserable.
God doesn't want anyone's misery.
And a regime that puts man in misery is an unjust regime, rejected by God.
For this reason socialism and capitalism are condemned; for one and the other, by virtue of their essence, place man permanently in a state of miscria.
Capitalism, because it concentrates the ownership and use of goods in the hands of a fortunate and millionaire few and leaves the multitude condemned to live (I say to die) of a precarious and eventual wage; the second, because it also brutally concentrates it in the hands of the state, from which the crowd will often be deprived of its use.
It is true that socialism imagines the appropriation of the goods of production by the state and then distribute them and make them available to the consumption of all men; but, as they have already seen it with a penetrating gaze Aristotle and St.Thomas, such a regime in addition to violating the just freedom of all and not taking into account the inequality of individual natures, would bring as a logical consequence the inadequacy of production.
Because, as the Cuotidian experience proves, what belongs to everyone is not done by anyone.
And if everyone should produce in a collective way, it would produce very little.
Hence St.Thomas, in the same article in which he establishes the common use of external goods, affirms and demonstrates the need for private property (II-II, q.
66, to 2).
Thus, considering the question of whether it is lawful for man to possess something as his own, he answers: “We will answer that concerning the outward thing two things are the responsibility of man: 1* the power to seek and dispense: and as for this it is lawful for man to possess own things and it is also necessary to human life for three reasons: 1% because each is more earnest in seeking something, that it agrees to himself alone than that which is common to all or many; for each, fleeing from work, leaves to another what belongs to the common good, as happens when there are many servants; 2% because human things are handled more orderlyly, if to each one it is the proper care to look for his interests; while it would be a confusion if each one takes care of everything indistinctly; 3” because for this reason the state of men is kept more peaceful, being each one happy with his own; therefore we see that among those, who in common and pro-indivisual 16 possess something, there arise more frequently contests: the second thing that belongs to man in the outer things is the use of them; and insofar as to this, man must not have his own things, as easily, in common way,
This is why the Apostle says (1 Tim.
6,17): it commands the rich of this century...to give and distribute frankly their goods...” Private property So that the common use of external goods underlies and justifies private property, as Pius XI states in his wonderful Qforte Anno, when he says: “All (that is, Leo XIII and the theologians who taught guided by the magisterium of the Church) unanimously affirmed always that the right of private property was granted by nature, that is, by the Creator himself, to men, and that each one could attend to his own needs and his family, since through this institution, the goods that the Creator assigned to the whole human race, serve in reality for that purpose, all of which cannot be achieved in any way without the maintenance of a certain and determined order.”
If one wants to understand the problem of private property, it is necessary to understand first the common use of property, or what is the same; the right to existence that belongs to every member of the human family.
The right to private property is a necessary but medium means of ensuring the common use of external goods.
(Common use: it does not mean that everyone will use anything but that nadic will lack the minimum he needs to live).
Economic liberalism, which makes the right of ownership omnimode, cannot be effectively avoided unless it is derived from the common use of property.
This doctrine also bases the doctrine of Catholic theologians on the right of everyone who finds himself in extreme need to take what he needs for himself and his family; "then," says St.Thomas (II-IL, q.
66, a.VII) — anyone can lawfully help his need with other people's things, by taking them away, already manifest, already hidden, and this is not proper reason for stealing or rapping.”
The same doctrine is based on the right of the State to limit and regulate private property in such a way as to achieve its common purpose.
Because, if private property is to ensure the common use of foreign property, the State, which has the mission of promoting the common good, must regulate it for that purpose.
Pius X1 recalled this doctrine in the “Quadragesimo Anno”, when he wrote: E CBCO “Therefore, public authority, always guided by natural and divine law and inspired by the true needs of the common good, can more carefully determine what is lawful or unlawful to the possessors in the use of their goods, Ya Leo XIII had taught very wisely that “God left to the activity of men and the institutions of peoples the delimitation of private possession”.
History shows that domination is not an entirely immutable thing, neither are other social elements and we still said on another occasion in these words: How different have been the forms of private property, from the primitive form of the people: savages, of which still today there are signs in some regions, until the one that later re-dressed in patriarchal form, and later in the various tyrannical forms (using this word in its classical sense) and so on in feudal forms, and in all the others that have happened until modern times”.
In this determination of property, the action of the State must be such that, far from abolishing private property, it tends to guarantee it and make it effective; so that every family, to the extent possible, possesses its own stable plot that is perpetuated from generation to generation.
The ideal of government policy should be to secure urban and peasant families/family property, and then protect it with effective legislation.
Precisely the opposite of liberal and socialist politics, determined to destroy the family, already with nefarious laws that threaten the indissolubility of the marriage bond or that relax, by the normalist and 17 imbecilized public education, parental authority and education, either with laws on the division of the inheritance, inspired by the Napoleon Code, or on the imposition of mortgages on the own good of the family.
It is necessary, if property and agricultural life are to be managed, to restore the family heritage.
What is a family heritage?
It is a good from which successive possessors are invested because it is perpetuated in the same line, without dividing itself.
Well ineligible or unhypothecable and unattainable, recognized by the German law that Le Play calls family.
In order to continue to expose what a healthy economic conception demands on the production of the land, I will say that once the family heritage is restored, the rural domain, which is like the organic cell of agricultural production, will need to coordinate in such a way the work of the different families, that is: the small or medium farm, that is not absorbed by the large or devoured by the powerful landowner.
Cooperation is necessary.
Cooperation that can protect the rights of the farmer in the natural economic competition: it will defend him against the usurcros by the mutuals of Credit like the Reiffesen Boxes; it will instruct him on the improvements that should be introduced in the crops: it will provide him with the suitable fertilizers, the instruments of production, especially the most expensive ones; it will free him from the commercial oppression by the consumer cooperatives; and it will ensure the storage and sale of the crops by the production cooperatives.
In a word: real agricultural trade unions will be formed that provide for the common needs of farmers.
Obviously all these measures will be completely useless if the government does not firmly avoid the monopoly and speculations of international intermediaries.
As in fact, in my view, we have reached a critical point, where the power of speculation is almost indestructible, while that of the State, because of democratic liberalism, is weak enough, it is necessary to organize the land in such a way that it is possible to satisfy the country's own needs; so that production first supplies the country before it is oriented to the world market.
This will obviously require a less mercantile agricultural distribution, less lucrative but more abundant in natural goods.
It is necessary to sponsor a mixed farm, agricultural-horticultural poultry-winner.
Naturally, in our country, it must be difficult for the native element to repeat its natural indolence.
We would thus have the same excessive speculation of monopolies, such as the pace of the world market, which is frankly protectionist, suggesting a return to patriarchal-type production of land, which I spoke of earlier.
The State may limit private property. It emphasized earlier that the common use of foreign property justifies and regulates private property, so that, to the extent possible, every family has an inalienable fixed heritage.
But it has been more exposed as a term to which it should be extended, although it can never be achieved perfectly.
There will always be people who of their own free will or of necessity will not have their own solar.
In the field, this shall be the condition of the tenant or sharecropper.
Both the leasing system and the shareholding system are in themselves fair, provided that the stipulated price is fair.
Among us, they are usually exorbitant, because they are calculated for times of exceptional prosperity.
Moreover, it is a flagrant injustice (at least social insofar as it goes against the common use of foreign goods) of the large landowners who in these years demand the payment of their rents even if the peasants are in distress.
Although leasing as such is a fair system, orderly land production requires farmers to be preferably the same owners.
What happens in Argentina that at least 70 percent of the land under cultivation is leased (and this under very disadvantageous conditions) reveals a profound disorder.
It is not easy to indicate the solution to this problem, but it is necessary to be convinced that the solution is necessary for both justice and justice. * See THE TOUR DU PIN, Vers un ordre social Chretien.
18 for social peace.
The settler is patient, but everything has a limit, besides it is not fair to abuse anyone's patience.
The State has the power, by virtue of its role as the procurator of the common good, to implement the solution that contemplates the good of all.
In order to show how far this power can go, and at the same time to demonstrate in an example the limitation imposed on private property by the common use of external goods, I will briefly set out the vigorous policy applied by the Popes in the 15th century against landowners and monopolizers.
At the end of the 15th century, the Roman agriculture, a part of the countryside of Rome, was in a state of pitiful desolation, while in Rome there was a terrible hardship.
The owners of the land of the Roman agriculture preferred to allow the land to spontaneously produce grass for pasture of raw animals rather than to force them on their own or to tolerate others forcing them to bear fruit for the sustenance of men.
It was then that Pope Sixtus IV, in his famous bull Inducit nos, of March 19, 1476, gave everyone, in the territory of Rome, the power to plow and cultivate, in times according to custom, a third of any estate they chose, whatever their owner, on the condition that they applied for permission, but with the power to till even if they did not obtain it, even if they paid a fee or rent to the owners.
As can be seen, in this case, the State, by virtue of its jurisdictional power or legal justice, without depriving the owners of its domain (as evidenced by the payment of the rent), regulates it in such a way that the use and usufruct of the property is participated by all.
Clement VII Bull will demonstrate more effectively as far as this power reaches.
With the bull of Sixtus IV it had been achieved that “many were dedicated to tilling”, but since then the barons forbade their vassals to carry the harvested grain, in order to force them to sell them to them cheaply and then resell them, Nadic wanted to continue growing them.
This is the case of the vulgar monopoly of the Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, etc., already inscribed in its time by Aristotle.
What does the Pope do to remedy this situation?
It severely forbids all Roman barons and nobles and any other persons: 1% Buy from their vassals wheat and other grains, other than what is necessary for the use and sustenance of their house; 2" Prevent them from taking him to Rome; 3 That they themselves transport him to a place other than that city, To render effective the prohibition, threat that those who did not obey, within 15 days of the promulgation of the bull, will incur the sentence of excommunication, of which they cannot be acquitted except by the Roman Pontiff, with express mention of the case, in the trance of death alone and with express satisfaction.
If they do not obey, after another 15 days, they will be deprived entirely of the fiefdom, which will be confiscated for the benefit of the Apostolic Chamber; and if, after six months after the last 15 days, they refuse to obey, then ipso jure, they will be deprived of all peoples, lands, fifths, fiefs and rights, unable to recover them or possess others forever; and the cities, towns, lands, fifths and rights will be fully incorporated into the Apostolic Chamber.
(See Narciso Noguer S. J. Cindent Questions on Property and Socialism.)
It is clearly not a question of proposing the application of this example in order to remedy our situation.
It is a question of showing how far the power of the State can go in regulating property.
That this regulation is such, that if any one dejects it, it can carry the penalty of the same expropriation.
For, it should be noted that, in the case cited by the Pope, it does not deprive of dominion but after the owner has become guilty of a crime against social justice; and it is a crime not to abide by the regulation of property imposed by the State in view of the common good.
It should also be noted that the application of a forceful measure can be justified by the doctrine of the common use of the bicnes, which authorizes the one who finds himself in extreme need to take the other's so as not to perish from misery.
If a family can do just that, it seems that, if there are many families who see themselves in misery, because the only capital they possess, the work of their 19 hands, is worth zero (if unemployment is worth zero), then the State itself must take over the distribution of the goods that others possess superfluously.
A radical corollary solution to this doctrine Perhaps the time has come, or is about to come, for a vigorous regulation of private property.
Today there is an unjust accumulation of goods in the hands of a few while the crowd is not in poverty, but in misery.
This implies a social injustice and a serious threat to the social order.
It's urgent to find a solution.
However, the State, whose mission is to ensure social justice, must remedy it by appealing for effective solutions.
These must be such that they are not unaware of the right to property.
The State must respect private property, and since it would be impossible, in the present case, to determine which assets were poached, should refrain from attempting to determine it and should leave the assets in the hands of those present.
But respected the current rule, it can and must seek a solution to the problem of unemployment and misery.
To this end, it will have to carry out a comprehensive study of the current distribution of financial, commercial, industrial and agricultural goods; it will examine the performance of these goods and their distribution to inquire why, even with this yield of wealth, there are thousands of families in the country who do not have the necessary subsistence.
Once these causes have been examined, and for this reason nothing better than to consult the economic forces of the country (workers, farmers, ranchers, farmers, industrialists, etc.), will apply with the aim of punishing them as energy rapists that solution that consults better the social justice, namely: It is not possible that in this country rich of natural goods sufficient for an immensely larger population, there is no one who, by virtue of the social economic order, lacks the stable human subsistence to which he is entitled as a member of the social community.
It will then impose, as mandatory, those measures that it finds necessary to achieve the realization of this social requirement, bearing in mind that it is not fair that there are thousands of families in poverty while others enjoy an income of 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 pesos per month.
Governmental measures will not consist in depriving those who make these excessive benefits of their property and wealth, but in forcing them to extend these benefits to the greater number of needy families, already providing work, already with a better remuneration of work, and giving these benefits to the State so that it distributes them to the needy families of the community.
If the holders of these productive riches refuse by selfishness or lack of social sense to submit to this regulation, do not waver the government, the social order; and no punishment more effective than depriving them of their wealth, according to the example of the Popes mentioned above.
A consideration of our country In a country, of the natural wealth of ours, misery has no reason to be.
If there is, it is due exclusively to the poor management of our economic life, which is more profitable economy than subsistence.
Our country has been and is exploited by foreigners as a factory.
Structured the country as a production factory for foreigners, our well-being is at the mercy of the prices imposed on us by speculators.
And when these prices do not cover the cost it leaves production, as happens and must happen now, bankruptcy and the most appalling misery reigns.
Where is the permanent solution that saves us from misery today and in the morning and that leads to genuine Argentine generations being forged in our country, rooted in our soil?
20 In a total change in our economic structure: that our economy ceases to be of luero, mercantilist, and is an economy of subsistence, of consumption.
Rural rule must be twisted for families.
Let the families take root in the land; the rich in their rooms and the poor in their farms, fifths or stanzuelas.
That they take root in the soil itself to perpetuate themselves in it in robust and copious generations.
And let them live in their lands.
How is it possible that today’s peasants come into contact with the land, a fertile mother, suffer misery, but because they work artificially “to sell” and not to live?
When this orientation of economic life is changed, families will take affection for their own soil, and will not live in distressing as the peasant of today, victim of the speculator, who does not know how he will be doing tomorrow.
With rural rule restored, as I explained in the body of this chapter, the rural market must also be rebuilt within a region to illustrate and stimulate farmers.
Experiences are being made in Italy that deserve to be applauded and imitated.
In addition, it is necessary to organize in national institutions the entire productive life of our campaign to realize on the basis of the domestic and rural economy the economy of national sufficiency.
Returning to Earth It is clear that cities need to be decongested and a return to the land (magna parens), not to exploit it and then abandon it, but to live, live and perpetuate itself in its material and spiritual fruitfulness.
With this sense of “subsistence economy”, we must open the land to all families who have no reason to loiter in the anemic life of the city by serving vices.
In the land possessed as a family heritage, men will feel their union with the forefathers and will feel united with the real riches of the earth, which will unite them with the Creator.
The earth with its cosmic and divine virtues is called to solve not only the problem of a better distribution of temporal goods but also the problem of human life so that man can serve his God.
The land that does not allow an absolute mechanization, possible in the other sectors of the economy, has mysterious relations with life itself: it is profoundly biological.
And it is this biological sense, meaning of life, irreducible to any mechanical expression, that modern man must recover.
If you do not regain this vital sense that you have lost, you will be able to rebuild a new economy, corporate type, with hierarchical functioning, but it will be a mechanics from which man will feel slave and not lord.
For this reason it is necessary for man to live a new economic order and not to build it, as an external work.
And the earth, fruitful with man's labor, will make him live this order.
We must then raise the cry of return to earth with a deeply human sense.
Only in this way will it be an economic and vital solution for modern man, who among papers and machines has lost the sense of reality.To end this chapter, let us say that the imposition of an order on the problem of ownership and production of land requires a strong government, free of political commitments and liberal prejudices, that separates the country from the iron circle in which it is gagged by the international financiers and speculators, that dominates the petty interests of the capitalists and landowners, that knows the total reality of the country and the world, that is not afraid of the popular clamor provoked by the politicians and that, guided only by the common good, common to families according to their different status and social function (because there must be poor families and rich families), imposes the most advantageous management.
CHAPTER III.
INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION In the first Chapter we study the very concept of economics, And we show, that the economy By its near formal object, that is the procurement of material goods useful to man, seeks the improvement of man in his material aspect; from where, it is essentially human 0o 500 or moral.
Moral, not because man takes care of it (he also deals with chemistry and physics, and these are not moral sciences) nor because he builds or builds them (he also builds works of art, and these are not his morals), but because the economy is ordered, by its very nature, at the service of man.
An economy that does not serve man, that does not contribute to his human well-being, universal social welfare, common, and not just one class, is not economy.
Hence, Capitalism is not economy; Socialism is not economy.
Modern writers and modern universities, which multiply economic theories, rather the formulas of increasing wealth, ignore the economy.
There will be in all these systems and studies a profitable waste of technique, of economic observations that could integrate healthyly into economy; but this integration has not been realized, but, on the contrary, these elements: economics have been incorporated into the anti-economic conception of the modern economy by which it has turned out to be a machine that devours human well-being.
In a word: the modern economy is uneconomic.
In the second chapter we study the phenomenon of land production, and denounce the disorder of the modern economy, which tends by its essence, acceleration of profit, to absorb the production of the land in industrial and commercial production.
We stated that it was necessary for the production of the land to regain the first place of regulatory function of all the production to which the same economic reality is destined.
Certain countries will be able to give greater impetus to industry, while others, because of their geographical conditions, will give it to agriculture and livestock.
But the global economic pace must not be swept away by mercantilism or industrialism, and yet a particular country will not abandon its agriculture to devote itself exclusively to industry.
This was the great “contra naturam” error committed by England at the dawn of capitalism and definitively sanctioned in 1842 with the law of cereals.
Error whose deadly consequences you are experiencing now, when you find yourself without the agriculture that provides man's primary sustenance and without markets where to place your old-fashioned industrial products.
We promote, as necessary, and even as imposed by the same frankly protectionist pace of the world economy, a return to economic production, a rural type in opposition to urban, domestic, as opposed to commercial.
Industrial production And industrial production?
Will it be necessary to bury as useless the stupendous expansion of technique and machine?
No way.
It will only be necessary to assign him a secondary place as he comes to meet the needs of man also secondary.
No one will find it difficult to admit this, if he takes into account that it is only the economy that perfects man, that satisfies his material human well-being; but this well-being is hierarchical: for it is first to eat, then to clothe and inhabit, and only after to enjoy the superfluous, which preferably the industry supplies.
Then production must also be hierarchical.
The land has to prevail over the industry.
In proposing this I am perfectly aware that it must seem like blastemia to those who believe in comfort and conceive the mission of man on earth according to the type outlined by President Hoover, when he says: “The man who has a standard car, a standard radius and an hour and a half of work daily less, has a life fuller and more personality than he had before.”
Another question is whether it will be possible to restore the industry to its rightful secondary location.
23 Clearly, in the present anemic state of man, it is absurd to imagine it.
For as long as industrial life has acquired a corpulence of monster (remember the magnificent, victorious history of industrialism with the era of cotton, cast iron, steam-driven machine, chemistry, electricity, gasoline engine, inventions now mathematically used in the rationalization of industrial life), while industrial life, I say, has acquired a monstrous corpulence, man continuing in the gap opened by Luther, Descartes and Rousseau (See, J. Maritain in Three Reformers, Berdiaeff in A New Middle Ages?
), has been losing its personality, and is today a simple grain of dust, driven by infinite circumstances.
He's lost his dominant power.
So while the beast has increased his corpulence and courage, the tamer has lost his empire.
It is not difficult to calculate what the fate of the tamer is, weakened in the face of the enraged beast.
Poetic figure, no doubt.
But it is quite possible that men do not tend to agree on how to keep the power of the machine to a limit.
And in the meantime, it exterminates them.
In short: that the problem of production has no solution until the most general of the economy itself is solved, and this in turn, as long as the problem of life is not resolved, as I explained in the first chapter.
A trivial observation to be kept in mind by specialists, who intend to impose a local order without attending to total order.
The synthesis predates the analysis, one to the multiple.
Moral Justification of Capital Before these preliminary considerations let us study the ordination that must exist within the same industrial life.
We will have to justify capital, salary, management, machine, and harmonize their rights.
Note that the justification of these elements I do in general, in abstract, indicating the essential conformation they can and should have.
I do not make the justification of these elements as they have become concrete in capitalism, precisely because it has given a perverse and unjust conformation to these elements of its good.
Justification must be made from a moral point of view, that is, from human action as a human.
To what extent can these elements be justified as human acts?
Can they be acts of virtue 0, on the contrary, are intrinsically vicious acts?
If the former, they can be justified whenever they actually proceed with good ordination; if the latter, they are never justified If the former, provided they are good, they will be beneficial; if the latter, they will be nefarious.
Now, of course, let's see if capital is justified.
Capital is justified as the exercise of a virtue that St.Thomas calls magnificence.
If we remember correctly, we said in a previous chapter that private property has a social function, a common destination, - common use, which St.Thomas says.
By virtue of this common destination of external goods, “or superfluous that some people possess,” says St.Thomas, “is due by natural right to the support of the poor; so says St. Ambrose (serm.
64) «Of the hungry is the bread that you hold in detention; of the naked the clothes that you have locked up; of the redemption and absolution of the wretched is the money that you have buried» (IIII, q.66a.
7).
Will it then be necessary to get rid of the superfluous, that is, of what is left over once the need and decorum of one's condition has been satisfied, and to donate it to the poor in the form of alms?
This is not exactly necessary.
This money can be invested in companies that provide work and bread to those in need.
This is the doctrine of St. Pius XI, admirably taught in his encyclical on the Restoration of the Social Order, when he says: “He who employs large numbers in works that provide greater opportunity for work, as long as they are truly useful works, practices in a magnificent way and very well suited to the needs of our times the virtue 24 of magnificence, as he gathers himself drawing the consequences of the principles set forth by Doctor Angelico (II-II, q.
134y”.
The virtue of magnificence, as the Holy Doctor explains, orders the right use of large amounts of money, as well as liberality generally orders the use of money, even if little.
Note, therefore, that he would sin with greed who would accumulate superfluous money and subdue it to common use.
From where it turns out that the economic concept of capital is justified by the exercise of the Christian virtue of magnificence.
What, indeed, is capital?
It is accumulated wealth that is invested in one company for the production of other wealth, and thus benefits the community.
So capital, as such, seeks first to benefit the community, the poor, because it is the reversal of the superfluous that by natural law is due to the support of the poor.
(St. Thomas).
I do not think it is necessary to prove that this is not the concept that capitalism has forged of capital.
By reserving for the next chapter a more in-depth critique of the capitalist concept of capital, it suffices to say now that for capitalism, capital is money that produces more money, that concentrates more money.
Exactly the opposite of genuine capital.
Because far from making capital a medium that spreads the benefit of money in the community, it makes it a magnet that accumulates it quickly and absorbently in the hands of the lucky individual who posces it.
Therefore, while the capitalist accumulates, is enriched in a fantastic way, the crowd is continually stripped, until it is left in the present misery and unemployment.
The eminently social destination, common wealth invested in capital, has been forgotten.
In addition, the unbegotten infertility of money has been forgotten as long as it is not employed by the work of intelligence and arms.
Who makes new material riches?
Man's work.
The initiative of an entrepreneur, who with his intelligence and will will will resolve the most efficient and fast way of a better production of wealth; the work of the workers, which applied under the direction of the entrepreneur's intelligence will produce wealth.
The production of wealth is an effect of labor.
Capital invested in means of production (machines, buildings) is an instrument, necessary if you want, but a simple instrument whose fruitification comes from work.
Work is therefore superior to capital as the main cause is superior to the instrument.
In the production of a book, the author's rights are first and higher than the rights of ink and pen, e.g.
Capital has rights, cs cycrto, but its rights are post-labour rights.
“For this reason, ” writes Jacques Maritain*, “a partnership regime between money and productive work is easily conceived, in which the money invested in a company represents a part of the ownership of the means of production and serves as food for the company, so that it seeks the material equipment it needs, so that the company being fruitful and producing profits, a part of these profits would come to capital.”
That is, capital would feed work and not labour capital.
Exactly the same as St.Thomas teaches when he writes (I-IIL, q.
78, a.
2): “He who entrusts his money to a merchant or a craftsman, forming with him a kind of society, does not transfer ownership of his money to him; he keeps it to himself and to his risks and dangers, and participates, whether in commerce or in the work of the craftsman.
In this case you can legitimately claim as a thing that belongs to you a part of the benefit that comes from there.”
From here it follows, against Marx's doctrine, that capital is entitled to a part of the profit, and that profit, of its own, is not a usurpation of the work of the worker as the simplistic theory of surplus-value intended.
The flagrant injustice of liberal capitalism, that the rights of capital follow the rights of labour, is also being pursued.
Capitalism has invested the rights of labor and capital, suffocating it under the greedy clutches of it.
“Instead of being had * Religion et Culture, p.
97.
25 the money, writes J. Maritain” — for a simple food that serves as a material sustenance to the living organism that is the production company, is it had as a living organism, and the company with its human activities is considered as its food; so that the profits are not the normal fruit of the company fed by the money but the normal fruit of the money fed by the company.
Investment whose first consequence is to pass the rights of the dividend before those of the salary.”
It is necessary to cry out against this injustice that constitutes the very depths of capitalism, an injustice that goes unnoticed even for the workers themselves, who regard it as the most natural and just thing.
Capital is an instrument of labor.
Work must be used from capital.
This is why the primary and unique drive of the capitalist to secure profit and increase capital is unjust.
This is secondary, and comes after the human well-being, according to the condition of each, of all the executors and operators who have put their activity in the company has been sufficiently assured.
Moreover, as I said before, and it follows from the doctrine of the Church taught by St.Thomas, the capitalist who invests his money must not seek first of all his profit, his profit, his profit, but must first try to provide work and thereby human well-being to those less fortunate than he in the possession of wealth, and only once this primary requirement of capital has been met, can he himself benefit from the profits that result.
For many, this reasoning will be baseless, it will seem fantasy...
I know that capitalism and the capitalist move only for profit, for the thirst for gold, for the desire to pile up.
This is why I am affirming from the first chapter that capitalism is unjust, nefarious, and amassed in the sin of greed...
This is why I am asserting that capitalism has risen and rose with the theft of the inalienable rights of the worker.
Hence, what St. John Chrysostom said of the great fortunes: “In the origin of all great fortunes there is injustice, violence or theft.”
But, despite knowing that it is a childish occurrence to teach that capital rights must be demanded after sufficient labour rights, I reaffirm it.
First, because you have to express the truth; second, because then your teaching is more necessary than ever; third, because from the first line of this book I have announced that I would only formulate a judgment of value, axiological, on modern economic reality.
This must defraud those who would like a practical recipe that, without abandoning capitalism, fixes the disturbed economy.
But the truth is that the only truly practical solution is to abandon capitalism essentially unjust.
The company Work, we say, is first, and capital is secondary.
They're both in partnership with the company.
But there is the employer's work and the worker's work.
The first is the work of intelligence and will: the entrepreneur takes risks.
What counterweight will balance the risks of the entrepreneur?
Capital also risks what counterweight will balance it?
On the other hand, the operator risks nothing.
Since his condition as a man without rents does not allow him to wait for the profit of the company to live on these profits, perhaps problematic, he must work for a Cuotidian wage that assures him the subsistence of him and his own, as we will immediately explain when talking about the salary.
Hence, in strict justice, the worker does not have a share in profits.
The salaried worker does not form, then, properly, part of the enterprise.
But for other reasons, as Pius XI teaches in Quadragesimo anno.
“It would be more opportune for the contract of employment to be somewhat relaxed as soon as possible through the contract of society, as it has already begun to do in various ways for the benefit of the workers themselves and * Ibid.
26 even employers.
In this way the workers and employees participate in a certain way, already in the domain, already in the direction of the work, already in the profits obtained”.
There are, of course, a number of issues now to be raised.
1* Does the company - the association of labour and capital - propose a profit?
♪
* Can this gain be the company's first mover?
3* How to divide this profit?
Three extremely difficult points, which must be determined with prolificity, from the point of view of moral law.
The profit of the company First of all, does the company - the association of work and capital - have to propose a profit?
I answer that yes, because both capital and labour risk their own resources, which must have a fair reward.
If there was no prospect of profit, who would expose their resources?
Who would venture into companies?
The risk justifies the gain as the scholastics have seen it, who consider just the profit of a money invested in a company, as well as suppose unfair the interest of the borrowed money (II-II, q.
78, a.
(2).
In order for the value of this reason to be appreciated and understood, let us fully transcribe the difficulty that St.Thomas is supposed when he asks whether it is lawful to demand any utility for the money borrowed?
The Holy One proposes this difficulty (II-II, q.78, a.
2): “The money that lends it is more alienated than the money that gives it to a merchant or craftsman.
But it is lawful to receive the money invested in the merchant or craftsman.
Then it is also lawful to receive it from borrowed money.”
Answer it.
“May I say to this that he who lends his money transfers the dominion in him to whom he lends; from whom he who lends himself money has it at his own risk and undertakes to restore it entirely: from where he who lent it must demand nothing more.
But he who entrusts his money to a merchant or craftsman by forming a society with him does not transfer control of his money to him but preserves it; so with risk at the expense of his owner he negotiates the merchant and works the craftsman; and for this reason it is necessary to demand the part of the money that comes from there as a matter of its own.”
The risk then compensates for the fair gain.
But can this profit be the company's first motive?
To raise this question is to raise the same to which St.Thomas gives solution in the sum (LI-11, q 77, a.
4), when he asks, is it lawful, “to trade, to sell something more expensive than what has been bought,” and answers: “to trade for profit, implies in itself to serve the lust of profit that does not know term but tends to infinity.
And for this reason the negotiation itself has a certain ugliness in that it does not involve an honest or necessary end.
However, profit, which is the end of trade, although in its concept it does not matter something honest or necessary does not imply of itself anything vicious or contrary to virtue, from where there is nothing that prevents the profit from being ordered for some necessary or even honest purpose, and so the trade is lawful; as well as when someone orders the moderate profit that seeks to trade or to support his house, or to help the poor; 0 even when someone is engaged in the trade for the public utility to, so that they do not Jalten the things necessary to life.
of the homeland and seeks profit not as an end but as a stipend of labor.”
It is clear from this admirable doctrine of Doctor Angelico that “profit cannot be the motive of a capitalist enterprise.” Profit must be expected because capital is risked.
But profit for pure gain is not to be sought.
There must be honest motives that justify the inversion of money in a company such as benefiting the community with a useful new production, or giving work to the indigent, or even a convenient support of him and his own.
How many practical applications could be made of this doctrine, which is the Catholic doctrine of the economy!
A Catholic patron with resources, if proceeding in the light of these principles, what 27 useful works in favor of his fellows would perform, raising the economic situation of the destitute classes, and thereby raising their cultural and religious situation!
Then capital would regain its own function of spreading the goods in the community, and not, instead, as now happens in this profit economy, which absorbs them from the community to accumulate them in the hands of a minority that exclusively enjoys them!
How to divide the company's profit?
Speaking in strict law of commutative justice, the profit that will result from the company, once all obligations with operators and consumers have been met, belongs to the entrepreneur (or entrepreneurs) who had the management and to the capital that made this management possible.
The Cardinal.
Cayetano, commenting on the famous article by St.Thomas (II-II, q.
78, a.
2, ad 5), sets out the principles of this division so that justice is saved.
The benefit, he says, must be proportional to the risks to which each partner is exposed according to the amount of capital that some invest or the work and initiative that the others contribute to make this capital productive.
But, although according to commutative justice, there is no obligation of anything else, for the Catholic there are other virtues besides commutative justice, and according to them he must adjust his conduct.
We said before that the economic concept of capital is justified by the exercise of the Christian virtue of magnificence.
Capital is accumulated wealth that is invested in one company for the production of other wealth and thus benefits the community.
Then it is necessary for the company to be so regulated that the profit is in fact common: then it is necessary to set a limit to the profit of the shareholders and the entrepreneurs; it is necessary to involve the workers of the profits; it is also necessary that the company takes into account the interests of the consumers in order to produce really useful items and finally it is essential that the profits of the company are not made at the cost of a ruinous competition with other entrepreneurs.
Then the company must organize itself in the real collaboration of capital, work and management, and once so organized it must be harmonised in the picture of the profession and of the entire economic life.
That is to say that in the corporate regime, as I will explain when talking about the social economic order, the company will achieve the regulation that makes it a collective benefit.
The salary Set down the principles of a capitalist enterprise in the Catholic sense, let us go into explaining the salary, and first, let us affirm, against the criticisms of the socialists, that the wage regime is necessary for the workers.
Because the worker lives on his daily work; he needs, then, a daily pay.
You won't be able to work in a company waiting for an uncertain profit.
Then he needs day by day the resources to ensure his own subsistence and his own: the daily wage is justified by the same indigent condition of the worker.
But justifying the existence of wages does not prevent us from strongly condemning the behavior of capitalism in the remuneration of wages.
Like all the efforts of the capitalists, or better, of the administrators of capital (which in turn tend to exploit the real capitalists brazenly), it consists in seeking at all costs their own profit, profit, they seek to remunerate as little as possible the labour force, paying wages of hunger, as was common in the century replacing it with that of women, children or machines.
XIX, or to eliminate the work of the worker Justification of wages Two abuses that deserve careful consideration.
First of all, it must be remembered that the worker's right to a fair wage is one of the most sacred rights.
Hear how the apostle James speaks (V.
1-6): “Ea,” he says, “rich people, weep, raise your cry in view of the misfortunes that are to come upon you.”
*Poor are your goods and your clothes have been gnawed from the moth.
* Gold and your silver are molded; and the rust of these metals shall bear witness against you, and devour your flesh as a fire.
You have treasured anger for the last few days.
*Know that the hire that you paid not 28 to the workers who reaped your harvests is crying out against you, and their cry has penetrated the ears of the Lord of hosts.
*You have lived in delights and feasts on the earth, and have fed yourselves as the victims who prepare for the day of sacrifice.
“You have condemned the innocent, and you have killed him without having resisted you.”
Thus the apostles spoke condemning the exploitation of the poor; no one is therefore surprised to hear words of harsh condemnation for the capitalist monster who has become drunk and drunk with the sweat of the day laborer.
What is meant by fair wages due to the worker, or better: what is the minimum wage whose limit can never be lowered without committing flagrant injustice?
Leo XIII and Pius XI have determined the question in such a finished way that it does not allow us to state anything new about it.
Work - especially in the worker and employee - is the exercise of one's own activity in order to acquire those things necessary for the various uses of life, and mainly for one's own preservation.
The man who employs his work lives on his work: he has the right to a human existence, I say more: he has the right to a human and Christian existence.
It cannot be used as a machine or as a commodity or as a cargo donkey or simply as an elegant animal.
Therefore, if he works, that is: if he employs his strength in another man's, he has the right to be provided with the resources necessary for a human life worthy of man.
A human life: therefore, what is necessary at least for the proper sustenance of a frugal worker and of good manners (Leon XIII) and that of his family (Pio XI).
Because he is human, that is: proper to man, to live he and to live in family with woman and children.
The absolute family wage is owed to every worker.
The head of the family is only one thing, one being with his wife and children.
It is up to him to sustain them.
As long as the woman and children are hungry, it is the father who suffers and feels the hunger.
This is why S. S. Pius XI says: “It is a crime to abuse the childhood age and the weakness of the woman; it is a very serious abuse that the mother (the same thing as the childhood that wanders in the street sale) is forced to exercise a lucrative art, leaving her peculiar care and chores abandoned at home, and especially the education of small children”.
Note that the family wage, as a minimum wage, is owed to every worker, even if he is single, because it is the human wage, which sc owes him as to man.
If you don't sc home, it's a matter that only he cares.
The employer owes him the human wage, which is at least the family wage.
A human life: but it is not human life that has but what is strictly necessary for the sustenance of each day, which it cannot save in anticipation of tomorrow.
Then the just wage demands something more than strictly necessary for the daily sustenance of the family.
Hence Pius XI says that “it is very helpful to the common good that the workers and employees come to gradually raise a modest capital by saving some part of their salary, after covering the necessary expenses”.
The right minimum wage also includes human and Christian treatment.
Human treatment: “and for this reason it is necessary to ensure that daily work does not extend to more hours than the forces allow.
The length of this rest must be determined taking into account the different types of work, the circumstances of time and place and the health of the workers themselves.”
(Leon XIII).
Human treatment: this is why I understand that the division of labour imposed by “tyllorization” must be rejected.
It is not tolerable for man to submit to the mechanical, automatic repetition of the same gesture, without his own initiative.
The man is not, as Taylor imagined and said, an oxman.
You have the right to human nobility.
Treatment, besides human, Christian.
For as the worker has been rescued by Christ, and is loved by Christ in a special way, since He was also a worker, he has the right to be regarded as a Christian and given the facilities to fulfill his religious duties and sanctify the days of the Lord.
29 The minimum wage explained cannot be denied for any reason or in any case, even if its denial was authorized by civil law.
“If ever the forced worker of necessity 0 moved from the fear of a greater evil were to accept a harsher condition, which he would have to accept against his will for absolutely imposing it on him by the master or contractor, that would be to make him violent, and against violence he demands justice.”
(Leon XIII).
There is no shortage now, with unemployment, of those who exploit the little demand for arms to unjustly remunerate the worker's work.
Pernicious abuse.
If a company does not have the resources to pay the due salary, it cannot demand regular work from it either.
He can only demand the work that pays him.
If you lower the wage below the fair, reduce the amount of work by equal proportions.
So far we have tried to quickly determine the minimum wage, the limit of which cannot be lowered without a fatal violation of strict justice.
Will an entrepreneur be content with this?
No way.
As the Code of the International Union of Social Studies of Malinas says: “The minimum wage does not exhaust the demands of justice.
Above the minimum, various main causes matter, whether for justice, or for equity, an improvement.
Thus, e.g.
a more abundant production or more or less large prosperity of the company, demand an increase in the salary.
In addition, there must be a hierarchy of wages, depending on the economic function performed.
It is not fair that the work of the stone picker is equally remunerated as that of the electrotechnician.”
Truth of common sense, against which capitalism conspires.
Thus, e.g.
the goalkeeper of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, is assured, earns 300,000 francs a year, while a professor of the College of France earns 45,000 francs.
It is more remunerative to serve the pleasures or vices of a plutocracy than to provide it with intellectual elements.”
In order to finish this question about the salary that we have had to expound in a hurry, without saying anything about the Allocations family to help large families and about insurance against accidents at work, etc., let us say that even if the regime of the salaried is of his right, it is urgent today to temper it by the regime of society.
Be it partly because of capitalist exploitation, or because of the voices of the workers' exploiters, the truth is that the worker and the employee have an instinctive aversion to wage labor.
Hence, we have to say with Pius XI that, “having regard to the modern conditions of human association, it would be more opportune for the contract of employment to soften as much as possible by means of the contract of soccy, as has already begun to be done in various ways for the benefit of “the workers themselves and even employers.
In this way the workers and employees participate in a certain way, already in the domain, already in the direction of the work, already in the profits obtained”.
The Machine But today the whole doctrine of fair wages is perfectly useless, because capitalism arbitrates more expeditious resources to mock it.
The work of the worker is replaced by that of women and children, who are paid less, and above all by the work of the machine.
It is monstrous that it is easier for a child to be placed than for a worker, father of family.This is the height of capitalist exploitation.
But what has no name is that the capitalist's whole effort is to arbitrate the form of an automatic movement from his factory that eliminates labor to increase his individual profit.
It is known, in fact, that their desire to supermultiply the profit is to deliver to the market a product of less cost than the current in square.
For this purpose, it will apply a new technical procedure that increases the potential of the machine and reduces the workforce.
That is to say: all their effort is to evict the worker for the machine.
An example of a thousand.
The manufacturer Harrison of the United States once produced 50 daily radiators that cost him 10 hours of hand by “ Marcel Malcor, “L’Economie contemporaine” cn Nova et Vetera, Avril-Juin 1931.
30 play.
In 1929, thanks to a more sophisticated instrument, he managed to produce 10,000 radiators with 40 minutes of work.
It accounted for 93 per cent of labour.
It's not about condemning industrialist Harrison.
If this gentleman had not applied this procedure he would have perished in the industrial competition.
It is a question of showing in one example the cruelty of an economic system beset by the acceleration of profit, to the detriment of the largest part of humanity.
Capitalism makes a double abuse of the machine.
First, because it monopolizes its undeniable beneficial force, to the detriment of the community.
The machine, like all good, has a common, social purpose: it is just that it benefits the worker as well as capital, and the worker rather than capital, because, as we said before, the rights of labour are superior to the rights of capital, which without labour is a sterile good.
This is the first abuse of the machine made by capital.
The second, connected with this first, is that not only does not the profit of the machine participate to the worker, but it uses it as a means to evict the worker, to kill the worker.
Some will say that they are these demands of technique, of Progress.
But I ask: would it be lawful to feed machines with human flesh, on the pretext that it is better fuel than coal?
Is it lawful, then, to plunge more than twenty million men into absolute misery, not counting their families, to place others in real misery for the family wages paid to them, and thus create immense global despair and all because it is necessary to respect the infinite acceleration of the machine?
But is the machine made for man, or is the man made for the machine?
I believe that no one doubts that the super-potentiality of the machine is one of the causes, but not the main, of the current economic unrest.
Remember that today the United States, thanks to the large-scale production imposed by Hoover and Ford, has a production capacity that exceeds consumption worldwide in some items.
Thus, e.g.
“The production capacity of the American automobile industry is 8,000,000 cars, while world consumption in 1929 rose from just 600.
A thousand.
The American shoe industry can produce 900 million shoes annually, while American consumption does not exceed 300 million.
The coal mines cstan cequiped to produce 750,000,000 tons of coal, when the American market cannot absorb 500,000,000.” In the oil, coal, steel, wool and silk industries, a technical instrument is available that represents a triple production capacity of the volume of the sale.
At the same time, all countries are eager to develop their industries.
Even India has built up its industry, equipped to the curopea, and closes its market to the old English industries.
Russia intends to raise in a few years an instrumental producer more powerful than the American.
The dizzying delirium of profit, which capriciously accelerates the potentiality of the machine, threatens to engulf the entire human race after having exploited, for 150 years, the proletarian mass.
Will man know how to slow down speed in time?
I said at the beginning that, in front of the machine that has been increasing its corpulence and courage, modern man is a simple grain of dust, driven by infinite circumstances.
His luck is not difficult to foresee.
Bourgeoisness and proletariat We have examined industrial production, in order to arrive at the consequence that everything is in such armed form in capitalist economy that the bourgeois is omnipotent and tyrant in front of the poor, the day laborer in particular, and that he uses this omnipotence to squeeze out the last drop of dignity.
7 Pierre Lucius, La faillite du Capitalisme, p. 103.
31 This is not literature.
The ordinary dealing with the workers has shown me to the living the vileness with which he is treated.
His dignity as a Christian has been torn from him: the worker, loved with.
Predilection for Christ who wanted to be poor and worker, today maintains a concentrated, desperate hatred against Christ, against his Church, with the ministers of the Crucified.
(Living with them, it's easy to check.)
Who has deposited that hatred?
The bourgeois, the capitalist, the bourgeois Catholic.
Because if the newspapers, if the books, if the cinema and the theater poison the worker, the fault is that of the bourgeois, who, eager to become rich, ingested the poison.
If secular schools and atheistic universities poison with their fatuous ignorance, it is the bourgeois's fault.
His dignity as a man has been torn away from him: for the bourgeois who, at the end and at the end, is but a more fortunate worker, has regarded him as a despised commodity, of which he lays hands as much as he serves.
It is true that he was provided with comforts, bourgeois superfluousities (sport, cinema, readings), but at the expense of his human dignity, which has been violated by the machine.
But today the worker is desperate and in the face of hydropic capitalism he feels strong.
He no longer accepts “serving”: He wants to be a master.
And the pace of events makes us suspect that the time has come for your empire.
From the French Revolution to here, he has dominated the bourgeoisie, as he had previously dominated the aristocracy, and before it the priestly power.
With the bourgeoisie exhausted today, the scepter will pass to the proletariat.
For this reason, writes Berdiaeff*, as before it was necessary to teach the bourgeois to respect the human dignity of the working classes, so today the workers must be taught that “the bourgeois and the noble are also human beings, that they must be treated as such and whose dignity must be respected.
This, at least, is the problem that arises in Soviet Russia and is likely to arise someday in the West.”
Then, as now, it will be necessary to preach “opportune et importune” that man of any social condition carries in his being the image of God, has been rescued by Christ and is called to eternal life.
“In the face of this divine dignity, all class differences, all political passions, all the superpositions that daily social treatment has accumulated over the human soul, are insignificant and vain.”
The Church of Jesus Christ, which is Christ himself prolonged and made visible among us, will then, as now, remember that “it is of no use to man to win the whole world if he loses his soul”.
And that the supreme bicnestar of man in the cycle and in the twitch is in the love of all, united in the One who has placed his wealth in giving his life for us.
$ Le christianisme et la Lutte des classes, p. 195.
32 CHAPTER IV.
FINANCES By exposing in the first chapter the nature of capitalism, we discover its fundamental law that is summed up in its definition: “acceleration of profit by the acceleration of production and consumption.”
Profit, infinite, insatiable, governs all modern economic management, so that it is consumed to produce and produced to win.
Production regulates consumption and finances govern production.
We demonstrated how an economy ruled by this vice capital should be a nefarious economy for man and nefarious towards himself, because it was to carry its own ruin in its entrails without power ever, not even for an instant, to provide the economic well-being of man.
In the previous two chapters we discussed the management of production, agriculture and industry, and we justified the concepts of ownership, labour and capital.
But in the exposition of these concepts, we continually strive to warn of the futility of every system while the finances that govern today, with violent shocks, the economic life, do not return to its own function.
In this fourth chapter, let us undertake the study of finance.
This is therefore the key to these pages, to: less as an explanation and criticism of capitalism.
The study of finance will reveal to us the fundamental point that sustains the whole modern economy, called capitalism; it will reveal to us the root of the present economic crisis, definitive crisis, insoluble.
You may feel some relief, but this will be the improvement that preludes the fatal outcome of the agonizer.
However, since it is not our primary attempt to criticize capitalism, but to expose the Catholic conception of the economy, we will ensure that the clear Catholic notion of currency, capital and credit appears in the course of this chapter.
True riches Well, true riches are those called by St.Thomas (II-II q.118, a.
2) natural riches, that is: the products of land and industry, because only they can remedy indigence and provide the sufficiency of goods to live virtuously.
For this reason, the head of the house and the prudent politician acquire and treasure these riches so useful to the domestic and political community, because without what is necessary for life it is not possible to govern the house or the city.”
But its acquisition presupposes its production.
Once produced, it is necessary that they circulate so that those produced by us reach others and take advantage of them, and instead those produced by them take advantage of us.
It is therefore necessary to permutate natural riches.
Obviously this exchange was not necessary in the first domestic community, because as everything was produced at home and everything belonged to the head of the family, he distributed the work and distributed its products, But as the towns and cities were formed, an elementary division of labour appeared, and the permutation of natural riches, known as barter, became imperative.”*
From this first natural change (type of all equitable change, because I give so much of this that it is worth so much for this another that is equal), artificial change or permutation through money was born.
For as the relations between men were expanding and extending even to distant lands, it was not easy to trade in natural riches such as wine, wheat, etc. And for this reason, to effect these changes in distant places, it was established that something would be delivered and received that, besides its value, would be easy to carry, p.
e.g.
: metals such as copper, iron, silver.
At first the metal was determined by only its weight or quantity: but later, to avoid the work of measuring and weighing, a seal was printed on the metal in guarantee of a certain quantity'".
9 Com.
from St.Thomas to Politicorum of Aristotle liber I, lectio II 10 St.Thomas, ib.
lesson VII.
"!
St. Thomas, ib.
33 Money Money is nothing more than that which is adopted as an instrument of change.
As far as money is concerned, he has no mysterious current, no magnetic force.
Its value is of pure change: it will be, therefore, greater or lesser the greater or lesser the amount of things that with its unity can be acquired.
Hence, it is made to circulate, because only in this way does it fill its essential function as an instrument for the permutation of natural wealth, that is, the products of land and industry.
Drowning deeper into this concept, let us warn that money is not necessary as money is a commodity, or something of intrinsic value.
In its primitive significance, money was a bonus on things of value, equivalent to the amount of these.
In fact, we have different forms of money: money-lingote, money-league, money-cheek, money-earned, money-salt, money-concha; only that it had to meet three conditions: of course, to be recognized everywhere as a mortgage to give and receive; then, to preserve by a lasting and immutable way, the recognized value; and, finally, it was not to set the value of all other goods, but to make the relationship of their reciprocal value not disturbed, and that he, the money, was only conceived as representing the expression of these relations of value.
This introduction brought about two major changes in trade relations.
First, the change became purchase; in other words, the pure real relationship became personal relationship, the actual contract into consensual contract.
Second, the price replaced the goods.
This is the same movable property, object of purchase or exchange.
The price is the estimation or comparison of the goods with what is not directly merchandise, but only an equivalent or representation of the goods and intermediary between goods.
With the introduction of the money, the goods, the corrective transactions, the needs, were no longer directly compared to each other, but only considered half-way in relation to each other, referring their value to the money, a price measure generally adopted.
Money as such, that is, in its quality of money, cannot, therefore, ever be merchandise.
If one takes it as merchandise, already as a simple thing of value, because of the matter of which it is composed, either because of other comforts or advantages that are added to it, and whose use can be separated from it or at least be estimated separately, because they are not essentially linked with it, as means of commercial relations, then it is no longer currency (S. 71, II-II, q.
78, a.
1, ad 6.)
Money could have value not in terms of money but in terms of the subject matter involved.
In this case it is necessary to ensure that its nominal value coincides with this value of thing, in order to prevent it being traded with it as a commodity'?.
However, if money is not a real, independent good, it does not have real, own, independent value either; it is only a sign of value that can be used to repay other real values, but only to the extent that there are other values that can be exchanged with each other.
The trade in money Money, in short, has but a pure nominal value, representative of natural wealth.
It's not made to trade.
But as soon as the money was introduced, Aristotle observes, there were those who traded with the money themselves for profit.
These were the money changers or bankers, with their art called “nummularia”.
Aristotle, and after him Saint Thomas and scholastics, call this art artificial pecuniative, whose own function is the artificial production of profit by the trade of money.
And it manifests that this pecuniative one founded on the enrichment by the exchange of money is reproachable, as is reproachable and foolish the concept of many who imagine that only money is wealth.
1?
See Weiss, Apology of Christianity, Social Question.
34 To believe that money alone is wealth, says Aristotle, is a fatuity, because it cannot be true wealth whose value depends on the will of men; so the dignity and usefulness of money depends on the will of the social community itself, which can when it pleases it to nullify its value and replace it with another; then it is not money that is true wealth.
Moreover, that one may abound in money and perish from hunger, as the fable tells it, happened to Midas, who, having an insatiable desire for money, asked the gods, and obtained it, that all that they presented him should be turned into gold.
And so he starved to death, for all the food that was presented to him turned into gold.
All of which shows — and it is fitting to remind the modern economy that it has lost the elementary sense of money — that finance or pecuniary has no end in itself, as if it were the supreme thing to be aspired to.
The true wealth of a country is not counted for the gold it has stored in its coffers.
The United States, despite its huge gold reserves, is a country with a miserable economy because it does not aim to provide human well-being to its millions of unemployed.
However, as Aristotle and St. Thomas certainly demonstrate, there exists in man a perverse instinct, greed, which drags him to make pecuniary or finananza an end in itself.
Because, as a man generally does not seek to dispose of what is necessary to lead a virtuous life, but to have an infinite means that satisfies the infinite insatiability of his whim, he then tries to heap together the artificial wealth, the money, the gold, with which he can capriciously acquire what his whim demands.
This is why money is piled up unlimitedly, infinitely.
And it is sought to increase it, not by producing natural wealth, but by itself.
Money breeds more money, either by changing from one metal to another, or — which is much more reproachable with foenus or interest loan, or usury.
“From where,” says Aristotle, “it results in childbirth when the money increases with money.”
It's like the money's growing up.
I have $100, and at the end of the year, automatically, without me measuring my work, by virtue of the unbegotten fertility of money, I have in my hands 105.
There has therefore been an interest, a usury, a raising of $5.
You won't have to work to be rich anymore.
The others will work, it's true, but for my benefit, for my money to have a baby.
The loan at interest Before exposing the conception that Capitalism has forged of money, and the resources that it has put in hand to infallibly ensure its productivity, let's see why both Mosaic law and Christian legislation have prohibited usury or interest that is charged for the money borrowed.
I'm not talking about overinterest, 30 percent p.
e.g., which is now called usury, and which would become the abuse of usury, but of any interest even if it is 1/2 percent, and which is what was always known by the name of usury.
The Church always condemned usury as unjust and nefarious.
Let us cite only a few documents.
In 1139, the Lateran Council 1*, in canon 13, says: “We condemn the insatiable rapacity of lenders, the detestable and ignominious usury condoned in the Old and New Testament Scriptures as contrary to divine and human laws” (see note 3 at the end of the book).'"
Clemente V (XIV century), in the Constitution Ex gravi ad teaches us: “If someone falls into the error of daring to assert with pertinence that it is not sin to demand usury, we declare that he must be punished as a heretic.”
But the summit document on the subject is the encyclical, Vix pervenit, of Benedict XIV, precisely in 1745, when Capitalism was about to take flight; an encyclical that was directed against Calvinist errors that authorized usury.
The Holy Father states: “The kind of sin that is called usury and that has its place and its proper seat in the loan contract, consists in the fact that the borrower requires under the loan, of 35 whose nature is to repay only what has been received, it is given back more than it has given, and therefore pretends that because of the loan it is due some profit over capital.
Therefore, any surplus profit from borrowed capital is unlawful and usury.
“And it is not intended, ” he continues, “that in order to wash away this stain of sin it can be assumed that the profit is not excessive or burdensome, but moderate, that it is not great but small, nor that the person to whom that profit is requested because of the loan alone is not poor but rich, nor that he intends to use the loan in the most useful way to increase his fortune, either by acquiring new properties, or by devoting himself to a lucrative business, in the intention, always, not to let him rest.
In fact, he is convicted of acting against the law of the loan, which necessarily consists in the equality of the sum given and the sum returned, the one who, established that balance, dares to demand something more by virtue of the loan to the person from whom he has already received satisfaction with the equality of his repayment.
That is why he is obliged to restore to everything that he has perceived above capital, according to that obligation of so-called commutative justice, which consists in preserving exactly in human contracts the equality proper to each one of them, and in repairing it when it has not been respected.
“This is in no way to deny that other securities, as they are called, which are not intrinsic to the nature of the loan, or congeners, can sometimes be found in the loan contract, under which an entirely just and legitimate cause arises to demand something above the capital owed by reason of the loan.
“Nor is it denied that, by means of contracts of value very different from the loan, anyone has frequent opportunities to place and use his money straight, either by devoting himself to a lucrative trade or to business operations, in order to achieve irreproachable profits.
“But, as in these many kinds of contracts, if the equality proper to each one of them is not observed, all that is perceived beyond the right, but not by usury, assuming that here it is not a patent or covert usurary loan, but by a true injustice of another nature, must obviously be restored; so it is also true that if everything is carried out as it should and as the balance of “in justice demands it, there is no doubt that in those contracts there is a multiform way and a very lawful reason to continue and extend trade and all profitable businesses, as practiced among men, for greater public good.
Do not allow Christian souls to be convinced that trade can flourish and prosper through usury and other similar iniquities.
On the contrary, it teaches us a divine oracle that “justice elevates the nations, and that sin makes the peoples miserable”.
“But it should be noted that it would be vain and deplorable to be persuaded that anyone who has some legitimate securities in his favour alongside the same loan contract, or, without that contract, other kinds of perfectly fair contracts, can, using those securities or those contracts, when he has freed another one of his money, his purses or other such goods, take a moderate interest above the capital that returns to him whole and whole.
If someone thought that way, he would not only disagree with the divine teachings and prescriptions of the Catholic Church regarding usury, but would also go against the common sense of men and natural reason.”
So far the encyclical of Benedict XIV.
This document clearly expresses the doctrine of the Church at the very moment when it will cease to influence the economic relations of men.
The modern economic regime, inspired by the anti-Catholic spirit of the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvin, and the Puritans, not only authorizes but glorifies the usury by making it, from lending to interest, the vascular system of economic life.
Capitalism emerges great.
The most formidable industrial progress is made on the beam of the land as an effect of the loan at interest made permanent institution.
And in this economy, money is fertile, productive, with breeding.
36 In the face of this new reality that the facts raise, the Church keeps (does not deny) her eternal doctrine and allows her children (Canon 1543 of Canon Law*) to receive legal interest in loans of money or consumables.
Not because he has forgotten or changed his doctrine, but because of new facts, whose modification is not in his hands for the moment, I allow his children to take advantage of the productivity of money, in fact universal.
(See end Appendix III on “The Loan for the Interest and the Conduct of the Church”).
In stirring up this question, let us note here the legality in conscience for those currently living in the modern economic regime, and ask: Is a system of economics based on lending at interest in itself just and beneficial?
Will such a system, even if it acquires a grandiose development, not be harmful, since it cannot serve the human well-being of the collectivity?
Will the grandeur of such a system not necessarily be for the benefit of some at the expense of the social body?
Tlicity of loan at interest Why did the Mosaic law and Christian legislation always severely prohibit usury?
St. Thomas replied (II-II, q.11.
78.a.
1 and bad q.
13.
4): Usury is not sin because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is sin: it violates natural justice.
Because something is sold that does not exist; then, there is inequality that is contrary to justice.
It's like I, without selling anything, would charge $5.
I give 0 and I get 5.
It would obviously be unfair.
This is precisely what happens with usury, income, the interest received for the loan of money or a consumable thing.
“In effect, St. Thomas continues, there are things that use it itself; so we consume wine when we use it, that is when we drink it, and we consume wheat when we use it, that is when we eat it.
From where, in these consumable things one cannot compute apart the use of the thing and the same thing; but he to whom the use is given, for the same reason the thing is given.
And for this, in these things, by the loan the domain is transferred.
If anyone, then, wanted to sell the wine apart and, on the other hand, the use of the living, he would sell the same thing, twice or sell what does not exist, which is manifestly against justice.
And for the same reason, he who lends the wine or the wheat commits injustice, asking for two rewards: one, the restitution of an equal thing; the other, the price or pay for the use, which is called usury or interest.
There are other things — the Holy Doctor continues — whose use is not the consumption of the thing; so p.
e.g. use.
of a house is to dwell in it and not precisely to destroy or consume it.
In these the use of the.
you can separate from the thing itself and deliver one without delivering the other, e.g.
when one gives to another the use of the house, reserving the domain.
It is then possible to collect a census for the domain of the house, the use of which has been given.
(Evidently this census would never amount to the rent or rent of the modern lease, since in this, the rent that is collected involves the usury or interest of the invested capital.
The modern concept of “renting” is a capitalist concept and therefore usury; the same is true of the rental of fields).
Now, ” continues St. Thomas, “money, as Aristotle teaches, was introduced primarily to effect the changes; thus the primary and proper use of money and its consumption, its distraction, is in itself unlawful to receive price or usury for the use of borrowed money.
So, according to this doctrine, money is by nature sterile, infidel.
It is not fair, therefore, to collect your loan as if it were fertile, as if it were produced, as if it were breeding.
Hence, in the Mosaic law (Dr 23:19), the Lord commands the Jews: “You shall not lend to usury, your brother, money, grain, or anything else, but only to foreigners.
But to your brother, you must lend without usury what you need so that the Lord your God may bless you in all that you put your hand on the land you are going to possess.”
He will say some: the Jew was allowed to lend usury to the foreigner, then that is not in itself bad.
Answer the Holy Doctor (II-II, q.
78, a.
1, ad 2): 5 1917 Code.
(e) N.).
“The Jews were forbidden to receive usury from their brothers, that is from the Jews; therefore it is implied that receiving usury from any man is simply evil; for we must have every man as neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel, to which they are all called.
But to receive usury from foreigners was not granted as lawful, but was only allowed to avoid a greater evil, that is, that they should not receive usury from the Jews who glorified God, for the greed to which they were given was very great, horn is recorded by Isaiah, chap.
LVI”.
Hence, the Church always prohibited usury or loan at interest.
He only authorized it in exceptional cases, not because of the fertility he attributed to the money but because of certain extrinsic causes to the money itself, as well as because of the damages that in certain cases might involve the loan of money.
Legalized usury is officially introduced with the Reformation, Calvinism above all.
From where, as Catholic meaning or influence diminishes, usury grows, and with usury, Jewish domination over the Christian world.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Summarizing all the above, it turns out that the doctrine of Aristotle and St.Thomas, the eminently Catholic on Finance, can be found in the following points: 1.
Only the products of land and industry are truly rich.
2.
Money is an instrument of change, the value of which depends on the natural wealth that can be acquired from it.
3.
Money is absolutely infidel by its very nature; it has no right to raise.
4.
Therefore, the usury or interest, whatever it is, received by a loan is unfair.
Money in Capitalism Capitalism is going to reverse this very clear doctrine.
Because it will make money a commodity; the only commodity or wealth; wealth that proliferates mathematically as time passes.
To this end, the commitment of capitalism — unconscious but real and profound — will be reduced to providing itself with a monetary instrument that allows it to disassociate itself as much as possible from natural wealth and to produce money with money, proliferate money: this instrument will be gold with its countless substitutes.
Gold as money will not have value as it is representative of all the natural riches of a nation, but an intrinsic value, the only appetizing one.
And so, gold will be the only appetizing wealth, for all other riches will be desired as soon as they can be reduced to gold.
That is, money will not be sought as a means of obtaining natural wealth from us, but natural wealth will be exploited as a means of supplying us with gold.
Gold will be, not a mere commodity, but the great commodity, the immutable pole in the race of phenomena, the absolute measure of values.”
Like this.
gold is a coin with characters opposite to those that must have a coin according to the wisdom of the ancients.
The ancients tolerated that the currency was a commodity, provided that this commodity had a real value that fully coincided with its representational value or equivalence.
They assumed in this case that this currency was a circulating commodity, unchanged in itself, whose variability could only arise from the variability of natural products.
That is to say, if products were scarce they had to go up in price and if they were abundant, they had to go down in price.
But capitalism, which makes gold the only commodity, begins by removing it from circulation and burying it in the basements of the big banks.
Gold will, however, be the most variable of all things.
15 Variable gold tends to be expelled from circulation; it will be replaced by other means of payment that will retain an equivalence relationship with gold: paper currency and cheques (see note 4 at the end of the book)”.
The coin paper and checks that ensure a greater circulation of!
* Absolute measure of values, not because it does not admit variability but because it is what you ultimately want.
Ferdinand Fried, La Fin du Capitalisme, p. 3.
48.
5 [Ving Fisher, L'illusion de la monnaie stable.
38 means of payment do not have a representative value of natural wealth but a representative value with respect to gold.
This representation value will vary according to the variations in its volume.
In this way, the prices of all things are in function of three variables: gold, paper currency (and cheques), and the same natural riches, Gold is also in function of three variables (see note 5 at the end of the book)”.
The trade of the coin The trade of the coin, so strongly reproved by the wisdom of the ancients, will be the preferred occupation of the financiers who will have found an easy means to enrich themselves by speculating on this infinite variability of the gold, of the paper that replaces the gold, and of all the other riches that will be represented on paper.
Finance will be the marketing of all values.
I would not dare add here that this commercialization of economic life is a genuinely Jewish creation, if an economist of the authority of Werner Sombart'* did not prove it with overwhelming documentation.
“Capitalism,” says Werner Sombart, “is the bolsification of all economic values.”
“Now, he adds,”7 in this process “the Jews have played the role of creators, and even the particular aspect that modern economic life has taken as a consequence of this development must be considered as the effect of a special and essentially Jewish influence.”
And it continues to show how the letter of exchange, the banknote, the obligation, the shares, the stock exchange, etc., are genuinely Jewish creations.
People have become so accustomed to this marketing of money and all other economic values, that it seems to them the most logical and most harmless.
However, this is not the case.
Because all this marketing presupposes the formation of fantastic fortunes, which are created artificially, without the real production of wealth, at the expense therefore of real production.
Moreover, this creates an extremely great instability for the production forces, which must be detrimental to consumers and producers in order to benefit, on the other hand, the speculations of the financiers.
The prolific money, but this isn't the worst.
The serious thing, the most serious thing about capitalist finance, is that in it money, gold and all other values, as they are reduced to coins, must necessarily be prolific.
Every wealth must produce interest.
It is not possible to conceive of unproductive wealth.
Money has the right to interest, to raise.
One hundred pesos, by the end of the year, must necessarily become one hundred five, for example.
I mean, therefore, interest, usury (usura-system, legalized, 5 percent, or 1 or 1/2 percent if you want), which actually forms the most essential core of capitalism, because it is the concrete expression of greed.
Let us begin by warning that the notion of loan at interest, or sale at interest, at credit, is at the root of everything; the notion of interest due to it invades everything: our mother's house, this money, this garden, this stationary machine, everything that has a value, everything that could produce money again and does not produce, everything, is a capital that can and must produce, that must be reared; constantly, as time goes on, it is increasing with a 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 percent, depending on the legal rate.'
16 Les juifs et la vie economique, p.
$1.
'7ib.
p. 3.
81. '
Marccl Malcor en Nova et Vetera, Juilict-Sept.1931.
39 This is actually the capitalist concept of capital, of money.
For the capitalist, there is no dead wealth: any money, thing or good, has to proliferate in favor of its owner, whether or not it actually produced that wealth, whether or not it mediated the work of its owner in its production.
It has a hundred pesos, but at the end of the year it is absolutely certain that it is 105 pesos for example.
There's been an infallible, $5 math baby.
An agricultural industrialist has had a splendid year and has collected a benefit of $100,000.
You can rest for a lifetime now.
Because the harvest of this anus — not consumed —, only with its annual breeding, that is to say with income, will sustain it all its life.
Money and capital Before I show the perversity of this conception of money (and other riches as translatable in money), I will establish that it is necessary to distinguish between money and capital.
Money is an instrument of change; it is made to be used, to ensure change.
It is not wealth but a nominal value of wealth.
On the other hand, capital is a means of producing new wealth.
As explained in the previous chapter, capital is the investment of wealth in a company so that, associated with work as a tool of production, it shares the risks and profits of the company.
The owner of this capital, who risks this wealth in the production of new wealth, is entitled to its benefits.
For this reason, the ancients and Saint Thomas expressly (II-II, q.
78, a.
2, ad 5) state that “he who entrusts his money to a merchant or a craftsman, forming with him a company, does not transfer in him his dominion, but remains owner, and thus can lawfully demand a portion of the profit that comes from him, as of his own.
No, on the other hand, he who lends his money, because he who lends it transfers the domain to him who lends it, and thus can demand only what he lent.”
It is clear that this authentic concept of capital, accepted in all times by the Church, does not coincide with the concept of Capitalism.
Because Capitalism inoculates in the concept of capital the same interest.
This is so true that in industrial enterprises the interest of capital is not drawn from the liquid profit of the company, but is considered a general expense to be deducted from the gross profit.
It is that interest, breeding, is something inseparable from capital.
If once the amortization of the capital and its interest is assured, there is still a liquid profit, well come!
: capital in the form of a dividend will benefit from it.
The concept of capital clearly unfair and usury, as I will immediately prove.
Let us remember for now the Catholic concept of capital, of genuine capital, as I explained in the third chapter.
It is the investment of unconsumed wealth in a company, so that, associated with work as a tool of production, it participates in the risks and profits of the company.
From where: 1* Capital is only instrumental cause in production;?
* You are not entitled to profit but when you are associated with work; 3* Your right to benefit is secondary, comes after work, as well as your influence on production is secondary and post-work; 4* Just as you are associated with work in the share of profit, so you are also associated in risks and losses Then, capital is not entitled to any interest; you are also not entitled to deduct the amortization of capital from gross profit, as a general expense.
Capital is only entitled to the dividend if there are liquid profits.
The liquid benefit must be computed after full satisfaction of the rights of the work of the executor and the worker.
Only in this way will there be true association of the capital in the company, as food of labor, as it appears from the principles of St.Thomas, explained in the third chapter.
Now, if the capital was not associated but lent, then it is entitled only to claim full repayment of the capital, whatever the fate of the company; as it is not associated in the participation of the enterprise's risk, it cannot claim any share of the profits either.
40 Capitalist capital implies the following injustices: 1* It is considered as a loan, and for this reason it claims its amortization, with industrial income; 2* It is considered associated, and it claims participation in the liquid profit; 3" It is considered superior to work, and it claims its amortization, income and dividend, before the rights of, labor.
This is why it is necessary to choose: associated capital or borrowed money.
One thing or another: both as happens in the current type of capitalist enterprise, it is unfair, it is theft.
The loan at interest in capitalism Now, if the money is borrowed, the interest that capital claims properly is a theft.
By what means, if 100 was delivered, is it claimed at the end of 105?
These 5, which require what are required?
From the past year?
But are you entitled to trade over time, with the year, and charge $5 because it's been a year?
He will say one: but the other benefited from the money I lent him.
He lent them to her; then he gave her the money to use; he gave her the money and its use that are inseparable.
Now, when the borrower repays the borrowed money, it also returns its use, that is, it returns everything that it gave him.
He has no right to profit as he does not have to answer for his losses, because, by lending him the money, he took away the money.
If he had not taken away the money, had he not lent it but had associated it in the company with the other's work, he could justly claim a share of the other's profits, as well as expose himself to his risks.
But then it would not be borrowed money but associated: it would not be entitled, either, to its infallible amortization.
Very clear and clean doctrine, which we find difficult to understand because we have the capitalist mentality of money and capital.
The lender's interest is appropriate wealth without work.
But, since it is wealth, it is the product of the work of the producer, of the non-rentist, who produces for himself and for the renter.
The renter steals part of his work from the producer.
This is clear in the industrial income and in the modern fundiary income (modern saying because today the rent of houses and fields implies the concept of money and capital with right to breeding), appears more evident in the state borrowings.
Because the State that borrows, usually does not invest that money in productive works but in consumable or better destructible works.
So then you have to amortize capital and interests.
The money is lent to the person who has it, that is to say the financier.
So it is enriched with the interest of lending.
And since the state does not produce, then it is necessary to remove from the producer a part of what it produces to pass it over to the financier.
In this way, the one who actually borrows is the producer or worker, the intelligence or the hands, but the worker.
The beneficiary — infallibly — is the non-worker, the ragan, the financier.
With State borrowings, the State is officially responsible for passing the wealth of the producer's hands into the hands of the non-producer.
And with the borrowings contracted abroad, from the producers of the country in the hands of the non-producers, from abroad.
This is why the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, Act 20, say with great wisdom: “While the borrowings were inward, the Christians did nothing but change the money from the poor’s pocket into the pocket of the rich.
But when we had bought the people that were needed to get the loans transported on foreign land, all the wealth of the States went to our boxes, and all the Christians were forced to pay us a tribute of servitude.
19 In quoting the “Protocols of the Sages of Zion,” we do not take into account the authenticity of these protocols, nor do they respond to a premeditated plan of a supposed universal Jewish leadership.
We note, yes, that it is undeniable, however, that they rightly express everything that is in fact accomplished and fulfilled in the relations of the Christian and Jewish peoples.
41 How evident — the Protocols continue — is the lack of reflection on the purely animal brains of Christians!
They borrow money from us with interest, without thinking that they will need to extract from the country's resources, sooner or later, the borrowed capital plus the interest to pay us.
How much easier it would be to take the money they need directly from the taxpayer!
This demonstrates the general superiority of our spirit.
We have known how to present the business of borrowings in such a way that they have even seen advantages for them.”
“Each loan demonstrates the incapacity or ignorance of the respective government regarding the rights of the State.
The borrowings hang like a sword of Damocles on the crowned tests, which instead of distributing contributions on time, spread their hands begging our financiers.
Above all, external borrowings are like leeches, which can no longer be removed from the body of States, until they fall by their own weight, unless the Government violently uproots them.
But non-Jewish governments, far from uprooting them, are repositioning new ones every time.
They irreversibly have to sink as a result of such constant and voluntary bleeding.”
The interest loan divides humanity into oligarchy and miserable crowd The interest loan is nefarious because it divides humanity into two classes: a multimillion-dollar oligarchy that does not produce and a miserable multitude that produces.
All that has been said so far about the finances, the currency, the injustice and inconvenientness of the usury, must appear to be debilitated on the one hand, and on the other hand extremely ineffective.
For, even assuming that usury had its drawbacks, wouldn't it be true that we would make up for the magnificent development achieved by industry and trade, development that almost entirely has to be attributed to the powerful lever of finance and credit?
Well, I’m going to prove — reproducing the show of La Tour de Pino”, done 40 years ago — that the Now Well, this isn’t fantasy: it’s the current economic reality of the world.
On the one hand we see credit and usury are essentially nefarious, and they have placed the modern economy in the abyss of its ultimate burial.
In fact, usury, even if it is 1/2 percent, is a nefarious injustice: for it, alone, without any other cause, tends automatically to divide humanity into two great and unique classes: the one, hoarder of money, that every day increases its money without working; the other, without money, that works more and more to enrich the financial class.
Because the interest you get in him.
money borrowed, whether from industrial income or from fundiaria income, or from State borrowings, or from simple bank loans, is subtracted from the hands of the producer and placed in the hands of the non-producer.
In this way, every day the capital of the financier increases, and especially of the primary financier, who is usually the world financier.
As capital increases, it increases its interest: then, every day, more is given to the financier by the producer.
The producer must necessarily become impoverished, until a time comes when what he produces daily does not even satisfy the party that owes to the interests of the financier.
It goes away, then, debting and it will be economically under the clutches of the financier.
a meager amount of financiers who have in their hands concentrated a huge mountain of money.
On the other hand, we see nations, industries, businesses, individuals, burdened with debts, working (or proposing to work) to meet the enormous commitments made.
Who are you working for?
For the benefit of the financier, who will absorb us, who knows to what generation, the sweat of our work.
And who does not work, does not produce; all his work is artificial, financial, speculative.
♪
You see a social ordre chrétien.
42 It is bad because it breeds a terrible mountain of money.Indeed, will that mountain of money in the hands of the world's financiers be idle?
Impossible, because if it is not placed, it will not increase with interest.
But where, if the current producers do not offer sufficient guarantees to meet the debts incurred, and also, if their manufactured products do not find markets where to place themselves?
If no credit is requested, the credit is offered.
Money must be infallibly increased.
And so we see how in 1928 and 1929 the financiers agreed $8.5 billion to the New York brookers for their stock speculations?!.
Credits raised all securities.
Prosperity was coming back.
But this was a speculative rise.
The rise was not based on higher output but on false speculation, which raised values because it had money to speculate.
And so, Luandu came the reality was a brutal bankruptcy.
Pierre Lucius”?
shows in statistics the course of quotations from 1923 to 1931: Indlce of variable interest values.
Index of the General Statistics of France (base 1913:100).
ler.
Paris New York Minimum 1923..... 173 119 Maximum 1929...... 507 403 Height calculated at 100 195 239 2* Low Paris New York Maximum 1929.... Minimum 1931...
Low calculated at 100 507 249 150 403 154 209 This artificially provoked boom brought the bankruptcy of big speculators and resulted in the loss of small public savings.
And so they broke Hatry and Horn in London, Oustric, Devilder, Homberg, Bauer Marchal and Aero-Postal in Paris, Gualino, Panzarasa, Brudarelli in Turin and Milan Why did that huge amount of money throw itself into the world's main bags, but to make it prolific from the moment it is inconceivable that it remains idle without increasing?
The same applies to overproduction of raw materials in all overseas countries and industrial overproduction in industrial countries.
Money, with its mad desire to grow, has rationalized the United States, Germany, Russia; it has brought about extraordinary progress in industry in all countries, and even in previously exclusively consumer countries such as India, the Balkans, China, etc. Let us estimate the nefarious disruption of this rampant overproduction if one takes into account that each of these countries can virtually supply world consumption.
What has been the ulterior result of the agricultural-industrial expansion caused by the huge mountain of money that plunged over the world in crazy cravings to increase wealth?
Very simple: The superproduced raw materials had to be stored; there was their devaluation below their cost price, and in this way the peasant population ended up being plunged into misery and bankruptcy.
♪
Oh, my God!
Emile Mireaux, Les Miracles du Crédit; Pierre Lucius La fallite du Capitalisme; Ferdinand Fried, La fin du Capitalisme.
♪
La faillite du Capitalisme, p. 3.
8 43 The industrial overproduction produced the unemployment of the usinas with the unemployment of workers and the industrial bankruptcy.
“So in the world economy we see, on the one hand, impoverished peasants, unable to buy manufactured objects, machines and tools; and on the other hand, impoverished working masses who cannot meet their needs for raw materials”23 A typical case among us To appreciate the nefarious disorders that must necessarily produce in a saturated market, (0 be in a market that does not allow to increase the yield of production), a huge mass of money, which cannot be left inactive in the hands of financiers, suppose that there is a financial consortium with 1,000,000,000 pesos.
Financial trade X has 1,000,000,000 pesos, and does not know what trade or industry to provide because no one requests them.
Will you keep this huge sum inert?
No way.
It will cause prolific businesses in the short term, which will reimburse you with profit such sum.
But since these businesses will not obey a real need of consumers, this profit will be made at the expense of owners and producers, who will have to succumb in the commercial struggle, victims of the financial consortium X that will increase dramatically.
Suppose the Financial Consortium X sees a productive business in the short term in the building of skyscrapers.
Then he will direct in that direction the investment of the money, not because in Buenos Aires there is a need for those housing, since the population has not increased as for such a density, but because he sees thanks to the snobism of the people who like the last department, their housing will be preferred at the expense of others who will be sacrificed.
In this way, the Financial Consortium X, with its omnipotent power of 1,000,000,000, will ruin the other owners and lead to a forced loss of rent.
This will not have exhausted the financial capacity of the Financial Consortium X.
Taking advantage of the ruinous state of many warehouses, bakeries, furskins, pharmacies, nightdresses, shops of the city, will buy them at an insignificant price, will transform them giving them an attractive and novel look, and with this chain of business models scattered in the strategic points of the city, will make pingues businesses, while all other merchants break.
And so, mathematically, the Financial Consortium X will keep everything in the Republic.
The cereals, the cattle, the milk, the bread, the drugs, the estancias, the large buildings of rent, everything will pass to the financial Consortium X, which will make enormous profits at the expense of the ruinous state of the producers and merchants, debtors of its own.
But are those of the X Financial Consortium wicked?
No way.
They are people who operate honestly within the Capitalist Economy.
They have money and they lend it.
By lending it, they increase it with interest.
And so, with the loan at interest, they receive fruits of the labor of all those who know no other way to become rich than with the sweat of their forehead.
When these are for one cause, or for another, they cannot meet the debts incurred, they are seen in the need to make an arrangement with the Financial Consortium X, which usually lends itself very kindly to an intelligence with the unlucky debtor.And what injustice is there in all this?
Isn't it the logic of an economy founded on interest lending?
Thus by logic, Capitalism has come to total disarray.
And naive people wonder where the money is?
Where was I supposed to be?
In the hands of their owners, international financiers.
Are they guilty, then?
No way.
Does not the modern world, the capitalist economic regime, say that everything is progressing thanks to the wonders of credit?
* Ferdinand Fried, p.
22 44 How is it therefore strange that the creditors have in their hand all the money of the world?
They have lawfully picked it up, because the producers have consented to hand it over!
If “It takes money” But if you have the money why don’t you hand it over to the circulation?
And for what purpose?
To increase production?
If the current production is excessive.
To increase consumption?
But in this case, what guarantees to offer, if consumers could not repay it.
Who will now hand over the money to the circulation, if it does not offer guarantees of productivity?
Moreover, if it were surrendered, the disaster phenomenon of 1929 would be repeated...
Moreover, if he surrendered, he would feel a momentary, artificial relief, which would then bring a more desperate situation.
Because when the money was collected with its corresponding offspring, which the producer would produce for the benefit of the financier, the latter would become richer and the world poorer, constantly aggravating the evil Money, pure instrument of change But the truth is that it takes money, instrument of change, pure instrument of change that puts the goods in circulation.
But there is no need (it would be very damaging) for the money or capital entitled to raise, to usury Then, the money that is needed, is a non-prollific money, an exorcised money from the usury even of the legal usury of percent.
Money like Aristotle and St. Thomas wanted.
Fsta is the only solution to the world's economic prohlem; the demonstration formulated is of a fatal mathematical rigor.
Solution that you don't want and that hasn't even glimpsed.
A solution that, although glimpsed, would not be applied because the world is governed by the world's financiers, they would never allow these a solution that destroys their exclusive interests.
Traditional philosophy provides the only possible solution to the world's economic crisis.
Meanwhile, the celebrities of the economy and politics sc are eager to cure the comatose state of the economic organism with the treatments that have led it to that state.
Usury - vice, usury - system Usury is therefore unjust and nefarious.
The current crisis, definitive for capitalism, is the first effect of usury.
Of usury, it will say some, that is, of the usury of an exaggerated interest, but not of the legal usury, of the modest usury perceived by honest banks.
But, I ask: once usury is justified and legalized, who will keep it in its right terms, if it is by nature accelerated?
Besides, where does legal usury end and viciousness begin?
Do not the financiers impose the rate of their loans and the State legalizes it with its acceptance?
But regardless of all this, even if it was true that the current economic paralysis was not simply due to credit and yes to the abuse of credit, is it not still true that credit will only have rushed, accelerated the disastrous effects of usury; and that even without abuse, albeit more slowly but with equal mathematical infallibility, this nefarious state would have been reached?
Our demonstration cannot be avoided.
It's a fatal mathematical rigor, I repeat.
Mathematical rigor that still explains the apparent orderly use of credit in the growth of capitalism and the disordered in these last years of apogee.
Because a body in motion, as it approaches its center of gravity, increases its speed; then usury and its deadly effects must increase as capitalism reaches its peak.
Usury, then, has shattered capitalism.
45 Another Objection.
But if usury has always been practiced, why is it so deadly now?
Will this not be a simplistic solution to the economic crisis?
Never as now has usury been practiced as a necessity of economic life.
Tradition, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman philosophy and all traditional civilizations have always condemned usury.
It was practiced, it is true, behind the back of the law, but it was this usury that led Rome to destruction.
Therefore, now that we have made usury a necessity as we have never seen in the centuries, we will also have to come to a unique catastrophe in history.
Clearly, when the world's industrial capacity had failed to balance real consumption capacity, the harmful effects of usury were not visible.
Because since production was then of positive yield, it was possible that it would enrich the financier and the producer.
But now, that capitalism has reached its peak, now that the production capacity already exceeds the consumer quantity, the yield has become problematic — if not impossible — and the usury appears in all its catastrophic perversity.
Usury, finances and Jews What an admirable wisdom that of the Church who always condemned the loan at interest!
What an admirable Saint Thomas who expressed this wisdom of the Church!
The fact is that as long as the Christian peoples remained faithful to the doctrine of the Church, they lived in relative human well-being and achieved a spiritual greatness that bears witness to the lasting works of the Middle Ages.
In any case, the peoples were not slaves to Jewish domination.
But, with greed, usury entered, and usury, finance.
And with finance and usury Jewish domination had to be introduced (see note 6 at the end of the book)."
We must not forget that the world does not go into unconsciousness ruled by blind forces.
Peoples have the destiny that God has imposed on them in their inscrutable designs.
The Jewish people have a clearly revealed vocation.
Only the Jewish people were told in the person of Abraham (Gen 12:1-3): “Get out of your land and your kindred and your father’s house and come to the land I will show you.
And I will make thee head of a great nation, and will bless thee, and will exalt thy name, and thou shalt be blessed.
I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse and in you all nations be blessed.”
All nations, therefore, the Gentile peoples, have been blessed and in the Jewish people because Health must come from the Jews (Jn 4:22), and thus, the Apostle St.Paul in the letter to the Romans, (chap.
X and XT), teaches that Gentile peoples were grafted into the Jewish trunk.
Christ and the Apostles, true Israelites, were that trunk from which part of the Jewish people was plucked out for unbelief and in which the Gentile peoples were grafted.
Spiritual primacy then corresponds to the Jew.
The Gentiles share in this primacy, adhering to the faithful Jew, to the Israelite verus who is heir in Isaac to the promises made to Abraham.
A carnal primacy, a primacy in the kingdom of Mammon, in the worship of the golden calf, also corresponds to the unfaithful Jew, symbolized in Ishmael, the son of the slave.
And so God, responding to Abraham's wishes (Gen 17:2), gives him a blessing on Ishmael: "Behold, I will bless him and give him a very great and very large seed: he will be the father of twelve leaders, and I will make him chief of a great nation."
Faithful Jews have spiritual primacy; fleshly Jews, symbolize in Ishmael and Esau (Gen 27:39), have a carnal primacy, in the domain of riches.
Therefore Esau receives the blessing of his Father Isaac: In the fatness of the earth and in the dew that falls from heaven.
Therefore the carnal Jews made themselves a god of gold (Ex 32), and Moses in punishment took away the golden calf, and cast it into the fire, and cast it to dust, and scattered it over the waters, and gave it to the children of Israel to drink.
(Ex 32,20).
But the truth is that the Jewish people receive both spiritual and carnal primacys in the two currents that go through them during their eternal history.
The Gentiles inherit their spiritual primacy by being grafted into the Jewish trunk.
While the Gentiles remain faithful to Christ, they have nothing to fear from the Jewish carnal primacy.
But if they too want to become independent from God, to give themselves to Mammon, the golden calf, they will be able to enjoy these carnal joys, but as slaves to the Jews.
Gold will always be the property of the Jews, for they have drunk it in the waters.
Here is the theological destiny of the modern economy, ruled by the Jews.
Modern economy is the total immersion of man in the concern of the economic, openly contradicting evangelical teaching: No one can serve two masters, God and Mammon.
Do not be anxious about how to eat or how to dress.
Don't pile up wealth.
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all else will be given to you in addition.
(Lk 12,22-31).
When Christian peoples have forgotten the primacy of God’s kingdom, they fell under Jewish domination.
And so, as Christian peoples renounce the loving domination of the Church (the kingdom of God), they fall under the domination of the carnal Jew.
And since this Jew is equal to finance, in usury, the Christian who reneged on Christ is left under the usury domination of the Jew.
Christian peoples have inherited their true greatness by remaining faithful to Jesus Christ, who is the One in whom all nations will be blessed.
As long as they remain attached to Him, they must fear the powers of the flesh, of Mammon's servants.
For all things are given to him who seeks first the kingdom of God.
But when the Christian peoples wanted to become independent of the Church, the Kingdom of God, venturing into the domains of sin, they associated the carnal greatness of Mammon's Servants, but became slaves.
Slaves of Mammon and slaves of the Jews.
In slaves of the Jews who gained primacy in the kingdom of Mammon, and whose secrets were internalized.
To the Jews it was said by God (Dt 28:12): The Lord will open his rich treasures, namely, heaven, to give rain to your land in its time, and he will cast blessing upon all the works of your hands.
So you'll lend to a lot of people.
And you won't borrow from anyone.
Comment St.Thomas: (II-II, q.
78, a.
1, ad 2) Promise therefore to the Jews in reward the abundance of riches, for which it turns out that others can lend.
Therefore, if the Gentile peoples, abandoning God, prefer to know the wonders of wealth, they will have to learn them in the school of the Jews, who by divine will are depositaries of this wealth.
Hence there is a theological need for Jews to have primacy in an Economic Regime that is the total immersion of “man in the lower concerns of material.
There is no capitalism without the Jews, says Werner Sombart (Les Juifs dans la vie économique), unwittingly confirming the theological demand that, in the present providence of things, an order of life governed by economic concern, in which the Jews are not kings, is not possible.
New proof that “there is no other name in which we can be saved, in which we can achieve even a discreet human well-being, but in the name of Jesus, who died for the Jew and for the Gentile, to make them both share in the Charity of God.”
CHAPTER Y.
CONSUMER We have seen in the preceding chapter the fate of an economy given over to money as to its ultimate end.
Being this, of his own, infinite, unlimited, as Aristotle and St.Thomas observed, he had to imprint an infinite acceleration movement on all economic life.
That's how it happened, indeed.
The insatiable desire to profit, not only unleashed but glorified in the modern economic regime, stimulated the trading of money with money to produce more money.
The Finances, with their engine, the loan at interest, crowned the entire economic life.
In an economy placed under the sign of profit, behind the Finances was to continue, rushing, the trade of goods, because in it, without a direct production activity, the money is increased quickly.
And so, commercial and commercial life, with the outburst of sea, river and road transport, stirred up humanity until then relatively peaceful, making it an immense market.
Behind the trade had to come, also in a dizzying race, to respond to the incessant demand of the market, production.
First, industrial production, because it is exercised in the domain of the artificial and therefore of the unlimited; and secondly, the natural production which, for the same reason, is tied to the limited demands of natural forces.
Finally, if you have to produce to trade and trade to profit, you also need to consume, because if there is no consumption, production is not possible.
But consumption is always necessarily limited, although it is perverted by purpose.
And it's more limited than land production.
Then he must come after her.
And so, in the lucrative economy of the modern world, consumption comes to the tail of every economic process, dragged by production, as well as to it drags trade, and to this, in turn, the Banking.
It would be wrong to remove the consequence that in the modern world it is sought not to eat.
On the contrary, it is sought that it be eaten, consumed in infinite, unlimited, accelerated mode, in order to be able to produce infinitely and trade infinitely and profit infinitely.
In this world without God, the infinite matter is filtered through all the domains of activity.
The mistake of the modern economy is therefore not to suppress consumption.
On the contrary, it is in raising it to infinity in order to continue to infinity the other economic processes.
That is, it is an “inverted” economy, as I explained in the first chapter.
An infinite economy alongside the finite man.
A purely dynamic economy alongside primarily static man.
A profit economy alongside the man who is a consumer being.
It would suppress consumption if it agreed for profit; it would increase it to infinity if profit demanded it.
This, which may seem like literary paradox, is history, as Marcel Malcor has shown in his wonderful studies on Contemporary Economy.”*
Indeed, when England in the century and a half of its economic imperialism faces its powerful industry one and a half million customers, of consumers scattered all over the world, it keeps well from preaching theories about wage and consumer increases, vulgarized today by American theory.
What need can there be to increase the consumption capacity in its 20, 30, 40 million English sober as Puritans, if it cannot supply its huge global clientele?
But today, that the producing instrument can supply the world several times, it is necessary to preach the need for infinite consumption.
(I say: you can supply.
If in fact it does not supply, it is for other reasons).
Hence Henry Ford’s theory, when he teaches that “the machine lives from quantity, and since quantity is the same worker, he is the most interesting consumer, the only interesting.
It is therefore necessary that his salary allow him to buy what he produces.”
“One?
Nova et Veiera, 1929 and 1931.
49 industry cannot be said to be solidly established, he adds, but when the great mass of consumers coincide with the great mass of their workers.”
And since today the production instrument is more powerful than the world's consumption capacity, the whole effort of the economy is concentrated on divinizing consumption.
To this end, the laudatory weights to the increase in consumption; the propaganda that provokes consumption; the very fast fashion that accelerates consumption; and the credit to consumption, which accelerates it.
Advertising...
Fashion...Consumer Credit Let's briefly expose these four chapters of the contemporary economy, now committed to glorifying consumption, and only in this way will we explain one of the most interesting aspects of this reversed economy, which after having produced even satiety, is quick to destroy what has been produced, because it warns that a stagnation brings it death.
The contemporary economy formulates large laudatory weights to consumption.
We've summoned Henry Ford.
It is impossible to forget the other great type of American who is former President Hoover: “The man who has a standard car, a standard radius and an hour and a half of daily work is less man, has a more complete and more personal life than, without this, he had before.”
And Mr.
Mellon, former finance minister in the United States, is proud of the consumer capacity of his country.
“Although our population, he says, accounts for less than 7 percent of the total land, we have consumed 48 percent of the world’s coffee production last year, 53 percent of the tin production; 65 percent of the rubber production; 21 percent of the sugar production; 72 percent of the silk production; 36 percent of the coal production; 41 percent of the iron production; 47 percent of the copper production; 69 percent of the oil production.
From now on, we can expect natural and inevitable growth of both population and natural wealth.
** It laughs at the satisfaction of these civilized barbarians, who imagine that the increase in population and natural wealth depends on gluttony.
For them consumption is the measure of civilization.
This is why the United States, which drinks half of the coffee produced in the world, is more civilized than Europe, as well as Europe is much more civilized than the East...
If man is an eminently consuming animal, it is necessary to encourage him to consume products whose consumption so dignifies him.
But first we must make him understand the advisability of adapting to this permanent incitement, of being interested in advertising.
For this reason, the many warning companies educate modern man urgently demonstrating the serious interest involved in reading the warnings.
“Read you.
Notices”.
“Get used to reading ads,” they say.
On the other hand, the recommendation is idle.
Because the offensive of American propaganda, with the thousand unimaginable resources, attacks all the senses, uses all the senses, reaches the heart and numbs the spirit.
Propaganda is always in direct proportion to the futility of the article.
Thus, the firm Rigley spends $4,000,000 for the propaganda of the 16,000,000 it sells in chewing gum.
And it is easy to verify that the more artificial its propaganda is a greater product, the more effective it is: “because in modern man, desire is subject to the laws of mechanics; repetition, a certain intensity automatically release its rope at the price of an easily calculated expense and that can appear comfortably, in advance, in the calculation of the cost price”* This is why it is easy to discover the philosophical sense of the enormous wasteful warning: in the present conception of life, man is a consuming animal lost in an impersonal mass; it is therefore necessary to act on his five senses to incite him to consumption.
If man is a consuming animal because in modern conception he is a concrete of pure matter subject to the laws of mechanics, he must be endowed, as matter, with continuous mobility; because the local movement, passer-by that scholastics say in contrast to * Interviewv to Mr.
Mellon, Evening Standard, 27 Nov.
1928.
Quoted by Mr.
Malcor en Nova et Vetera, April-June 1931 2 See Marecl Malcor, Nova et Vetera, Janvier-mars 1929.
50 immanent, and that modern man calls activity, energy, dynamism, is inevitable consequence of matter.
For this reason, it is necessary to progress, renew, quickly renew consumption, divinize fashion.
We must eat, drink, dress, play, inhabit and develop in fashion.
Fashion, previously reserved for aristocracy as an expression of beauty, has invaded today all domains and all social classes.
It is an effective conquest of democracy.
“It is remarkable,” says Marcel Malcor, “that the concern of fashion (which did not once exceed a very restricted medium) is now totally widespread and vulgarised.
All the efforts of advertising, which is reigning above all here, are directed to the crowd.
Two things matter to him: that change is sufficiently frequent, as often as possible, and that it can be adopted uniformly, almost instantly, from top to bottom, on the scale of fortunes... in the original form or that of a substitute.”
But there would be no use in weighting consumption and its permanent incitement, if man were not given the opportunity to consume.
For this purpose consumer credit has been organized as the most natural thing in the world.
“The normal way of selling — especially in the United States — a car, a phonograph, a chair, a spoon is on a monthly basis.
There is no something active sector of the economy that has not organized in a chronic, regular way and in view of a rapid progression, the sale of credits.
According to a sympathetic observer from the United States, the floating credit of trade on retail customers is $7 billion (1926); the public is always behind in a year with respect to their entries.”** Inverted consumption It is impossible to establish with more evidence that economic concern is now concentrated in the acceleration of consumption.
Pernicious acceleration: because with it it is sought that man spends for spending; he spends above all on the useless, on amusements, on whims, on a luxury that does not coincide with his social condition.
Remember, p. 3.
e.g. the vulgarization of silk stockings, toilet costs among women, etc.
In reality, the consumption of the contemporary economy is the opposite of the consumption of an economy ordered according to natural demands.
In this, consumption is the purpose of economic life.
What is produced is to provide man with what he needs for a human life, within his condition, as St.Thomas said (II-II, q.
118, a.
1.
Consumption is production.
The ordered according to the human requirements of each one's life.
There is a deep sense of hierarchy.
And in turn, consumption regulates, as in the end, trade, currency, economy is placed under the sign of the human; it serves man just as man on his part serves God.
But one will say: does not regret this imply an evident regression in the straight march of humanity that runs toward progress?
He runs so fast, he's about to crash.
As there is an investment, we said, in the economic process, consumption is perverted in itself.
It consumes badly, and it consumes badly so that the trader can liquidate his stocks with profit, and the producers can print speed to their machines, and the bankers can multiply their productive credits.
“So true is that consumption goes to the scrap of the entire economic process, that it is preferred to destroy huge tons of coffee, corn, wheat, etc., in order to ensure profit, rather than feed the millions of starving people.
Logic of an economy, I repeat, that has forgotten the elementary law of economic life, exposed by St.Thomas (II-II, q.
118, a.
1), when it says: Foreign goods have reason for useful things at last.
From where it is necessary that man's good toward them be properly regulated.
That is: that man seek possession of the external goods as soon as they are necessary to his life 27 "L* economy contemporaine", in Nova et Vetera, Janvier-mars 1929.
* Marcel Malcor, Nova et Vetera, juillet-sept.
1931.
51 according to his own condition.
Cardinal Cayetano comments: “with the name of life, he understands not only food and drink but everything that is convenient and enjoyable, within honesty.”
Therefore the next law of economic life must be man's consumption according to his own condition.
It is produced to consume... it is traded to consume... money is used as a means of circulation of wealth that ensures a more abundant and varied consumption.
Profit, as such, (the only law of modern economy) is always severely condemned in a Christian economy.
So much so that in the time of the Fathers of the Church (third to seventh centuries) — in order to react against the purely lucrative spirit of the pagan economy — mercantilism, where profit is sought, was rejected.
Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, says (6,6-10): “Certainly, piety is a great treasure, which is content with what is sufficient to live.
Because we've brought nothing to this inundate, and we certainly can't carry anything either.
Having what to eat and what to cover, let us be content with it.
For those who seek to be rich fall into temptation and the snare of the devil and into many useless and pernicious desires, which plunge men into the abyss of death and destruction.
For covetousness is the root of all evils; from which some were drawn away from the faith and subjected themselves to many sorrows.”
To many, this text will seem of ascetic but not economic value; on the contrary, it will seem destructive of the economy.
Not so, though.
It is an eminently economic text.
For precisely the last verse read explains to us the uneconomic character of a so-called economy regulated by greed: it separates man from faith, that is, from Christine life, and immerses him in body and soul in purely economic concerns (first error).
And subject him to many penalties, because it does not provide him with economic well-being; on the contrary, it enslaves him, as demonstrated by the contemporary economy (second error).
The very well-being of the economy requires, to the extent possible, the expulsion of profit, and a movement that stops all activities that by their own inclination tend to profit, such as trade and finance.
Thus, unlike the pagan writers who justified the great commerce and judged small industry and small commerce as unworthy of a free man, the Fathers of the Church began from St.Paul to rehabilitate manual labor.
St. Augustine himself writes that, if the spiritual works did not take him so long, he would like to imitate St. Paul (who worked to build tents), exercising “a work as innocent as it is honest, relative to objects of everyday use, as those that come out of the hands of blacksmiths and shoemakers, 0 as the works of the field.
The work, in reality, especially the more in contact with nature and of a more creative character, dignifies man, while the profit of the mercantile activities dulls him by making him impossible for supernatural dignification.
Trade would be wrong, however, to condemn trade as a bad thing in itself.
St. Thomas has been able to balance the righteous doctrine, when he teaches: “There is a exchange or business of money for money, or goods for money, not to get what is necessary for life but to seek profit.
And this business is the merchant's own.
This trade, considered in itself, is reproachable, because it is at the service of the lust of profit, which has no end but tends to the infidel.
And so trade, considered in itself, has some perversity, as far as its purpose is not honest or necessary.
However, the profit that is sought in trade, although in its reason it has nothing honest or necessary, yet it has nothing in itself vicious or contrary to virtue; from where nothing prevents profit or profit from being ordered to an honest or necessary end; and so, trade is lawful.
Like, for example, when someone orders the profit?
Alecu Amoroso Lima -Tristao de Athayde, Outline of an Introduction to the Modema Economy, p.
168.
52 moderately seeking in commerce to sustain their home, or to help the destitute; or also, when someone is engaged in commerce to provide for public need so that they do not lack in their homeland what is necessary for life, and asks for profit, not as an end but as a stipend of their work.”
It follows from all this doctrine that, in order to justify the profit of traders and trade itself, it is necessary to order it to an honest and necessary end, such as consumption.
Without this ordination, trade is bad and harmful, as it happens in capitalism.
For this reason, in the modern “industrialist” economy (as opposed to manual), “lucrative” (as opposed to consumer), “impersonal or anonymous”, (as opposed to personnel), “quantitative” (as opposed to qualitative) “provocateur based on claim”, the trade is king and the Banking is imperial.
The same statistics help to demonstrate the disproportionate increase in trade compared to the same industry.
“Like this, e.g.
In France the commercial professions comprised 900,000 individuals under the second empire and today 2,700,000 (1921); multiple: 3.
At the same time, the industrial population had not increased by 1.6.
In England, there are two merchants <unk> ara a farmer.
In America, one for two approximately.
It’s just a lucrative activity.”*
Ferdinand Fried notes how Germany’s first “new rich”, partners Otto Wolff and Ottmar Strauss of Cologne, who are at the head of the mining industry with a fortune of 50 million gold marks each, and Peevckek whose lignite mines are valued at 150 million, have found the basis of their fortune in trade.
Because trade greatly favors big profits.”'
And the industry itself has made great fortunes because it is primarily commercial, mercantile, with all the easy and quick profits that this matters.
To some it will not seem something disorbited this race of consumption to the drag of infinite production, of infinite trade, of infinite finances.
What does it matter, he'll say to go sooner or later, if he's sufficiently insured?
What does it matter, above all, if we have never, like now, disposed of such an immense abundance?
It may be, he will say, that this implies a moral investment; but, economically, it is an effort that humanity never achieved.
The modern economy is simply great.
It is known that the doctrine of the Church does not admit this divorce of values.
There can be no truly economic economy that violates the hierarchy of human values.
It may seem great, but it is immoral, it carries in its root a terrible destructive force that will end the man and end it.
If it's immoral, it's uneconomic.
Now: the present economic reality will reveal to us in a characteristic fact the fulfillment of this doctrine The bankruptcy of an economy - profit We have said before that the supreme effort of the contemporary economy is to expand to the infinite the consumption of man.
His own life demands it.
If it succeeds in widening the consumption of luck by putting it on par with its productive capacity, liberal capitalism is saved and will continue to reign in the universe.
Because what is the economic situation of the world today?
There is obviously financial overcapacity, as shown in the fourth chapter.
There is plenty of money, as it is accumulated without being able to place itself, invest itself...
Finances are saturated.
Financial overcapacity determined commercial overcapacity, saturating world markets.
All countries are now more or less in a position to suffice themselves, at least for the common type of agricultural and industrial products.
In the state of growth of liberalism, when England exported its manufactured products in exchange for the materials * Marcel Malcor.
* La Fin du Capitalisme, p.
80.
53 premiums in the world, it was easy to conceive of trade; but today, all have production machinery and a large part of raw materials, almost saturation has been achieved.
This explains why the world is divided into closed economic fields.
Each of them is in a position to produce for the world: the United States on the one hand, England on the other, Germany on the third, Russia on the lookout and Japan on the Far East.
The protectionist pace of the world is a consequence of mercantile saturation.
Financial and commercial overcapacity determined the industrial and agricultural overcapacity discussed in the second and third chapters...
Now, there is saturation, stagnation in finance, market, industry.
For this to go it is necessary that the consumption, that comes in wheel behind; that it walk light, because the other one walks in race unstoppable.
Well, consumption can't, not run, but walk.
Because for consumption to walk and run it is necessary that the cost of living be cheap and the resources of the abundant people.
However, the cost of living has to be high, and the resources of scarce people.
Precisely, the cost of living is very high and the resources are very scarce, because the whole economy is inverted.
I hope that the demonstration will be conclusive; in this form it will also be demonstrated the perennial present day of Thomist thought.
Only he can diagnose the economic evil of the world and correctly predict.
The cost of living must be very high.
Because between the producer and the consumer are the financier, the trader and the state; three entities that do not produce and that consume enormously.
Then your maintenance has to tax on the cost of living.
In addition, there is another factor that intervenes to increase the cost, and it is the disproportionate division of labour.
Because, although it may be true that the division of labour, as such, decreases the cost of the product, it is to be noted that the charges corresponding to the financier and the state at each stage of the work are added in cascades, so that they multiply by two, by three and even more the gross cost price of a somewhat complex manufacturing.
But let us forget this circumstance and stick to the fact that between the producer and the consumer are located the financier, the trader and the state.
However, the rights of the financier have been increased disproportionately both in terms of public borrowings (only the debts of the world war weigh in the books of the world, according to Herr Renatus' calculations, two million gold marks)33 as well as in terms of industrial and fundiary income and in terms of bank credits, while the money itself has been passed by the producer to the financier.
This is true of capital, which is considered productive.
Because if you take into account that there are huge capitals that now, due to industrial paralysis, do not produce and that nevertheless collect their fixed income as if they produced, the proportion increases fantastically Ferdinand Fried, following Schmalenbach, underlines this with respect to Germany.”*
“We work, ” he says, “not only to pay the relief to the 4 million unemployed, but also to pay the interest and amortize immobilized machines, that is to say to guarantee their income to capital.”
The rights of the trader (and include in the trader the small, medium and large trade, and even in this one distinction a visible progression from the simple importer to the powerful world monopoly) have been multiplying, and it will be easy to appreciate the huge network of intermediaries that enrich themselves without producing.
Without producing, I mean, not as a criticism, but to highlight the enormous burden on the cost of living.
This, placing us at the best of the cases (purely theoretical case), that the merchants are content to profit; because in reality today they steal in a brazen way, if not the little one * Marcel Malcor, Nova et Vetera, juillet-sept.
1931.
% Article by Ramiro de Maeztu in La Prensa, 20 Oct.
1932.
* La Fin du Capitalisme, p.
547, 78.
54 merchant that can not, nor the medium that is broken, certainly the merchant type global hoarder.
For this they have a perfect organization, unbreakable, which they call consortium, cartell, concerned, trust, and that is nothing other than what Aristotle calls “monopoly” (Politicorum, liber 1, e. IX).
Monopolies that gladly fix the cheapest price possible to the producer, and the most expensive to the consumer, In addition to the financier and the trader, there is a dangerous parasite that stands between the producer and the consumer in order to extraordinarily expensive life.
It is the modern bureaucratic state, which weighs like a heavy burden in the simple municipality, in the provincial order and in the national order.
The modern state is now a vulgar mutuality or a placement agency.
Their budgets are enormous; taxes grow every day, so that they amount to mere expropriation.
Pierre Lucius (La faillite du Capitalisme).
studying the influence of this phenomenon in the current crisis, he points out how in the production of certain products the tax burdens have increased, from 1913 to 1929, by 100 percent, and reproduces the testimony of Gastón Jéze, professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, who says: “The deficit is the rule in England, in France, in Italy, in Germany, not to mention but the great states.
The cause that produces it is permanent; its influence only increases.
It is the demagogic spirit.”
And between us, it's easy to check.
Now, with these three agents devouring money without producing, life has to be exaggeratedly expensive.
“Thorald Rogers, in a study whose objective value has never been discussed, wrote in 1880, after a long enumeration of the price of food, materials, wages, and especially building wages, in 1450: “If the reader has the patience to make the necessary calculations, he will find that, except for rents, my multiplier 12 (between the price of life for 1450 and the price for 1880) is quite accurate.”
With regard to the Tower of Merton built at Oxford, he said that its cost, valued in modern currency, was then £1630.
Built today, it would cost £4,000 to £5,000.
It said this in 1880.
Today its cost will have to be charged by 25 percent”*s, Now, while life has become more expensive, the resources of private individuals (especially workers and employees) have been sluggish.
First, because the money was taken from them with the interest loan, as we say in the fourth chapter.
Secondly, because of the phenomenon of technical progress, which determines unemployment and low wages.
Then, if life is expensive and resources scarce, consumption cannot run, and not even walk.
The modern economy, which lives from the movement, has to paralyze itself and die: a logical result of an “inverted” economy.
Why?
Because in promoting finance, money was passed from the hands of the poor to the hands of the renter; from the hands of the producer to those of the international financier.
A huge but deadly capital was created.
By promoting commerce and industry, as was done at the expense of the day laborer who was displaced by the machine, it was left in misery.
Then, at the precise moment when the economy needs to accelerate consumption in order to continue living, it refuses to walk.
The reason is clear: consumption has been made the last in the economic process, when it has the first place.
The Fair Price The modern economy is standing still.
The modern economy has to be stopped by the same logic of its “inverted” essence.
* Marcel Malcor, en Nova et Vetera.
What could be done to make this economy work?
Very simple.
to impose on all things the right price, which Aristotle and St. Thomas speak of.
Fair price, that in an orderly economic regime, where there is a fair competition is determined by the law of supply and demand.
Law, this law, very different from that which he knew and applied liberalism.
Because, in reality, eminently bourgeois liberalism, by destroying the corporate regime, unfairly applied the law of supply and demand in the price of wages, to the detriment of the worker, who received hunger wages, and in the price of the goods, to the detriment of the consumer, who paid bad and expensive item.
Now: “The fair price or exchange value of a thing computed in currency depends on the set of available objects, the set of resources and the set of wills to buy and sell that are in a given market.
Or if one prefers to state the law of supply and demand: in a market, the more substantial the quantities offered by the sellers, the same the other things, the lower the prices.
The lower the quantities offered, the higher the prices.
The more substantial the quantities requested by buyers, the higher the prices.
The lower the quantities requested, the lower the prices.”** And as supply, thanks to the phenomenon of overproduction, tends to infinity and demand, by unemployment tends to zero, the fair price should tend to zero.
The fair price of raw materials and manufactured products for current use should be almost zero.
And this solution coincides exactly with the one we proposed in the second chapter by asserting the need for a fairer distribution of goods, as revealed by the enormous stocks stored, on the one hand, and, on the other, that enormous mass of people in misery, because their only available capital, labour, is not required.
Therefore, if wealth is stored and wasted because there is superabundance, its value is equal to zero.
If work is not required and huge masses of people roam in unemployment, it is because it is zero then justice demands a pure and simple change.
Zero by zero.
Things must almost be given away.
The right of ownership is not invoked against this doctrine.
Because property, as we explained in the second chapter, is conditioned by the destiny of wealth to the whole human race, to the common of men.
It is a necessary means, but a means, to secure this end, that is: that nadic be deprived of what he needs to live.
If it infringes this primary right, its justice is doubtful, its foundation disappears.
And then the state can intervene for a new distribution of goods, or at least, to put the fair price into effect.
Simple and fair solution, but fantastic, because it would matter the declared bankruptcy of all financial, commercial and industry companies.
The selling price was to be much lower than the production price.
Imagine what an economic catastrophe.
However, this is an inevitable measure.
A measure that man must impose on himself, by a spirit of penance.
Remember the word of the Pope, in his Caritate Christi Compulsi”, when he affirms that only prayer and penance can bring back to the world lost peace.
“Neither the peace treaties, ” he says, “nor the most solemn covenants, nor the international conventions or conferences, nor the noblest and selfless efforts of any man of state, will forge this peace, unless the sacred rights of natural and divine law are first recognized.
No one, leader of the public economy, no organizing force, can ever bring social conditions to a peaceful solution, if before in the same field of the economy, the moral law based on God does not triumph.”
Moral law that only prayer and penance will impose today in the world.
For prayer and penance will dispel and repair the first and foremost cause of all rebellion and all * Valere Fallon, Economy Sociale * Pius XI, Encyclical Caritate Christi Compulsi, 1932.
(N. del c.).
56 revolution, that is, rebellion against God.
Measure, this, that if man resists imposing it, will be imposed by the terrible, inflexible logic of the same economic reality.
We must not be fooled about the economic situation.
She's terribly desperate.
The Pope says that from the deluge onwards, it has hardly been seen a spiritual and material discomfort as profound and as universal as this one.
If the evil is serious, it needs serious and painful remedies.
Let us therefore balance consumption with production, using the only solution, which is painful but unique.
The moment is unique in the world.
The same peoples, the Pope says, are called to decide for a definitive election: either they give themselves to these benevolent and benevolent spiritual forces (prayer and penance) and become humble and contrite to their Lord, Father of mercy; or they abandon themselves, with what little remains of happiness on earth, in the power of the enemy of God, namely the spirit of vengeance and destruction.
Hence, the ultimate solution to remedy this catastrophic outcome of the “inverted” economy is a spiritual solution.
This is not surprising because the disease that the rock is also spiritual; it is the sin of greed, which inoculates as its own law the individualism of the modern world out of the Reformation.
In short: economic production is ordered to consumption; consumption is ordered to the material life of man; his material life to his spiritual life; and this to God.
All things must be to the measure of man, and man to the measure of God.
Man is the center of the earth, and God is the center of the whole universe.
Angels glorify him in heaven, men must serve him on earth and demons tremble before Him of fear in hell.
57 CHAPTER YI.
ECONOMIC - SOCIAL ORDER So far we have studied the internal structure of the various economic values (land production, industrial production with its elements of labour and capital, finance, consumption), and we have outlined the hierarchical management of all these values in the economy as a whole.
Consumption, we said, must be the next measure of the economy, that is, all economic values must be directed towards consumption.
It must be produced for consumption; it must be traded to ensure more abundant and equitable consumption; it must use currency and capital investment for consumption.
Consumption, in turn, will be measured by the material demands of man, according to the condition of each one; using the words of Doctor Angelico, we will say that man must seek with measure the possession of the external riches as they are necessary to his life according to his social condition.
In summary, that the measure of everything is man, just as man is measured by God.
God is at the height of the whole human order: for man must reach him in the charity that culminates in the contemplation of the Saints.
But to do so he must order the whole life of his internal operations by the practice of moral virtues.
In the order of his spirit, man's measure is the unmeasured Good.
He must tend to God with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his mind and with all his strength (Mk 12:30).
In this order, the prospects for progress are infiminite, because their spirit tends to God, who is the Infiminite Good.
But God who, by a plan of his mercy, has been constituted to the measure without measure of man, does not destroy the human order; on the contrary, he demands it as a sustenance that can withstand the infiinite projections of the Divine Good.
Economics, therefore, destined to serve man, keeps all its reality as a humble instrument that provides man with his material bread so that he is able to eat the spiritual bread.
Admirable hierarchy of values that, by restoring each reality to its own function, protects the inferior ones with the support of the superior ones.
On the other hand, the modern economy that invests all economic and human values, making infinite profit the object of the economy and of all human life.
destroys man and the economy, after having injured God's sacred rights.
I believe that has been demonstrated in the preceding chapters.
For this reason, it is necessary to uproot the profit of the economy.
But since profit is a perverse instinct that will always exist in the common of men, it is necessary at least not to glorify him, not to erect him as the norm of life, not to make him the motor itself of the economic regime.
If there is profit, let it be like a vicious tendency of the individual and not as a normal tendency demanded by the same concept of economy.
On the contrary, a truly human economic regime must be in such a structured way that, taking into account the perverse instincts that nest in man's heart, it prevents them and, as far as possible, restrains them.
The values of an economic construction must be exercises of virtues and not practice vices.
Hence all the effort to demonstrate in this book, the conditions under which property, capital, wages, the use of machinery, etc. can and must be integrated into a Catholic economy (the only truly economic one). Hence, in demonstrating the essential perversity of the economic regime, commonly called capitalism, do not insist so much on criticisms that may seem to be characteristic of the men of capitalism, but on those that reveal an essentially vicious conformation of the same regime.
In short: that both capitalism and socialism imply a perverse concept of the economy.
Because the one like the other is the erection in the evil vice system of greed.
59 This vice nested in both systems will reveal to us, in this chapter, the individualism or liberalism of capitalism; the class struggle with the proletarian glorification of socialism; from which it will turn out, as a conclusion, that only the corporate regime proposed by the Church can ensure an exorcised economy of profit and therefore truly humane.
Liberalism Greed, like all vicious instincts, is egotistical.
It glorifys a tendency of the individual; of the individual, I say, and not of man, to underline the material aspect, that is, demanded by quantitative matter, of every vicious instinct.
If it is a tendency of the individual, it is material; if material, it tends to dispersal to disintegration, to unleashing bonds that unite and protect.
Hence, capitalism is a regime of unleashing, of dispersal, of individuals who disintegrate as atoms and give themselves to the unbridled attendance.
That is why the French Revolution, which gives its official birth to Capitalism, after decreeing on October 3, 1789 in the National Assembly that it will be possible “to lend fixed-term money with interest stipulations”, promulgated on June 17, 1791 the famous law “Le Chapelier”, by which all corporations are abolished and all citizens are forbidden to re-establish them in the future in defense of their intended common interests.
“If you violate the principles of freedom and the constitution, ” says Art.
3 of the said Law — citizens of the same profession, art or trade, to take decisions or to make agreements between themselves, with the aim of refusing a concert, or not to agree, but at a certain price, the competition of their industry or of their works; such deliberations or agreements are declared unconstitutional, as an incentive to freedom and to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of null and void effect...” This is why it interdicts in the name of the Rights of Man, the freedom to associate.
Here is the man condemned to be a mere individual in the infinite dispersion of millions of other individuals.
All individuals, untied from the bonds they protect, are committed to free competition.
Pure freedom (0 untying of ties), erected in system: freedom of trade and change; freedom of work for men, women and children; absolute freedom to hire working conditions; freedom to possess unlimitedly.
Prohibition of any labour regulations as regards the minimum wage, the duration of the day, the hygienic conditions of the workshop.
Individuals are disarmed from each other, under the supervision of the State, whose mission is reduced, like that of the traffic agent, to guaranteeing individual freedom.
What is the immediate fate of this economic regime?
Exactly the same as a garden of meek and ferocious animals, in which suddenly the walls separating species from others were torn down.
What was to happen?
That the weak, preyed to the clutches of the strong, would be eliminated or reduced to ominous servitude, and instead the strong would exercise a frank domination.
Because, valid for the strong of their arrogance, they would gradually strip the weak of their resources and increase their power in proportion to their weakening, until they imposed, in the words of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), on the countless multitude of proletarians a yoke that differs little from that of slaves.
History of capitalism in its double stage of free competition and economic dictatorship, so beautifully drawn by H.H. Pius XI, in the Restoration of the Social Order, when he writes: “First of all, it is evident that in our times not only wealth accumulates, but enormous powers and a despotic economic arrogance are created in the hands of a few...
This accumulation of power and resources notes almost original of the modern economy, it is the Jruto that naturally produced the infinite freedom of competitors that left only survivors to the most powerful, which is often the same as saying, those who fight most violently, those who take less care of their conscience... the free competition has shattered itself; the 60 economic arrogance has supplanted the free market; the desire for profit has succeeded the unbridled ambition of power; the whole economy has become extremely harsh, ruthless.”*
Economic liberalism is essentially bourgeois despotism in the same way as outright freedom in an animal garden is the domination of the tiger.
The French Revolution, under the pretext of human rights, has promulgated the domination of the individual-bourgeois, the man-stomach, who since that day has enslaved spiritual values with the subjection of the Church to the State, intellectual values with the servitude of intelligence to technique, moral values with the secularization of life, political values with the stupid myth of popular sovereignty and economic values with the harsh slavery of workers.
Socialism The bourgeois dictatorship we are enduring, how long will it last?
It's not easy to pinpoint.
But the time seems to come when his despotic half-brother, socialism, who burns in envious cravings for supplantary, will take place.
Socialism, in fact, is nothing more than the vice of greed projected in the heart of the one who has nothing, just as liberalism is greed in the heart of the one who has.
It is the glorification or systematization of the envy of wealth.
It is a sadness, as St.Thomas says (I-IL, q.
36, a.
2), because of the goods in which the bourgeois abounds.
This is why today's economic society is broken down into liberals and socialists, that is, into the greed of those who possess and into the greed of those who do not possess.
Hence, socialism must be seen in a double stage: in the stage of ascension (preferably social democracy or parliamentary socialism), in its struggle to seize the bourgeois trenches with its decanted program of workers' demands and in the state of arrival, with the realization of proletarian paradise (Soviet communism).
In the first stage it shows loquacious, flattering, opportunistic.
He is a terrible enemy of the bourgeois conception of life.
It is the indomitable corifeo of the rights violated by the worker.
This is in general terms.
Because if a socialist, even in this stadium, is offered a decent ascent to bourgeois society... all his phobias disappear as if by charm.
In the second stage, when a definitive socialist domination has been achieved with the crushing of the bourgeoisie, socialism is a supercapitalism that has changed its masters.
Because, when the bourgeoisie is dismissed, it is replaced by an oligarchy composed partly of professionals and partly of proletarians, and the economic society remains essentially in the same configuration as it possessed in economic liberalism.
The old lines of capitalism, weakly delineated by the logic of economic liberalism, are now underlined and erected in law by socialism.
If in capitalism human society appears divided into two great classes, of which one in misery works for the benefit of the other that has accumulated wealth, in socialism or communism there appears the same division: on the one hand, the State in the hands of a few, the only capitalist that usurps 70 percent of the working day, as it currently occurs in Russia; and on the other hand an immense family, condemned to servitude by decree of Law.
The class struggle belongs to the essence of economic liberalism and socialism.
Because like each other they are amassed in greed, and greed accumulates for itself to the detriment of others or envy what others possess with desire to strip it of, both involve an eternal struggle among the possessors.
Class struggle, existing in liberalism by logic, free competition, and in socialism as the imposition of the proletarian program.
* Pius XI, Encyclical Quadragesimo anno, on the restoration of the Social Order in perfect conformity with the Evangelical Law at the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Encyclical "Rerum Novarum" of Leo XIII, nn.
105-109.
(C.N.).
6th Catholic Doctrine on the Human Person Only Catholicism, which possesses a doctrine received from God, can transcend this dominion of the vicious instincts that divide one man against another and understand that, notwithstanding the envelopes and appearances that diversify men, all are equally human persons, regenerated by the blood of Christ and destined to see the Divine Substance.
There is no longer any distinction as a Jew, nor as a Greek; neither as a servant, nor as a free man; neither as a man or as a woman; for you are all one in Jesus Christ, said the Apostle Paul.
On the other hand, if the Divine Substance is the wealth reserved for every man, it is not necessary to walk anxiously thinking about what we will eat or what we will drink or how we will dress (Mt 6:25-34).
Economic concern occupies a very secondary place among human concerns.
The wealth of this world is no more valuable than poverty; on the contrary, poverty has been declared blessed by the One who sanctified it and exalted it in his nakedness of manger and Calvary, while wealth has been called inicua (Zk 16:9).
The rich man, if he does not want to hear the curse of Jesus Christ which he said: Woe to you the rich... it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle which you enter into the kingdom of heaven..., if he does not want to hear this curse, he must take his heart from the possession of wealth and employ those which God gave them in the humble service of the poor.
The Christian’s only wealth is the Poverty of Jesus Christ.
Therefore, the first converts to the Faith, the believers, lived together, and they had nothing that was not common to all of them; they sold their possessions and other goods and divided them among all, according to the necessity of each one (Acts 2:44).
It is necessary to deduce from here, not the stupid and utopian establishment of a communist regime, but that, after the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the world, there is only one thing necessary (Lk X.
42), before which neither poverty nor wealth are important, so that the greed of the rich person who accumulates to the detriment of the poor and the greed of the poor who burns in the desire to seize the wealth of the rich person is so perverse and foolish.
Be alert, ” said Christ (Lk 10:15), “and beware of all greed: that man’s life does not depend on the abundance of goods he possesses.
It is necessary to understand, above all, that the diversity of natural social condition and fortunes is entirely secondary to the dignity of the human person called to participate in the Divine Vision.
Need for social functions But, however, this diversity of condition, natural, social and fortunes is necessary and convenient; and therefore dear to God.
“Because he has placed in men, ” says Leo XIII, “the very nature of it is great and so many inequalities.
The talents of all are not equal, neither ingenuity, nor health, nor strength; and the necessary inequality of these things spontaneously follow inequality in fortune.
Which is clearly convenient to the usefulness, both of the individuals and of the community; because it needs for its government the communal life of various Jacultades and various trades; and what to exercise these diverse trades primarily moves men is the diversity of the fortune of each one... There is in the question that we are dealing with — continues Leo XI — a bad capital and it is to figure out and think that they are some class of society by their nature enemies of others, as if nature had made them to be fighting against each other in perpetual war.
This is so contrary to reason and truth that, on the contrary, it is very certain that, just as in the body different members are united among themselves, and from their union results that disposition of the whole being, that well, we could call symmetry, so in civil society has ordered the nature that those two classes come together concords with each other and adapt to each other so that they are balanced.”
* Leo XIII, Encyclical Rerum novarum, nn.
13-14.
(N. del c.).
62 Let us remember that nature demands diversity of different orders hierarchical according to the dignity of functions: priestly order, which takes care of spiritual interests; political order, which is reserved to the earthly destiny of human societies; military or warrior order, which is placed at the service of the earthly collectivity to defend it against possible external disorders; intellectual and artistic order, which puts at the service of the human collectivity the immense intellectual riches; economic order, which seeks, for social benefit, what is necessary for human well-being.
And in this same economic order there must be a diversity of functions according to the diversity of domains, such as the production of land and industry, commerce and finance; and within each domain, a distinct function for the employer and the worker, for the master and the servant, for the director and the employee.
To understand the Catholic conception of social and economic life it is necessary to admit all the various functions from the smallest to the highest and to admit the hierarchical subordination of one to another.
The priestly order is superior to the political order, and the political order superior to the economic order.
But the three equally necessary, as is necessary for the just existence of the three their hierarchical subordination.
If the political order supplants the priest, it is weakened and exposed to being supplanted by the economic.
Thus, the royal power that rebelled against the priesthood, when Philip the Beautiful rose up against Boniface VIII in the twelfth century, was reduced to servitude by economic power with the French Revolution.
And economic power is now to be destroyed by the proletarian revolution.
Workers' syndication How much I will say is common doctrine of the Church, taught especially in the Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII and in the Quadragesimo anno of S. S. Pius XI.
First of all, let us remember against liberalism and socialism the sacred right and obligation of every man, even independently of the State, to build associations with which he defends his legitimate interests.
The right to form such private societies, says Leo XIII, is a natural right to man and civil society has been instituted to defend, not to annihilate, natural law.
Moreover, man must not be disarmed in the face of another man as liberalism claims, nor in the face of the state as socialism wants, because in either case servitude is forced.
It is therefore necessary to restore, adapting them to the needs of the present time (Leon XIII in the Rerum Novarum), that exuberant social life, which in other times developed in the corporations to guilds of all classes.
(Pio XI).
We can reduce to three the economic and social groups that must be established in an economy in order to achieve under the current material conditions (I say matter in contrast to form, as I explained in the first chapter) a Christian order of economic life: the unions themselves, the organization of the professions, the interprofessional organization.
Trade unions are formed freely within the organized profession that harmonizes the rights of the employer and the opener.
The trade unions will therefore be workers' unions and employers' unions.
It is clear that the workers' unions are primarily of special interest, because the worker (the same thing as the employee) is in conditions of inferiority vis-à-vis the employer; he therefore needs to use the union with his fellow workers to ensure that his rights are respected.
However, the employers' union is also necessary, already as a precondition to the organization of the professions, and above all to standardize in all establishments of the same industry the treatment due to the workers.
In practice, Christian employers' unions are more difficult to carry out than workers' unions.
The Church today urges priests and lay people to rush, above all, the creation of openly Christian workers' unions.
Unions that effectively guarantee the rights of 03 workers of the same profession or industry, in terms of wages, duration and working conditions, the development of vocational education, the regulation of apprenticeships, insurance against unemployment and accidents at work, the effectiveness of legitimate strikes etc. It is well known today the judgment of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, delivered on June 25, 1929 and addressed to the Bishop of Lila, in which the Congregation resolves a conflict between industrialists and workers of that region, at the same time establishing the doctrine of the Church on worker syndication.
1.
“The Church,” says the Judgment, “recognizes and affirms the right of employers and workers to form trade union associations, which are already separate and mixed, and sees in them an effective means of solving the social question.
2.
“The Church, in the present circumstances, deems the formation of such trade union associations morally necessary.”
3.
“The Church exhorts the formation of such trade union associations.”
4.
“The Church wants trade union associations to be established and governed according to the principles of Faith and Moral Christina.”
5.
“The Church wants trade union associations to be instruments of harmony and peace, and to this end she suggests the establishment of Joint Commissions as a means of union between them.”
6.
“The Church wants the trade union associations raised by Catholics to be made up of Catholics, without knowing, however, that particular needs can force them to do otherwise.”
7.
“The Church recommends the union of Catholics for a common work with the bonds of Christian charity” It is not possible to mean more energetically the will of the Church, which wants, as an urgent thing, Catholic syndication.
We should not be admired by this imperative will.
The Church is Mother, and is seriously concerned about the fate of millions and millions of her children, workers who turn into socialism, communism and trade unionism, with the obvious danger of their baptized souls, because they believe they find there the defense of their legitimate workers' rights.
It is therefore necessary to promote Catholic workers' syndication in order to ensure the spiritual and material well-being of the workers.
The responsibility of Catholic priests and lay people is very serious.
To remain indifferent to the perdition of so many predilections of the Lord, who are lost by the incuria of Catholics, is a grave sin of omission.
If in times of Christian faith, the Catholics moved by charity were dedicated to the rescue of the captives, today it is necessary to do exactly the same.
The slavery of the opening, already by bourgeois oppression, already by proletarian oppression, is evident.
It must therefore be redeemed.
Charity and social justice demand it.
In the Christian nations of Europe, this crusade of workers’ dignification is working with quite a lot of fruit.
The Christian Union International has a non despicable contingent of 3.
A thousand.
000 adherents.
Almost nothing has been done between us.
However it is something seriously demanded by charity and social justice, as taught by the Supreme Pontiffs.
Moreover, whatever is done for the Christian education of the worker is almost entirely useless, so long as he is not assured a Christian atmosphere of union grouping.
Corporate regime On the other hand, the Church strongly recommends the formation of trade unions as a step towards the definitive reorganization of Christian society, to be verified with the legal organization of professions, or to express myself in the classical language of the social Catholics of France, with the corporate regime.
[ “The corporate regime — as defined by the Fribourg Union — is the mode of social organization that is based on the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and their social function, and by necessary coronation the public and different representation of these different bodies.”
Pius XI proclaims the need for the re-emergence of this organization of professional life: “Because of the vice we have called individualism, things are coming to such an extent that, downcast and almost extinguished, the exuberant social life that once developed in corporations or guilds of all kinds, have been left almost alone, in front of each other, individuals and the State, with no small detriment to the State itself; since the social regime has been deformed, and all the burdens that the old corporations had previously shouldered have fallen upon the State, it is oppressed by countless businesses and obligations.”
Professional organization Thus, the formation of separate and independent trade union groups (trade unions of workers and employers' unions in the same industry or profession) is imposed on the professional body.
A joint committee, composed of equal numbers of delegates from the two groups (patrons and workers), shall exercise, with legal recognition, the government of the profession.
It shall determine the general conditions of work which are mandatory for all members of the profession, whether employers, employees or workers; it shall monitor their compliance through specially appointed inspectors; it shall judge in cases of infringement; it shall prevent conflicts between employers and workers; and it shall administer corporate property.
The constitution of these professional bodies, as social bodies, although vested with authority by legal recognition, is required by the social doctrine of the Church set forth by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno.
After expounding “that in your days, as things stand, on the labour market the supply and demand separate men into two classes, as in two armies, and the dispute between them transforms such a market as on a battlefield, where one front of another fights cruelly”, he continues: “As everyone sees, so gravely evil, that precipitates human society into ruin, there is an urgent need to put a remedy as soon as possible.
Well, perfect healing will not be obtained, but when, removed from the midst of this struggle, members of the social body, well organized; that is, orders or professions in which men join, not according to their position in the labour market, but according to the various social functions that each exercises.
As following the natural impulse, those who are together in one place form a city, so those who are engaged in the same industry or profession, whether economic, or of another species, form associations or bodies, to the extent that many consider these groups that enjoy their own right, but essential to society, at least connatural to it”" Interprofessional organization Once organized the different professions will be necessary to organize them all, together, according to the hierarchy of their respective purposes within the national character of production.
This is the interprofessional organization of which Pius XI also speaks.
To this end, a leading body of the entire national economy, composed of delegates from the different organized professions (patrons, technicians, employees, workers), will be constituted in all the domains of agricultural production, livestock, industrial, trade and finance, so that in this way a real economic-social organism can be established to which can be applied, says the Pope, the words of the Apostle about the Mystical Body of Christ: 10 since the body worked and united receives by all the * Quadragesimo anno, 1.
79.
(N. del e.).
* Quadragesimo anno, n. 83.
(N. del e.).
vessels and channels of communication according to the measure corresponding to each member, the proper increase of the body for its perfection through charity.
Economic activity, whose fundamental order we have outlined in the preceding chapters, will thus achieve effective regulation.
Consumption will be the great law of the economy.
The production of the land will regain its first function with a rural and domestic physiognomy; it will continue industrial production, where in addition to the big company will have a powerful impulse the restored craftsman; then will come the commercial professions and stable organizations of financing of the production; these organisms no longer on the basis of the loan at interest, which will be resolutely banished, but on the basis of capital that will risk in the production, with the advantages and disadvantages consequent.
In this way, the economic regime thus realized will not be capitalism emptied into corporations (utopia that many unconsciously claim) but a new economic order, from which greed has indeed been banished; and that if men proceed out of greed, not sca under the economic regime, but in a certain way as opposed to it.
But for the effectiveness and stability of such a regime it is in no way convenient for individuals to feel coerced or violated.
A soul must vivify this body.
The idea that we all form a body with a common interest must penetrate the consciousness of all as an impulse of economic life.
Life is not a struggle of one class against another, as liberalism and socialism have supposed, but collaboration.
Collaboration within a company, for a better and more equitable performance; collaboration within the same profession, to avoid unfair or fatal competition; interprofessional collaboration, to realize the greatness of a useful national production.
Collaboration also in the international order, because if nations are highly dependent on each other and need each other (Pio XI), they need to be strengthened for a successful harmonization of interests.
The State and the corporate regime Insured thus the rights of all individuals by trade union, professional and interprofessional unions, equally assured of the economic interests of the country at the same time as their other cultural, intellectual interests, etc., in the hierarchy of their respective ends, it is possible to determine the proper role of the State.
The state is the manager of the common good.
He therefore has to “direct, monitor, urge, punish, according to the cases and the necessity they demand” (Pio XI* to the whole social organism.
But it should not replace the activity of the organism.
It must not absorb it but protect it, having well understood, as Pius XI says, “that the more vigorously the hierarchical order reigns among the various associations, the more this principle of the supple function of the State stands, the more firm the authority and the social power and the more prosperous and Jeliz the condition of the State E Economic activity is not confused with political activity.
The political authority effectively directs the pre-existing social forces, including the economic ones, directing them to the common good.
It then presupposes the existence of social activities that have a constitution and movement of their own.
The organized economic activity in the corporate regime is then left outside the State, although under its political regulation.
The purely social character of corporations, as opposed to the status of corporations, must be emphasized resolutely.
Corporations must have their own life and not borrowed from any higher power.
In this regard, it must be recognized that the experiences of Corporateism carried out by Italy, Austria, Portugal and Germany have not yet achieved their own value.
As long as they cannot give guarantee * Quadragesimo anno, n. 89.
(N. del e.).
% Quadragesimo anno, n. 80.
(N. del e.).
* Jbid.
06 of survival to a crisis are always artificial creations.
They cannot be considered entrenched by the State.
Establishment of the corporate regime It does not imply this of knowing the efforts of these nations to straighten the economy on the only legitimate path.
But let us not be easily excited about drawing attention to these experiences, as we should not be discouraged if they failed.
The great difficulty is to resolve how the establishment of a corporate regime would be feasible.
Should the state establish it from above, as a done thing, or rather it should be prepared from below, as a requirement of the same economic life that claims it itself?
The action above it establishes and the action below it prepares are indispensable.
Because if everything comes from above, it will be an artificial creation without roots, and if it is expected to emerge from below, in vain it is expected to break the environment saturated with greed, which by definition is contrary to the collaboration proper to the Corporate Regime.
The state must impose it; but first the demand for its imposition on the consciousness of the masses must be felt.
Perhaps this demand will be felt in a truly perceptible way in the consciences of the economic masses today dulled, when the point of chaos is most high and the so-called unexperienced solutions have been exhausted: that then arise a mentor of peoples sent by Providence in the most desperate moments, and the Corporate Regime will be rooted for the health and economic well-being of the peoples.
International economic cooperation Only once the economy and national life have been secured, by an autonomous life-saving operation under the strong protection of the State, should consideration be given to the management of international economic activity.
The international organization of the economy will not only mitigate the dangers of competition, but will divide work and coordinate activities in accordance with the economic possibilities of each people.
Hence Pius XI says: “It would be useful for several nations, united in their studies and works, since economically they depend greatly on each other and mutually need each other, to promote with wise treaties and institutions a happy cooperation “I have had to outline in great and quick lines the configuration of the economic building according to the doctrine of the Church.
After this exhibition one can ask: how far is it possible to make this sketch?
What is the fate of this rampant economy we are suffering from?
So many other questions that would require a long and thorough answer.
However, from the metaphysical, theological point of view, from which we have positioned ourselves to judge economic phenomena and determine their just and beneficial conformation, it will be relatively easy for us to realize a response.
Indeed, if we observe well the current pace of life and especially that of the economy, we see that everything is reduced to “investment of values”, to “fortuitous expansion of certain individualities”, to “a mad desire to run, to accelerate”, to “a hideous domination of pike, of greed”.
In fact, they are various aspects of the same phenomenon.
For greed, which is infinite, causes acceleration, and this, the expansion of certain individualities over others; and all this, an evident reversal of values, so that what was to dominate and maintain the balance of the lower realities is crushed under the anarchy of them.
The Church has not and cannot have the slightest chance at the moment, not to impose, but to make understand (even most of her Catholic children) what the demands of a Christian, and human life and economy are.
Why?
For as long as the rhythm of life that I have just indicated remains, the Church is the same Spiritual Reality, which therefore matters the * Quadragesimo anno, n. 89.
(N. del e.).
the summit of all the realizable values here in the earthly plan, which keeps them all in their right balance, must be crushed, suffocated under the anarchy of all the other realities raised in rebellion.
And this anarchy, how long will it last?
Until it reaches its completion point.
As I have repeated many times and will repeat once again the world is in a process of degradation more than 400 years ago.
This whole process of decomposition, pointed out by Luther, Descartes and Rousseau, as for its most visible pillars, is reflected in the French Revolution, which is the revolution par excellence: the Revolution against God, against his Christ and against the Church.
But the French Revolution is not the last but is the birth of a new world, in which the rights of Man are proclaimed as opposed to the rights of God.
This new world is essentially economic, because, either served, God, or served Mammon, who is the idol of Wealth.
The world of the French Revolution did not want to serve God; it therefore had to worship Mammon.
But, in the economic world, the bosses and the workers, the bourgeois and the proletarians, liberalism and socialism are cstan.
The boss, the bourgeois and liberalism have already dominated, and now—just when I thought I had reached the zenith of their career—they feel weakened, disoriented, while their irreconcilable half-brother, socialism, feels strong and ambitious to dominate: the proletarian revolution seems imminent to me all over the world.
These next 10 or 20 years will be full of terrible surprises.
The man, desperate, will be fed up with his brother's blood.
Humanity, glorified by the French Revolution, will rush the last remnants of barbarism; it will be something far more frightening than the fall of the barbarians on the Roman Empire.
What about the Church?
The Church will have to restore the meaning of life to this desperate humanity, educating these new barbarians Christianally.
68 EPYLOGUE If it were possible to order the economy without ordering life, this book would already have to be closed.
But the economy is a concern in life, not the only one.
What place does he take in life?
And a civilization placed exclusively under the sign of the economics what characters should it have, at what time should it arise, how does it begin and in what will it end?
Here are so many other questions that claim the answer of the intelligence you read.
And this response arises from these reflections on the present moment written on the occasion of the Encyclical Caritate Christi Compulsi” that H.H. Pius XI addressed to the world commenting on this crisis of Capitalism.
It is not my purpose here to comment on this Encyclical.
I merely wish to indicate schematically some reflections on what, in my opinion, constitutes the central theme of it, that is, the grave moment because it passes through the world today.
“In such a state of affairs, ” says St. Pius XI, referring to the present unrest, “the same charity of Christ encourages us to turn again to you, venerable brothers, to our parishioners, to the whole world, to exhort all, to gather together and oppose, with all their might, the evils that oppress all humanity and those even worse that threaten it.”
Hence, in the Pontifical thought, the present moment has a very special significance.
Not precisely because it is present, that is, because it has become present to us (so great is the fatuity of the modern individual who imagines the axis of the universe through time and space), but because in reality this instant has to decide of the very existence of humanity.
If humanity does not want to be submerged in terrible chaos (as the Pontiff says: if it wants to be free from the danger of terror or anarchy), it must ensure the present moment.
The present moment is decisive, critical to the very roots of humanity.
Just as mankind succumbed in one catastrophe, in the flood, so it would seem to be about to succumb in another.
“S1 we walk through with thought, ” says St. Pius XI, “the long and painful series of evils that, sad heritage of the past, have pointed to fallen man the stages of his earthly pilgrimage, from the flood onwards, we will hardly find such a profound spiritual and material discomfort, as universal as the one we suffer in the present hour.”
This extremely serious importance of the present day explains that he is the object of singular predictions both in the traditional books of all peoples and in the prophetic spirit of the saints.
This moment, therefore, has a singularly privileged significance, and this is not so much because it marks the passage from one culture to another, but from the same culture to inculturation, to chaos.
What is the current, culturally considerate moment?
In order to weigh the density of the culture of any historical moment, it is necessary to consider it according to the past and the future.
Every historical moment is a link in an essentially movable chain.
Only the past and the future can reveal to us whether a point is progress or return and this to what extent.
Now, the present moment is one of very profound cultural regression, of immediate regression to death.
I will confine myself to the consideration, in this regard, of Christian culture, that is, of the culture located on the European continent which has been under the influence of Christian action.
If, in my hypothesis, the current moment is of regression, it will be necessary to indicate the culminating point from which we move away.
The fullness of the ascension was achieved in a visible way — within the inevitable imperfection of fallen humanity — in the thirteenth century, when the social action of Christianity was 46 1932 (N. of c.).
69 is represented by Popes Innocent IV and Saint Gregory X and Saint Louis King of France; when his intellectual activity illuminates with the intelligence of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas; when artistic activity shines in the frescoes of Blessed Angelico and in the Divine Comedy of Dante and in the Cathedral of Chartres; and when, above all these works of the human spirit never overcome, it remains so empty of itself that it does not ate to exclaim but with Saint Thomas Aquinas his brother Reginaldo who encouraged him to continue the Theological Suma: “Reginaldo, non possum; omnia quee scripsi videntur mihi palea”.
Why is that a highlight of human culture?
Because that period of history points, in the particularity of a culture, to the culminating point to which the human spirit can essentially reach.
Note that I say that this is a high point and not the only possible one.
Note above all that I call it a culmination because in it “the essential perfection of man” has been achieved.
And with this I indicate the criterion that should guide us in the appreciation of cultures.
A culture is nothing but “man manifesting himself”.
A culture will be all the richer the richer the manifestations of man.
The value of these manifestations must be weighed according to their content of reality.
The Subsisting Reality is God, from whom all good derives and from whom all good finite is but participation.
Hence, a culture will be all the richer the more “divine, closer to God” the manifestations of man.
Man, who is a conflict of pure power and pure deed, can realize cultures as diverse as the divine of the Middle Ages and the diabolical of communist Russia.
Man is a conflict of “pure power and pure act”.
It is “pure power” because, as Aristotle and Saint Thomas explain, human understanding is in power with respect to all the intelligible, and therefore, man, at first, is like a tabula rasa in which there is nothing written.
It is “pure act” because, thanks to the activity of the agent understanding, everything intelligible can be updated.
It can rise, then, from the smallest reality to God by participation, or it can content itself with being only man as it happened in the rationalism of the classical age, or it can become an animal as it happens with 19th century man, or it can simply be “chaos” as it is committed to forging man into proletarian dictatorship.
In man, a conflict of pure power and pure deed, four fundamental formalities coexist from Redemption, explaining the four possible stages of a cultural sky.
Indeed: cl man is something, he is a being.
Man is an animal, a sensitive, delightful being.
Man is a man, a rational, honest being.
And above these three formalities in the present providence, as the Creator has constituted it: Man is God, is called to the life proper to God There are, therefore, in man four essential formalities: supernatural or divine formality.
Human or rational formality.
Animal or sensitive formality.
The formality of reality, of thing.
In a normally constituted man (let us say also in a normal culture, since culture is man manifesting himself) these four formalities must be articulated in a hierarchical subordination that ensures the unity of functioning.
And so man is something to feel like an animal; he feels like an animal to reason and understand as a man; he reasons and understands as a man to love God as a god.
In other words, the formality of reality in him must be subordinated to his function as an animal; that of an animal, to his function as a man; that of man, to that of God.
This is still evident in the experimental field by the fact that the physical-chemical processes of man are at the service of vegetative functions; these, at the service of the normal functioning of the senses; the sensitive life, assures the acquisition of the ideas and the psychological life supcrior, with all economic, political and moral order, no more than a means for man to communicate with his Creator.
This is why 70 was deeply able to write St.Thomas Aquinas (Summa vs.Gentiles, L. III, chap.
37) that all human services seem to serve those who contemplate the truth.
In other words: mysticism, the infuse contemplation of Saints, which is but the highest exercise of holiness, is above every man, and just as there can be no man more human than the saint, there can be no culture more cultural (of greater cultural density) than that which is under the sign of holiness, as it was — within the inevitable imperfection of the human — the medieval culture.
If these four formalities that constitute man are socially projected, there are four well-characterized functions: To the formality of thing corresponds the economic function of execution — labor — worker.
To the formality of animal corresponds the economic function of leadership — capital — bourgeoisie.
To the formality of man corresponds the political function — aristocracy — nobility.
To the formality of God responds the religious function — priesthood.
Before indicating which sphere is specific to each of these functions, let us note that the first three are of human right, i.e. they may take various forms of realization, provided that their essential nature is respected; not so the fourth, the priesthood, which by the will of Christ has circumscribed its concrete form of constitution in the Episcopate united with the Roman Pontiff.
In fact, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to whom all power has been given in the cycle and on earth, has communicated his mission to the Episcopate in union with the Pontiff of Rome, when in the person of Peter and the apostles he said: “Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you.
And I will be with you until the end of the ages.”
What are the terms of reference, specific to each of these functions?
The priesthood, let us say the Church, has the function of securing the divine life of man by incorporating it into the society of the children of God and keeping it in it.
For this purpose, the Church exercises the functions of Teacher, and in this character she is the depository and authentic interpreter of all the truths revealed by God to man.
The Church exercises functions as a priest, and in this character she sanctifies with virtue what springs from the Perennial Sacrifice to all her sinful members.
The Church exercises the functions of Pastor, and in this character governs the conduct of men.
Its domain extends to the whole realm of the spiritual, which can be internal and external, private and public, individual, domestic or social.
Nothing that in a way or etro has a bearing on the eternal order is substantiated to its jurisdiction.
If the temporal government of a prince harms the elory of God and the eternal salvation of his subjects, the Church can and must, by virtue of her universal jurisdiction in the spiritual, apply measures of coercion against that prince, which can go as far as his deposition.The political function that is the foundation of the existence of the aristocracy or nobility, has as its own purpose to make human coexistence virtuous.
The human being must live in society to achieve his human perfection.
But this society must be human because the bond of union must be man's.
This bond of union is virtue.
And its realization is the proper function of that social class which, in one form or another, has in its hands the political function.
Which can only be aristocratic, that is, the rule of the virtuous in the etymological sense, since only those who possess virtue can make it prevail.
The aristocracy does not define what virtue consists of.
That is the attribution of priestly power.
The aristocracy brings to practical realization the state of virtue, whose knowledge has learned from the priestly lips.
Hence its subordination to the priesthood is essential to the aristocracy, as its subordination to theology is essential to politics.
Below the aristocratic order are the lower classes, bourgeoisie and craftsman, dedicated to the economic function of preparing the things necessary for the material subsistence of man.
The bourgeoisie intervenes in financial and commercial operations and in the direction of industries; the craftsman, in the execution of the different needs of life.
One runs, the 71st runs.
One brings capital and the other contributes its work.
But both of them live together in a spirit of mutual cooperation within the economic sphere.
The four essential functions that we have just outlined, as well as the four formalities that constitute man, are articulated in a hierarchy of mutual service.
The craftsman serves the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie serves the craftsman as he directs and tutors as well as the vegetative life prepares the sensory organs and in turn is served by it, since the animal through its senses is sought vegetative sustenance.
The craftsman and bourgeoisie united in economic conspiracy serve the nobility, as they assure it of economic support, and in turn are served by it, which assures them of virtuous order, just as the senses contribute to the acquisition of ideas and man with his ideas corrects and perfects sensitive knowledge.
The craftsman, the bourgeoisie and the nobility serve the priesthood, for the first two assure it of economic support and the third, virtuous coexistence, and in turn are served by it as the priesthood consolidates the economic and political order with the sanctifying virtue it dispenses, analogous to how man with his understanding convinces himself of the need to admit supernatural Revelation and supernatural Revelation consolidates the knowledge of natural truths.
A normal order of life is an essentially hierarchical order, a hierarchy of services.
And the hierarchical order integrates the multiple into the unit.
Thus families are integrated into the unity of corporations; corporations, into the unity of the nation under the same political regime; nations into the unity of Christendom by the worship of one God, into one baptism, and into one Spirit.
If the normal order is hierarchy, abnormality is violation of the hierarchy, and at the same time, process of atomization, because when the hierarchy is broken, the principle of unity is broken and the causes of multiplication that are the inducers of death are left free to expand.
Death is nothing but the disaggregation of the one into the multiple.
What and how many types of abnormality are essentially possible?
Three and only three, as three are the fundamental relations possible, namely: Let the natural rebel against the supernatural, or nobility against the priesthood, or politics against theology; here is the first rebellion.
Let the animal sc rebel against the natural, or the bourgeoisie against the nobility, or the leading economy against politics; here is the second rebellion.
Let something rebel against the animal, or the craftsman against the bourgeoisie or the leading economy; here is the third rebellion.
In the first revolution, if the political revolts against theological, there must be a culture of political expansion, natural or rational expansion, of monarchical expression and at the same time of religious oppression.
It is precisely the culture that opens with the Renaissance and is known by the names of: Humanism Rationalism Naturalism Absoluteism Cesaropapism In the second revolution, if bourgeois economics rebel against the political, a culture of economic expansion, animal expansion, bourgeois expansion and political oppression must be produced.
It is precisely the culture that opens with the French Revolution and is known under the names of: Economy Capitalism Animalism 7 Stupid Century Democracy In the third revolution, if proletarian economics rebel against bourgeois economics, a culture of proletarian expansion, nihilistic expansion and bourgeois oppression must be produced.
It is precisely the culture that opens with the communist revolution and is known by the names of: Communism War on capitalism War on the bourgeoisie Last and chaotic revolution because man does not affirm anything but turns against what exists and destroys it.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let us see now, although we should return to the suggested concepts, how this process of rebellions has been carried out from the Middle Ages to here.
The Middle Ages are essentially tcocentric or tcological or priestly because all human activities, each developing within its own sphere with an admirable economy, conspire to the union of man with God.
He is priestly because being the priest the visible depositary of the word of God, he must order, a world whose longing is the visible realization of this word.
Before placing the crown on the king’s head, the archbishop officiating asked the following six questions: “Does your Majesty want to preserve the holy Catholic and apostolic faith and strengthen it with righteous works?
Does Your Majesty want to protect the Church and its servants?
Does Your Majesty want to govern the empire that God entrusts to you according to the justice of our Fathers and promises to defend it vigorously?
Does Your Majesty wish to uphold the rights of empire, to reconquer the States that have been unjustly separated and to govern them so as to serve the interests of the Empire?
Does Your Majesty wish to be a fair judge and a loyal defender of the poor as well as of the rich, widows and orphans?
Does Your Majesty wish to lend to the Pope and to the Holy Roman Church the obstinacy, fidelity and respect that are due?” After the oath was given, the archbishop officiant turned to the assembled bodies of State, as well as to the upright of the assembly, who in the spirit of the ceremonial represented the entire people, and questioning them he said: “Do you want to fortify his empire?
Do you consent to give him faith and homage?
Do you commit yourselves to submit to all his commandments according to the word of the Apostle: that everyone should be subject to the authority that has power over him and to the king who is the supreme leader?” The whole Assembly then replied: “So be it.
Amen.”
This august ceremony, added historian Janssen, consecrated, through the representative of the Church, the reciprocal duties of the sovereign and the people; a contract was affirmed between the Nation and the sovereign.
The coronation and consecration took place at once.
The Church sanctified the temporal order in the person of the King, penetrated him from the spirit of Christianity.
Thus, the whole cultural life faithfully respected was sanctified by supernatural life, and thus life in all its manifestations was profoundly Christian.
Life was prayer.
And as in every prayer creature, life was rich in all possible manifestations of life (wisdom, art) and at the same time, deeply humble, forgotten of itself and only sighing for the One from whom all bicn came.
73 That admirable balance is to be broken when the temporal power ceases to serve and seeks only to command.
Every imbalance is produced by the sin of the evil spirit — non serviam.
Sovereignty is the beginning of all evil.
This occurs in a typical way at the end of the Middle Ages, when Philip the Beautiful turns against the Church the authority consecrated by her.
By the sacrilegious hand of William of Nogaret, Philip the Beautiful seizes the Pope, keeps him in prison and outrages him in Anagní.
Sitting on his throne the tiara on his head, holding in his hands the keys and the cross, the old pontiff in whom the Middle Ages had taken refuge, is despised by the absolutism of the monarchs that opens the Modern Age.
This rebellion inaugurates in the social sphere the gestation of a new spirit that is developing as the priesthood weakens in its prestige (Popes of the Renaissance) and remains officially formulated and assured in Luther's rebellion.
Luther, backed by the princes and in a certain way heralded by the Renaissance concentrates his blows on the Roman pontiff, authentic repository of grace.
And so a “absolutist” culture is inaugurated, in which princes recognize no more rights than their will; “naturalist”, because man seeks the expansion of nature; “rationalist” because man with his own measures is sought in all manifestations of art; “classicist”, because he seeks a perfection of balance and rationalist order.
A concrete case of this culture, we find it in the century of Louis XIV in France, where the absolutism of the monarch takes a parallel expansion to the naturalism of Buffon and Fontenelle, to the moralism of the Bruyére and La Fontaine, to the rationalism of Descartes, to the humanism of Moliere, to the classicism of Corneille and Racine and to the Gallicanism of Bossuet.
At the same time as the anthropocentric world is lived, it is walking to its dissolution and it is giving way to the “animal” world, that is, to a world in which man will not adjust his life to human demands but to the subhuman ones, to the animals that request him.
And so, for example, Descartes' action ends in the suicide of reason by Kant.
Why this?
For without supernatural grace man cannot realize the perfection of his nature and of his reason, as the Church teaches at the Vatican Council.”
And so — inevitably — rationalism is only a way to the torture of reason; absolutism to the torture of monarchs; naturalism a way to the torture of nature; humanism a way to the torture of the human.
And so too — inevitably — rationalism ends with the suicide of reason in Kant- Nietzche, absolutism in the gallows with Louis XVI, naturalism in the materialism of the nineteenth century, humanism with the animal life of the positivist, classicism with the unbridled fantasy of romanticism That is, that the first revolution operated by modern man in supplanting the supernatural, will end in the second revolution, which will supplant, in turn, the political to inaugurate the primacy of the economic.
Luther's Revolution inevitably rushes into the French Revolution.
The French Revolution is, in substance, the supplantation of nobility by the bourgeoisie, of politics for the economy, of the human for the subhuman, of the rational for the stupid, of the classic for the romantic, of absolutism for democracy.
And this is because of the intrinsic logic of revolutions.
A revolution in the metaphysical sense is a rebellion of the inferior against the superior to make the inferior prevail.
With the French Revolution a bourgeois, animal, stupid and positivist world begins: “animal”, because exhausted the “homo naturalis”, homo animalis cannot function.
Hence materialism, “stupid and positivist” because, exhausted the reasoning that is the faculty that interprets and unifies the facts, which reasons on the facts, it remains for man only to verify and see the facts and to collect them, or sca cl positivism.
*7 Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, Pius IX, Vatican Council 1 (1870), on the Catholic faith 74 I have said that this second revolution opens “the era of the economy”.
Indeed, the nineteenth century is essentially an economist century, as evidenced by the colossal industrial, commercial and financial expansion that unfolds in it.
The fact that he is an economist demands that political strength be weakened and that he bow to economic demands, as well as in the previous era the primacy of the political meant the cultural annulment of the priesthood.
And so, in fact, politics loses its effectiveness by the democratic conception of sovereignty promulgated by Rousseau.
It would be wrong to imagine that in an economist culture the economic function achieves its own object.
On the contrary, for the same reason that the economic act takes precedence, when of its essence it is subordinate to the political and religious, the economic function of the latter must be reversed.
And so it is, indeed, as we have shown in the chapters of this book.
The economist economy is inevitably inverted; in it it is consumed to produce more, it is produced to sell more, it is sold more to profit more, when the right economic order demands that finance and trade be at the service of production and this in the service of consumption and consumption in the service of man and man in the service of God.
Such an inverted economy is relentlessly dire and must end in a tremendous economic catastrophe, in which we seem to find ourselves.
It seems that the moment at which we currently find ourselves is the end of the bourgeois-cconomist era.
We find ourselves at the end of an age in which the cultural influence of the priesthood is exhausted and practical atheism reigns; the cultural influence of politics is exhausted and demagoguery prevails; the cultural influence of the bourgeois economy is exhausted, which will give primacy to the proletariat, and we are in universal bankruptcy.
We find ourselves at the end of the second revolution and the beginning of the third, which is the communist revolution, the proletarian revolution, in which the worker, placed in the tiny social condition, wants to supplant the bourgeois, the politician, the priest.
He wants to supplant the bourgeois and repudiate the bourgeois economy; he wants to supplant the politician and repudiate the governments of authority; he wants to supplant the priesthood and erect atheism in a system.
The communism imposed in Russia and crazily eager to spread to all areas of the earth, points to the last of the possible revolutions in a cultural cycle.
After it is not possible but chaos, let us further specify the character of communism.
The communist is a man whose supernatural formality, natural formality and animal formality have been removed.
What remains of a man who has been removed from these three formalities?
There's one thing left, something that walks into nowhere.
And if communism is really, the deification of reality that tends to nothing.
What is the reality that tends to nothing?
What remains something and is nothing because of its character as a report?
It's the raw material.
In fact, Aristotle defines the raw material by saying: Dico autem materiam quae secundum se, nec quid nec quantitas, nec aliud aliquid eorum decitur quibus est ens determintum.
The raw material can be everything, from earth to man; but of it nothing is of that, nothing determined; it is a pure capacity of reception.
But in Thomist language communism could be defined as that system of life and culture that tends to man's resolution in raw material, to something purely report, chaotic.
Hence, in all manifestations of life, in social institutions as well as in the family, property, the corporation, the homeland, as well as in artistic activities, as in science itself, communism is purely report and chaotic.
To verify this, I refer the reader to the exhibitors of communist reality.
The definition of communism set out here coincides with that formulated by the Holy Father in his encyclical letter, although it is taken from another point of view.
Indeed, the Holy Father defines communism by the attitude he adopts to the problem of God, which is the capital problem posed to every man who comes to this world.
That attitude can only be an insolent repudiation, 75 because what rushes into the chaos of raw material nothing can hate as much as the Subsisting Reality.
And that attitude of repudiation is as logical as was the attitude of adoration adopted by the medieval man informed by supernatural grace; as could neutrality and secularism, affirmed by the bourgeois of the nineteenth century.
What else is it for an animal, a stupid one, deprived of reason and grace, to do without God, whom his imbecility prevents from knowing?
Hence, it is only in a culture placed under the sign of the proletariat, such as the communist one, that it is possible to find an “organized and militant atheism”, engaged in a “campaign of atheism”, as S. S. Pius XI says.
Today's communism is therefore a very profound cultural regression—it is the critical moment of immediate regression to death.
What cultural forces are there on the present human scene?
According to the above consideration, we see that, in what it has on its own, it is an almost final moment in the regressive process that stirs the world from the Reformation to here.
The milestones of this process can be indicated: Renaissance Protestant Reformation Cartesian Rationalism Rousseaunian Liberalism Bourgeois Capitalism Socialism Communism They are various stages of an identical process of degradation, which can find a symbol in the process of corruption that operates in the body of man.
Human cultures are like the human body.
While the body is informed by the immortal soul, the body lives.
But the instant the immortal soul leaves the body, the body is lifeless and walks safely until its total dissolution.
At the time of death, the body retains the appearances of a living body: it seems to sleep.
The tissues retain their integrity; but little by little they are dissolving; the corruption is nested in their bowels, the catharic fetidity denounces this process of corruption and, after all, it will not be left of that body more than a pile of dust.
The Church cra this immortal soul, subsisting for itself, which gave life to culture.
In the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, the Church's divorce with culture takes place.
Culture is left without the principle of life, although by virtue of the vital impulse of this principle it preserves all appearances of life.
The classical age, which has had such extraordinary manifestations of culture, can be compared to the “in vitro” crops, which still live after the individual’s death has been operated.
They live at the impulses of the vitality that has abandoned them; in reality they walk to death.
This is why the whole modern world is a cadaveric world, with the particularity that now, when it is about to dissolve into powder, the types of the various decomposition states it has passed through are preserved.
Indeed, Protestant sects persevere; Cartesian rationalism perseveres; Rousseau's liberalism, voltairianism perseveres; bourgeois capitalism perseveres alongside socialism and communism, which embody the characteristic stages that correspond to the process of decomposition at the present time.
And the funny thing is that these delayed stages are caught up in struggle with socialism and communism as if they were enemies.
In reality they are brothers in different ages: all the children of the same rebellion march into the same chaos, albeit with a different step.
They are all forces of disorder, revolutionary forces in the authentic sense of the word, because they have rebelled against the One who is First and Chief and upholds the normal order of culture.
76 In this way, all the forces that can be staggered by degrees from Protestantism to communism, perhaps unknowingly and unintentionally form a united front of revolution marching into chaos.
In front of these revolutionary forces, all gravitating towards Moscow, is the Catholic Church.
The Church, by its essence, is above the cultural sphere.
His mission is divine: he wants to unite men in Christ, to unite them with God.
His mission is eternal: above time and space unites men with divine bonds.
However, by virtue of its supra-cultural essence, the Church has a great power to revive human cultures.
Because the temporal in contact with the etemno is vivified as the earth in contact with the sun, and, on the contrary, subtracted from its influence, dies.
Hence, the Church has forged the material elements that could survive the Greco-Roman world and the Barbarian races, the greatest culture that has left its mark on the earth: the culture formed by the Church.
The Church infused her spirit into the Greco-Roman elements separated by the Romans and into the German elements brought by the barbarians.
The wonderful thing about medieval culture is the spirit of the Church that blows in it.
It is the spirit of God.
It is the Eternal Spirit.
We would say that the hierarchy we have discovered in the Middle Ages is only a condition for the life of the Spirit: let us remember the abundant outpouring of the Spirit in the mystic writers (Saint Bernard, Hugo de San Victor, Saint Bonaventure), in the architects of the Gothic cathedrals, in the frescoes of Giotto and Angelico, in the divine prudence of the holy kings.
In this admirable outpouring of the Spirit lies the value of the Middle Ages and not as the specialists of history, feudal institutions and the Holy Roman Empire imagine.
Feudalism has been a determined realization (one of the possible) formed by the supra-cultural influence of the Church.
Many other Christian cultures are more healthy than feudalism.
The Church, by virtue of its essence which is to sanctify the human and incorporate it into Christ, is driven by an essentially hierarchical movement; she wants order in human realizations; she wants the realization of true culture.
This is why his movement is diametrically opposed to that which stirs up the modern world.
Just as the modern world is driven by an impetus of rebellion, of breaking hierarchies and of launching into chaos, so the Church of the Hollasc moved by the Spirit of subordination, of respect for the essential hierarchies, of integration in order.
The Church gravitates to Unity; the modem world, to chaos, which is a lack of unity.
The Church is launched into God who unites; the modern world, in the Spirit, of the evil that confuses.
The real opposition between the Church and the modern world arises in the fundamental problem of every man: the problem of God.
Just as the Church wants to unite with all the strength of her soul to God, so the modern world wants, with the same impetus of its strength, to turn away from him and erase his name from the face of the earth.
This is why the Catholic Church is the most typical force of how many oppose revolutionary forces.
It embodies the movement of reascension, so that communism embodies the movement of regression.
From reascension not to the Middle Eastern institutions, which they have passed to return no more, like all that is changeable, but from reascension to that Eternal Spirit who encouraged the Middle Ages and for the same reason that it is eternal is not of the past or of the future.
He wants the return of culture to God, which is Primum Principium.
He wants to establish order by the primacy of the first hierarchy, the priesthood.
It is, however, fair to remember that the visible members of the Church are not in a position at the moment to fully realize the movement of rescension.
For while the Church herself, as the wife of Christ, is “holy and immaculate, full of glory, without blemish or wrinkle”, yet, in the life of Christians, she is in a deplorable state of 77 ugliness.
Catholics have been infected with the ponzoña of five centuries of apostasy.
Catholics have made an alliance with the Renaissance, with classical naturalism, with the spirit of free Protestant examination, with liberalism, with the disgusting bourgeoisie, etc.
Catholics have become mundane and the Immaculate Bride of Christ is imprisoned and suffocated under the thick, crust of modern ponzoñas.
In order to regain its cultural primacy, the Church needs to suffer in the hearts of Christians a profound purification that consumes these ponzoñas and allows free passage to the outpourings of the Spirit.
This purification is operating in the movement of Catholic Action, which is and must be a movement of sanctification in Christ.
His Holiness Pius XI recognizes this action of the Holy Spirit when in the Caritate Christi Compulsi he writes: “And it is truly a powerful breath of the Holy Spirit that now passes over the whole earth, drawing especially the youthful souls to the most sublime Christian ideals, raising them to any sacrifice, however heroic it may be; a divine breath, which shakes all souls even at their own expense and makes them feel an internal anxiety a true thirst for God, even those who do not dare to confess it.”
With regard to the work of re-ascent to traditional life, fascism can be mentioned in a certain way.
Fascism, in fact, encourages the reform of the economy and of politics according to principles in a traditional sense.
I speak of fascism by interpreting the deepest tendency of its realization, in this respect, determined by its impulse to the end.
If we are to create the masterly exhibitions of Professor Gino Arias, that tendency is within the traditional.
It is fair to state that the interpretation of Fascism presented by Professor Gino Arias corrects the state's statolátric conception that many assign to it as essential.
Fascism is, in fact, a strong organization of economic life in corporate order under the control of the State.
The economy unfolds by itself under the political regulation of the state.
This interpretation would coincide with the Catholic conception.
It is clear that this profound tendency of fascism can be accepted, without accepting the violent means of which it is hand in hand.
But this would imply an accidental divergence.
In fact it must be recognized that fascism, both at its end and in its means, is, for the time being, the only movement of concrete archalization that restores the traditional principles of political economics.
Their same media violence is justified when they open their eyes to the reality of the moment, which is a moment of violence.
In this sense, reality is above theories and desires.
If violence does not impose order, violence, it will impose disorder already over the liberal moment that because of its stupid sentimentality of bourgeois has no energy either for good or for evil (either cold or hot) we enter into proletarian violence that is driven by a fearful realization of evil.
The Church does not want material violence as a government resource.
That at a certain moment violence must be accepted, because it is the only effective means of counteracting worse evils such as terror and anarchy, does not depend on the wishes of the Church.
The Church, then, respectful of reality, which she cannot modify, will limit herself to reminding her children in addition to the eternal norms of morality and charity, that material violence is useless and counterproductive, if it is not accompanied by spiritual violence.
For this reason the Church advises as the most important means for the restoration of the Christian social order, not fascist violence, but “penitential violence”.
What must be warned of fascism is that, if it is not to be ineffective and fatal, it must bear in mind that, in order to save humanity, it is not enough to go back to the traditional political man, but it is also necessary to go back frankly to the hierarchical man placed under the sign of the traditional.
It is as absurd to accept the primacy of politics (read authority 78 social) as to submit to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
The only legitimate and benefactory primacy is the meek and humble primacy of the supernatural, of the priesthood.
Only with this condition can fascism be Christianized and it can be an excellent collaborator of the order that is elaborated in all chaos under the action of the First Computer.
If we are to believe the magisterial exhibitions of Professor Gino Arias, fascism does not refuse to accept this condition.
And indeed, the concrete movement of fascist action, as has been unfolding in Italy, has gone day by day declining from its pantheistic conception of the State to recognize the universal primacy of the servant of the servants, of God who sits in the Chair of Peter.
A similar purification would be indispensable if Germanic Hitlerism, which must understand that great Germany is Germany of the Germanic Roman Empire, so splendidly history by Janssen.
The nationalist movement that awakens among us must also bear in mind the considerations formulated about the ¡archic organization of man, supraempiric considerations that must guide violence so that it is not a vulgar instrument for defending bourgeois positions.
It is necessary to start from the basis that all these positions are as rotten and as pernicious as leftist positions.
It is necessary, then, to go through all the mold, until you find the man himself.
Man who will not be found until He who, being God, has wanted to be a man so that man could be God.
79 APPENDIX 1 Bula Sixto V Detestabilis 21 Oct.
of 1586 Conviction of Company Contracts containing insurance of capital or certain gain or other usury vice.
Sixtus Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God, for perpetual remembrance.
The detestable voracity of greed and insatiable greed to profit, the root of all evils, so blinds the minds of men that many, eager for profit, fall miserably into the snares and lurks of the devil.
Because that ancient enemy of the human race sneaks cautiously through various deceptions and fallacies and oppresses men fascinated by the sweetness of profit and drags them into the vortex of usurys, hateful to God and to men, condemned by the sacred canons, contrary to Christian charity and while searching for vain and earthly riches lose the true and celestial, as we have recently heard with great pain that occurs in some provinces.
Because many, taking pretext for their usury of the honest contract of society, hand over their money or other things to the merchants, artisans, merchants or other persons with the guarantee of their goods, shops, warehouses, bakeries; or hand over to society, livestock or certain animals to the farmers or shepherds or any other person on condition that the capital, as it is called, of all the money, animals or things is always saved and whole in favor of the one who contributes to society not the industry or the work but the money, the animals or similar things, so that all the risk and damage falls on the other partner and thus agree in various ways against the equity and justice of the contract of society; and to the same partners with whom they perform the contract, partners generally poor and needy who live of their work and industry force them to return the capital whatever their fate and at the same time determine and prescribe that the partner must pay them, per month or per year, for the duration of the society, a certain profit, one per cent; and this sum and amount they want it fixed and determined to take care in nothing to that this benefit and at all times determine that this benefit is derived from the loss of the income.
Therefore, We judge as the principal and proper function of our pastoral care to direct in the way of health, with the help of divine grace, the flock of the Lord entrusted to Us assured of every danger and risk of eternal life, wanting to remove, as far as with the help of God we can, the contagion of this evil before it spreads more to the common ruin of the faithful, using the fullness of our apostolic power by this constitution that is to be used forever, we condemn and reprove all contracts, conventions, covenants that sc are to make in which people who give money, animals or any other thing in society are guaranteed that even though they suffer damage, damage or loss, capital must always be restored save and integrally by the partner who receives it, or that it must respond with a certain sum or quantity every month or year during the duration of the society.
We establish that these contracts, conventions and covenants must be held as usury and therefore should be considered unlawful; and that henceforth it is not lawful for those who invest in society their money, animals or other things, to agree and agree with respect to a certain profit; nor to bind with agreement or promise, to have agreed with respect to a certain or indeterminate profit, to the borrowing partners to restore save and integrate the capital when it has by chance perished or disappeared.
And we categorically forbid that from now on societies be created with these covenants and conditions that envelop the vice of usury.
8th Appendix II Bula Vix Pervenit by Benedict XIV of 1 Nov.
From 1745 It came to our ears that, caused by a recent controversy as to whether or not the validity of a certain contract should be admitted,* various opinions were disseminated in Italy that were not in conformity with sound doctrine, we considered that it was proper for our apostolic functions to come with a timely remedy, before evil increased, favored by silence and duration.
We have therefore decided to close the entrance to it, so that it does not continue to spread and pollute Italian cities that are still exempt.
1* That is why we adapted the resolution and method that the Holy Apostolic See always had to use.
We have put the matter in its entirety before the eyes of some of our venerable brothers, the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, particularly laudable for their knowledge of sacred theology and for their earnest science of maintaining canonical discipline.
We also brought forth several eminent regulars in one and the other Faculty, chosen by Nos from among the monks, mendicant orders, and regular clergymen.
We also call a prelate, doctor in both rights and well versed in the practice of the courts.
And having been summoned by Us on the fourth day of the month of last July to a general assembly to be held in our presence, we submitted to your consideration the nature of this whole matter, seeming to us that a clear and complete knowledge was formed in this regard.
2 After which we express to them our desire, namely, that they should be discouraged from all passion and from every spirit of rivalry, examine the matter in all its parts, carefully, and set forth in writing their views.
But we did not order them to rule on the contract that motivated the controversy, because several documents necessary for that purpose were missing, but rather to establish the true doctrine of usury, a doctrine that seemed to suffer no small impairment in the interpretations that had recently begun to be disseminated.
They all carried out our orders, expressing their views loudly on the occasion of two congregations, the first of which took place in our presence on 18 July, and the second on the first of August next, and sent their written opinions to the secretary of the congregation.
3* According to this, in unanimous agreement they agreed the following: The kind of sin which is called usury and which has its place and its proper place in the loan contract, consists in that the borrower demands, by virtue of the loan, of whose nature it is to repay only what has been received, it is given back more than it has given, and it therefore pretends that because of the loan it is due some profit above the capital.
Therefore, any surplus profit from borrowed capital is unlawful and usury.
And it is not intended that in order to wash away this stain of sin it may be assumed that the profit is not excessive or burdensome, but moderate, that it is not great but scarce, nor that the person to whom that profit is requested because of the loan alone is not poor but rich, nor that he intends to use the loan in the most ultimate way to increase his fortune either by acquiring new properties, or by devoting himself to a very lucrative business, in the intention, always, not to let him rest.
In fact, he is convicted of acting against the law of the loan, which necessarily consists in the equality of the sum delivered and the sum returned, the one who, established that balance, dares to demand something more under the loan 4 The triple contract consisting of one of association and two of insurance.
81 to the person from whom he has already received satisfaction with the equality of his recmbolso.
That is why he is obliged to return everything he has received above capital, according to that obligation of so-called commutative justice, which consists of retaining * The triple contract consisting of one association and two insurance.
82 precisely in human contracts the equality of each of them, and in repairing it when it has not been respected.
This does not mean in any way to deny that in the loan contract other securities can sometimes be found, corno call them, that they are not intrinsic to the nature of the loan, nor congeners, under which an entirely just and legitimate cause arises to demand something above the capital owed by reason of the loan.
Nor is it denied that, by means of contracts of value very different from the loan, anyone has frequent opportunities to place and use their money fairly, either in income purchases, either by engaging in lucrative trade and business operations, in order to achieve irreproachable profits.
But, as in these many kinds of contracts, if the equality proper to each one of them is not observed, all that is perceived beyond the right, but not by usury, assuming that here it is not a patent or covert usurary loan, but by a true injustice of another nature, must obviously be restored; so it is also true that if everything is carried out as it should and as the balance of justice demands it, there is no doubt that in these sc contracts it contains a multiform way and a very lawful reason to continue and extend trade and all lucrative businesses, as practiced among men, for greater public good.
Do not allow Christian souls to be convinced that trade can flourish and prosper through usury and other similar iniquities.
On the contrary, it teaches us a divine oracle that “justice elevates the nations, and that sin makes the peoples miserable”.
But it must be noted that it would be vain and deplorable to be persuaded that anyone who has some legitimate securities in his favour alongside the same loan contract, or, without that contract, other kinds of perfectly fair contracts, can, by using those securities or those contracts, when he has delivered to another his money, his cereals or other such goods, take a moderate interest above the capital that returns to him saved and whole.
If someone thought so, he would not only disagree with the divine teachings and prescriptions of the Catholic Church regarding usury, but he would also go against the common sense of men and natural reason.
Indeed, to no one can escape that in many cases man is obliged to help his neighbor with a pure and simple loan; by what the Lord says: “Whoever borrows you, do not deny it.”
And on the other hand, there are a multitude of circumstances in which nothing can be done but a loan, and which do not give rise to any other legitimate contract.
Therefore, the one who seeks to act conscientiously, the first thing that must find out carefully cs if ticke, with cl loan that he wants to make, another title or other contract different from the loan, by means of which the profit that he desires is free of any fault.
4” This is how the cardinals, theologians, canonists, who asked for advice in this extremely serious matter, expressed their opinions.
We, for our part, have also applied our spirit to this very cause, before and after the sessions of the above - mentioned congregations.
To this end, we carefully examine the vote of the eminent men we have spoken of.
This being so, we approve and confirm all that is contained in the above decisions, because all the authors of theology, all the professors of canon law, various passages of the Holy Scriptures, the decrees of our predecessor popes, the authority of the councils and of the Fathers, conspire to confirm those same views.
In addition, we are perfectly acquainted with the authors who have held opposing opinions, as well as those who made their supporters, or who seemed to favor them or provide them with an opportunity.
We also do not know with what prudence and how seriously the theologians who were in the confines of the countries where these new disputes were born defended the truth.
5 Therefore we address this encyclical letter to all the Archbishops, Bishops and Ordinarys of Italy, in order that all these things may be perfectly known to you, to you venerable Brother, and to all our colleagues.
And whenever it happens to you to celebrate a synod, to address the word to the people, to instruct it in the sacred doctrine, do so that sc does not say anything that is contrary to the propositions that we set out above.
We also urge you to watch carefully, preventing anyone in your diocese from daring to act against what we have determined, whether with his 83 writings or with his words.
If anyone refuses to obey, we declare him subject and condemned to the penalties prescribed by the Holy Canons for those who despise and violate the apostolic commandments.
6% As for the contract itself that has caused the recent disputes, nothing to establish us in respect of it.
Nor do we decide anything about the other contracts that theologians and canon interpreters judge with diversity of views.
In the meantime, we refer to your piety and your zeal to execute the following: 7 First, show your people with very grave words that the vice and stain of usury are severely condemned in the Holy Scriptures; that that cursed vice takes different forms and aspects, to precipitate the faithful into the abyss of divine misfortune which the blood of Jesus Christ has rescued and whom he himself has established in grace and freedom.
So, when you wish to place your money, pay close attention not to be dragged away by greed, the source of all evils, and rather to seek counsel from those who excel among all by the brightness of their virtues and understanding.
8" Secondly, that those who have enough confidence in their own knowledge and discretion to dare to give an opinion on such matters, which demand not little theological and canonical science, avoid extremes, because they are always evil.
There are, in fact, some so full of severity, that any profit from money seems to them to be illicit and bordered with usury, Others, instead, inclined to indulgence, are so soft that they come to exempt from ignominy of usury any emoluments sought with money.
Let no one prefer his own particular feeling.
Before giving an answer, consider the views of the authors who enjoy the greatest credit.
And then adopt the opinion that seems best founded, in authority and reason.
If there is controversy over a new contract under review, any insult against supporters of an opposing opinion should be avoided, and no one should be allowed to harshly censor the new case, especially when there is no support for one's own opinion for powerful reasons and for superior men.
For grievances and insults alter the bonds of Christian charity, seriously offend the faithful people, and scandalize them.
9 Thirdly, those who want to be free from any reproach of usury, while giving their money to others with the intention of perceiving a legitimate fruit, warn that it is in their interest to consult the contract they intend to make, the conditions stipulated therein, and the interest that their purpose should produce.
With such conduct, they not only manage to cvitate inquitudes and scruples, but also make their contract irreproachable before the civil courts.
This also prevents the provocation of discussions, since it is made clear that money placed in appearance according to the appropriate rules does not involve a disguised usury.109 Fourthly, we urge you to impose silence on those who in inept speeches repeat out there that the question of usury is today a question of words, because, when someone comes out of his money, he almost always has some reason to draw interest.
It is easy to understand that these claims are absurd, and that they are far from the truth; it is enough to consider that the nature of a contract has nothing to do with the nature of another, and that the consequences of these different contracts differ between them as much as the contracts themselves.
Indeed, the difference between an interest that is fairly perceived from money placed, and placed in such a way that it is legitimate for both jurisdictions, and the interest that is unlawfully perceived from money, cannot be greater, and that the courts, both civil and ecclesiastical, will force restitution.
That is enough to prove that in our time the question of usury is not a vain question, on the pretext that an interest in the money that is placed is almost always earned.
119 Here is what we most especially wanted to say to you, trusting that you will hasten to do what is prescribed in this document.
We also hope that you will apply the appropriate remedies, if in the occasion of these new controversies on usury there will become disorder in your diocese, or sc hicicra prevail depraved opinions, capable of tarnishing the whiteness and purity of sound doctrine.
Apostolic blessing.
Finally, we agree with you, and with the flock entrusted to you, the 84 APPENDIX III On loan at interest In order to finish understanding the character of a regime in which the loan at interest was abolished, I think it is appropriate to reproduce some pages of the book Du Prétr a Interét 0u Des Causes Théologiques du Socialisme par M. V. Abhé Jules Morel, Lecoffre Fils et Cie., Paris, 1873 It says at p.
132: “Is it necessary to say, then, that the use of money, according to the Church system, should suppress Banking, State borrowings, financial corporations and in general everything that allows the movement of capital necessary for a domestic and foreign trade?
If you want to talk about the agiotage, the stock exchange, the speculations, everything that changes the trade at stake, everything that accelerates the competition to the end of replacing fever for health, yes, certainly the desire and legislation of the Church would put an insurmountable veto.
But if you want to talk about a regular, weighted and measured trade, compatible with the eternal goods to which we must come after having gone through the temporal goods, not: the Church, which is useful to everything, had understood all the profits, and has rushed to chart the way for it.
The first bankers of the world, chronologically speaking, were Italians, the bankers of Florence, Siena, Pisa, Genoa, Venice who respected the Christian faith and observed its morals.
But when the devil of profit wanted to degenerate the honest benefits of Christians into the Mammon of iniquity, then the vigilant papacy intervened to suppress all this cursed science from twists, credits, fictitious commands and from.
all these fictions that replace today's healthy reality.
St.Pius V has an admirable bull on the changes (In eam pronostro, 28 January 1571) some of whose paragraphs transcribe us here: <«And so having reached our ears that the legitimate use of the changes, introduced by necessity and public utility, was often depraved by the greed of illicit gain so that under its pretext usury was exercised, We judge that we should answer the questions that were recently asked to us, with this decree that is to be valid forever...
First of all we condemn all those changes called fictitious (0 dry) and that are made in such a way that the contractors simulate to make their changes in certain markets or other places, to whose places, those who receive the money, extend their letters of exchange but do not send them or send them in such a way that after the time they return empty to the place where they came from, or also when without extending any of these letters, the money is required, with their interest where the contract was concluded, because it had been so agreed from the beginning between the givers and the receivers or at least this was the intention and because there is no nadic in the above markets or places that makes the payment of the letters of exchange presented.
An evil similar to this is done when the money is delivered, as a deposit or with another simulated exchange name in order to be refunded with interest, in the same place or another.
But even in so-called real changes, it happens that money changers differ from the established payment deadline and demand an interest under an express or tacit agreement or under a simple promise.
All these things we declare usury and expressly prohibit them from being done.
For this reason, in order to suppress, as soon as we can, the chances of sinning that there are in the changes and frauds of the usurers, We decree that from now on no one dares, whether from the beginning it is otherwise, to agree a certain and determined interest, even in the case of insolvency, and that they can not make rcal changes but for the first markets, dondc sc make, and where they are not made for the first deadlines, following the approved use of the country, banishing entirely the abuse of making changes for markets that will come, second or later or for equally remote deadlines.
85 But it will still be necessary to ensure that when a change is made in the near term, account is taken of the remoteness or proximity of the places where the payment is made, so that there is no reason for usury if the payment period is longer than the geographical position of the cities where the payments are to be made is required."
All this is too superficial and evasive.
Let's take a closer look.
The Pontiff declares that the use of change is legitimate, that this use has been introduced by public necessity, but that on the occasion of the change illicit profits have been introduced, and in the course of the bull, he gives the explanation.
The change is according to its nature when it transports money from one place to another and when it procures the currency of another country where the trade is made, by the currency of the country to which the trader belongs.
And be it for this transport, be it for this change of numerary, the change is entitled to a legitimate gain.
But if instead of a real change or even with a real change you introduce delays of unnecessary payments to the change, but voluntarily consented, in order for the money to carry interest during this time span, you put usury in cl change and sc makes the change a sin.
It is therefore truly the commercial loan, with its infiinita varieties of form that condemns here St. Pius V.”
Later on”, Jules Morel studies how a trader or industrialist, or anyone in possession of productive goods, could obtain capital without going to the loan at interest, which is essentially bad and writes: “The rent is legitimate in itself since it is the revenue of a productive fund.
Rent a house, rent a country.
Therefore, if this income is sold for a capital that is its fair representation, a fair contract is made.
What proves in passing how false it is to say that the Church recognizes no value to the use of money as it condemns usury.
No way.
The Church perfectly admits that an owner abandons the right to the income of his field for an indefinite time.
However the sale of this rent is not the same as the sale of the countryside.
Indeed, if the field were sold the sale money would pass from the seller's hands that would lose not only the rent but the funds that produced this income; whereas in the contract in question, only the rent changes owner while the funds remain in the owner's hands.
The sale of the income is simply a loan on a property that produces interest.
But what to do to make this lucrative loan to the lender and oncrowd the borrower not sca ussurario?
Here shines the insight of St.Pius V, at the same time as his desire to meet all needs.
Where does the injustice of the usurer come from?
That he can set the time when the money will be returned to him with all the fruits produced during the interval.
Here, on the contrary, the capitalist will abandon his consistent capital, in the rent of making any use he wants without being able to tell him: the term has expired, pay!
Provision favourable to the borrower beginning to restore the balance between the borrower and the lender.
But there's even more.
What makes the borrower not to be fascinated by the brightness and comfort of capital, when he has changed the rent of his field for the possession of this seductive capital?
It is that he had in hand this income from which he has the pain of separating himself, while he who comes to the usurer does not separate himself from anything and takes everything that fascinates him and on the other hand this mortgaged rent on the field will be enough for the payment of the interests of the borrowed capital: what gives the borrower all his security and his freedom of action, while he is the holder of the capital.
.
Thus loss, but moderate loss of one party, which prevents fascination and abuse and by another neglect of the period in which the interest is to be paid, which keeps the man in possession of his freedom: such are the essential conditions of the constituted income; they restore the balance between the borrower and the lender.
* Du Prét a Iterét, p.
139 86 What a request of the Church for the weak.
But it's not all yet.
If the funds that maintain the perpetual income, perish for any greater cause, the borrower will be taxed with the income that must be paid when he does not have the instrument that produced it?
No.
From now on, he has no further obligation.
That's not all.
He who has lent the capital cannot take it back, unless for one reason or another the rent is not paid.
But he who has made the loan will never be able to rid his house or field of the mortgage that weighs on them?
If you can.
And so the bull of St.Pius V demands that the constituted income be recoverable by the borrower at the time he wants to repay the borrowed capital.
Thus the rights of the borrower, of the relatively weak, are defended by the Church against the omnipotence, fascination and tyranny of the capitalist.
But why is the rent not recoverable by the lender as by the borrower?
Because in such a contract the balance would be broken.
The borrower obliged to repay on a fixed term or what is worse at the will of the lender, would have but an oppressive, fictitious, unproductive use of the borrowed capital and would ultimately be a victim of the contract that he would have made to remedy his momentary distress or at least that it seemed such to him such are the conditions of the rent, decreed by the famous bull of St Pius V Cum onus apostolicos servitutis of 1569.
It is now seen that it puts a brake on the desire to borrow and on the desire to lend, double desire, that if it is not restrained it ruins the present and the future.
Do you want to borrow?, Yes, but you cannot contract on inconsistent and impalpable values such as your credit, your merit, the beautiful operations that you will carry out in the future, the magic of credit.
the game in a word in which you promise to win.
You cannot borrow but on a possession that you already have, which is the fruit of your sweats or of your elders, and within the limits of this possession.
You limit it and affect it to the payment of the capital that you will receive with interest.
You want to lend?
But you cannot do it without getting rid of your capital for an indefinite time that you cannot claim.
You want to lend?
But you can't do it without losing the right to rent, in case the mortgaged fund perishes by force majeure.
What would be the situation of the states, if they had followed these rules of St. Pius V?
In the case of public crises, to which families are subject to private crises, could they not make a counter-borrowing effort to ease the tax?
Pcro perfectly.
The states have properties, forests, castles, mines, etc. that hypothesize an income on these properties and that take on the borrowing.
They'll be liquidated later when better days come.
But will they be able to borrow without reason or measure following the fantasy of their spirit of conquests or disorderly ambition?
Will they be able to crush the generations to come, devour them by discount, ruin them in advance, unload themselves upon them as prodigal fathers upon their children?
No way.
You will not find healthy credit about the past, that is to say about savings, about what you earned, what you acquired in previous times.
Credit will not be made for a world that does not yet exist and that will be taken away by the means by which it could be released when it sees the light of day.
The Church has foreseen all this.
It has passed over the body of this prudent mother as it has passed over her commandments; confidence has been placed in a new political economy, forged in the head of philosophers; it has been fascinated by the magic of credit in a century in which the word magic causes laughter, as if it were something exclusive to the zonzos and as everyone is confounded by this magic, everyone wants to lend and the State seeks only borrowings and it would be no wonder that France raised its debt to fifty thousand and that all its borrowings were covered.
They have rightly mocked Louis XV, the most miserable of the kings of the old regime, and behold, democracy imitates its overflows by saying like him: After me the flood!
Estc book by Jules Morcl, published in 1873, cs literally a prophecy of what was to occur in our century with the loan at interest.
Here is the translation of chapter XIV, entitled: “The abolition of interest would bring us back the golden age”.
87 “Let’s now say the relationship between the stock market’s weaknesses and the Church’s doctrine of lending at interest.
First of all, the securities traded on the stock market are of interest in their entirety.
As a result, the abandonment of interest alone would constitute a serious impediment to stock exchange operations.
However, there would still be the negotiation of the shares representing an operating industry.
Could not the rise and fall be applied to those values, even if they were deprived of the stipulation of interest that they now entail?
In this respect we will note that interest, such as the increase and decrease of shares, is also based on a single basis: the advance assessment of the benefits that it could obtain, either with the money I lend you and while you retain it, already sca, with my share of propicity in such a factory that it is or that it will be in activity, but that it has not yet paid off because it has not finished a first exercise or because it has not yet begun a new exercise.
Since a value is not put into circulation if it is not relying on the rise; and the decline is only the first failure of that hope.
All value thrown, is thrown up.
Where it turns out that all interest and all stock exchange trading are based on the /ucrum cessans applied to a probability, to a possibility of profit that someone is deprived to pass it on to another.
And as that gain may exist, but it does not yet exist, it is called with much property, it does not buy, but speculation; and as speculation overlaps speculation, even clouds, that gain, increasingly random, becomes agio, a game of unbridled stock exchange, all or nothing, to conclude in the millions or suicide.
That inverted pyramid rests, therefore, as at its tip, on the sale of the lucurum cessans.
On it oscillates, seeking a balance that cannot be preserved.
But what, once again, is that /ucrum cessans that has produced such extraordinary and unexpected effects for its own inventors?
It is no less than that external title than the genius — really incomprehensible — of St. Thomas of Aqui-no, of the more angelic than human doctor, did not admit at any price; for the lucrum cessans sold what he did not yet have, and what he could well, for many reasons, not have, being precisely those an-sidences the motives of the rise and the fall: Rewardem vero damni quod consideratur in hoc quod de pecunia sua non Lucratur, non potest in pactum deducere, quia non debet selle id quod non dum habet et potest preventi multipliciter ab habbendo.
Therefore, if it is forbidden, as it is effectively forbidden, to exploit the Jucrum, cessans, to sell what is not yet owned, which may never come to own, there is no more interest, no speculation, no bitter competition, no Stock Exchange; the businesses are all carried out with constant money.
Scrambled the pandemonium, demons run away.
In three prophetic lines, St.Thomas denounces the injustice on which the entire nineteenth-century economy rests, and the revolutions that come from there as a necessary consequence.
Lord Jesus, what a man you had given to your Church in that beautiful 13th century, the last of the temporal splendor of your Bride!
How well is the addition of that doctor to your Gospels, in the midst of the councils!
Let's get back to things on earth.
The worker is exploited by the employer, even if he is a human being, even if he sometimes has the guts of brother and father toward his worker.
But the employer is undemanding to be indeed paternal, brotherly, or humanitarian, because in turn he suffers from the exploitation of rabid competition created by the loan at interest, and shaken by the Stock Exchange to delirium.
The pa-tron cannot be good to the worker: his profits are disputed by a crowd of visible and invisible enemies; and he has lost his religion.
He has abandoned religion, because he has less time than the worker.
If the arms of this one work almost seven days a week, a chaos of worries and anxieties obsess the head of that one, during the same time.
The appeasement of society, the decline.
Therefore, they depend on the restoration of the law of Sunday rest and the law against usury.
Anything you want to do outside of that, it'll be worth so much as opposed to the fall of a big building.
Every man who works, or who forces another man to work on Sunday, would deserve to be stoned, as in the people of God: and every man who lends himself to interest, would deserve the same penalty.
Two are the commandments, and both form one: the love of God and the love of one's neighbor.
The highest expression of the first is the sanctification of Sunday; and the highest expression of the second is the renunciation of usury.
88 We already take it for granted that objections will be ignored, and we are prepared.
It would be very desirable for all trade to be done in cash; but that is simply impossible.
The colossal companies of finance and industry, that this century is becoming obsolete, could no longer be realized, since, having eliminated interest and the stock market, there would no longer be a machine that had the power to aspire to capital.
— That is true; but what harm would it be if colossal companies were replaced by sensible companies?
There would be no way to feed cities of one, two and three million inhabitants.
- God forbid!
Is it necessary for people to have these monstrous heads?
They need to stop having them.
Large-scale industrial cities are always the cities of greatest anarchy.
Look at your universal exhibition of Paris, followed immediately by the Commune; and how all the kings who had come to visit our industrial wonders in his crowded palace returned so soon to visit his desert palace.
It should also be noted here that the city of Lion, which was the first to practice usury in France, is today the most socialist city.
Anyway, how will it be done when you can no longer find money at interest?
— It will be saved.
There will be a revolving fund, which will have its guarantee in a reserve fund.
— Okay; but someone may need a loan, and no one will want to lend without interest, other than to a poor person, and as little as possible.
- It's true. - So?
— Then whoever is in need of money, and is not poor, will sell a small or large rent on his goods.
These goods will pay interest by usufruct, as long as they exist, like all real goods that are perishable; and only that which sold the rent.
You have the right to rescue her whenever you want and when you can.
St. Pius V, another universal genius, witness to the heightenings of commerce, had offered this Catholic recourse to the Transatlantic Navy transactions that needed them.
But the buyer of the rent will not be able to demand its repayment in capital; and that is what constitutes its profound difference with that it lends to interest on pledge contract, and what restores the commutative justice in this kind of transactions.
You will still have one more facility to find capital, if you are probos and skillful, the only two qualities that deserve it.
There is no one who wants to lend free to the rich, yet everyone will want to make their money bear fruit.
It will therefore try to place it, and this can be done through the company contract.
Legitimate society, of which the interested ones will take great care, because in it the profits and losses are shared: Cum periculo ipsius mutualis mercator de ea pecunia negocio-tur, vel artifex operatur, says the admirable Saint Thomas.
No one will have the privilege of escaping the conditions of all earthly goods, which are by nature subject to human accidents; and thus profits will be legitimate.
You talk a lot about the association of capitals: there is the only verda-dera and good association.
But that association by lending to interest that wants to make the goods of the land safe for one of the parties, permanent goods like eternal goods, goods endowed with a necessary growth, that go and return without any anxiety, that come out skinny and return fat, from generation to generation, goods inaccessible to the calamities shared by the other men; do you not see where you will end up with those goods that seize everything, that absorb everything, that devour the substance of the human race?
You create kings who will not only reign, who will not rule only from the top of that unique domain that the potentates possess over the having of the subjects, translated into taxes; you will have the new kings of finance, who becoming the arbiters of your private fortune, the true owners of your particular properties, will give their domination a hideous breadth.
The world of usury, with the present centralization, will, without thinking about it, resemble that Egypt of Joseph's time, where there was only one owner, Pharaoh, to whom it was necessary to ask permission to eat the bread and move his hand or foot.
The question of usury is the question of earthly life.
After the issue of salvation, there is no other major issue in the universality of: human interests.”
89 APPENDIX 1V Note on the Jewish Question of Jaques Maritain, reproduced in Criterion (9 August 1934).
The Jewish question offers two aspects: political-social and spiritual or theological.
1 - From the first point of view, the dispersion of the Judaic nation in the midst of the Christian peoples weighs a singularly delicate problem.
Many Jews by the way (and proved it at the price of blood in the Great War) are truly assimilated to their homelands of choice; the mass of the Israelite people is separated; reserved, by virtue of the providential decree which makes it, throughout history, the witness of Golgotha.
To the extent that it is so, let it be expected of the Jews rather than a real attachment to the common good of Western and Christian civilization.
It should be added that a people by Messianic essence like the Jewish people, from the moment the true Messiah refuses, will play fatally in the world a role of subversion, I do not say because of the preconceived plan, but because of a metaphysical necessity, which makes the Messianic Hope and the passion of absolute Justice, transposed from the supernatural plane to the natural plane and applied in false, the most active ferment of revolution.
That is why, just as Darmsteter and Bernard Lazare frankly recognized him, it is given to find Jews, Jewish mangoes, Jewish spirit, at the origin of almost all the great modern revolutions.
I do not insist on the enormous role played by Jewish and Zionist financiers in the political evolution of the world during the war and in the elaboration of what was called peace.
Hence the obvious need for a public health struggle against secret ju-deomasonic societies and against cosmopolitan finance; hence the need for a number of general preservation measures, which were certainly easier to excogitate at the time when civilization was officially Christian (see this point in Mgr.
Deploige sobre Saint Thomas et la question juive y un estudio de La Tour du Pin “La question juive et la revolution sociale”) but which do not seem impossible to supply, today especially when Zionism, creating a Jewish State in Palestine, seems to place the Jews in the obligation to choose, some for French, English, Italian, German nationality, etc.:... (and they must refuse all league with the Jewish political body); the others for, the Palestinian nationality, whether they go there to reside, whether they remain at the status of foreigners in other countries.
I call only attention to the following two points: 1* The measures I speak of are, by nature, measures of governmental authority, and if in fact to obtain them it is necessary to resort to public opinion, it is our duty of Catholic writers to enlighten it and help it to reason these things without hatred, keeping the intellectual discipline that is due.
Popular passions and “progroms” have never solved any question, much the contrary.
2".
- The Jewish question should not serve as a referral to the discontent and disappointments of the present hour, so that “THE JUDIO” appears in a sort of simplistic mythology as the only cause of the evils we suffer.
Whether it be ideas, men, or institutions, there are others guilty, and especially it would be very comfortable for us to strike our “mea culpability” at the back of the Jews, when the faults and infidelities of Christians have the first rank among the causes of universal disorder.
119 - The second aspect of the Jewish spiritual or theological question, which concerns the vocation of the Jewish people, I will emphasize, since it is very careless.
As anti-Semitic as it may be in the other view, a Catholic writer (me parcec evidente) owes to his fc the guard of all hatred and all contempt for the Jewish race and religion of Israel, themselves considered.
The Church prays with the psalms of David; she is the direct heir of the Old Testament and its Saints.
As degenerate as the carnal Jews may be, the race of the Prophets, of the Virgin, of the Apostles, the race of Christ is the trunk in which we were grafted.
Let us recall chapter 11 of the Epistle to the Romans: 91 “If the rejection of them was to reconcile the world — what will be its return, but a rise from the dead?...
“If some of the branches were cut and you, bitter olive, instead grafting — taking part in the root and juice of the olive tree, — don’t blaspheme much against the branches”...
For if you olive bitter against nature you were cut and grafted — against nature in the wild olive tree — with more reason the native branches one day in the olive tree itself”...
The more the Jewish question becomes politically acute, the more necessary it is that the way we treat it is provided for the divine drama that it evades.
It is intolerable that Catholic writers speak in the same tone as Voltaire of the Jewish race, the Old Testament, Moses and Abraham.
Above and beyond that, two important facts, which I would like to point out in conclusion, are now being brought to our attention.
1.
- The first is the relative number.
great (and in any case truly impressive) Jews who, of some time has, convert to the faith (I speak of sincere conversions and not of certain collective conversations in Poland or Hungary).
Never has the religious consciousness of the Jews seemed so honestly moved.
2.
- The second fact is the extraordinary fervor of prayers for Israel that exists today in the Church and whose fruits are precisely those conversions.
The story of the two Ratisbonne brothers, converted, is well known.
Theodore in 1827; Alfonso miraculously in 1842, for an apparition of the Virgin.
This appearance and conversion are related in the?
* Maitines' lesson of the Feast of the Miraculous Medal (27 Nov.).
Theodore Ratisbone founded in 1847 the Congregation of N. S. of Zion, whose own object is the conversion of the Jews, which has gained considerable increase.
In 1905 an association of prayers was founded in Paris for the conversion of the Jews which Pius X erected in 1909 and which then numbered 36,000 adherents.
Here is now a less known and very significant fact.
Towards the end of 1869, at the Vatican Council, the two converted Israeli priests Lemann made, as Cardinal Coullé wrote, “a bold attempt in appearance, but immensely moving: to provoke a witness of sympathy of the Holy Church of Jesus Christ in favor of the remains of Israel, and to demand for all prayers for their reintegration.”
Tenderly animated by Pius IX, they wrote a Postulatum pro Hebracis that presented to the Fathers of the Council, gathered 510 episcopal signatures.
“All the Fathers of the Council,” adds Mgr.
Elie Blanc, they would have signed without exception if the two brothers, for a delicate feeling of deference, had not wanted to yield the honor of the majority of signatories to the Postulatum pro Infallivitate that had collected 533.
Only the interruption of the Council by war prevented the discussion of this Postulatum.”
In short, the idea launched in London in 1918 of novenas of Masses for the conversion of Israel has prospered singularly.
In France only 510 Masses were said in 1920, more than 1000 in 1921.
On February 27, 1920, this initiative received the approval of His Holiness Benedict XV, who promised to offer himself the holy sacrifice for the conversion of Israel in the ninth high school for the Feast of the Sacred Heart.This is how the Church, despite this kind of sacred horror for the “perfidy” of the Synagogue that prevents her from bending her knees when she prays for the Jews on Good Friday, continues to repeat among us the great cry “Father, forgive them” of the Crucified One.
It seems to me that there is an indication there that Catholic writers cannot discard.
As much as they must denounce and fight the depraved Jews who carry, together with the apostate Christians, the anti-Christian Revolution, so much must be kept from closing the door of the Kingdom before good will, before the “Israelites, of which N. Lord speaks, in whom there is no fraud.”
Charity towards one must not hinder justice due to the other, and vice versa.
This is an eminent case in which it is necessary for us to unite in the integration of Christian life, which is not easy, two virtues opposed in appearance: the just defense of the interests of the republic and the supernatural love for every man, even for the enemies of the republic, love without which we do not deserve to call ourselves Christians and which is self-control, not of “Catholic internationalism”, but of “supranational catholicity”.
Jacques MARITAIN (De La Vie Spirituelle, tom.
4, p. 4.
304) 92 NOTES * (1) Although Luther personally opposed the spirit of acquisition of wealth (see Werner Sombart, Le Bourgeois, chap.
XX), with all Protestantism, because of the fact of being drawn away from the supernatural influence of the Church, carried in its entrails the spirit of profit, which is of the essence of capitalism.
This is why Luther's disciples, especially Calvin and the Puritans, updated these germs deposited in the essence of the Reformation.
Max Weber and Troeltsch have historically studied the influence of the Calvinist Reformation on the formation of capitalism.
Suffice to quote Henri Sée, Les Origines du Capitalisme moderne.
Colin, 1930, p. 3.
46 and 47).
“On the other hand, the religious Reformation, the Calvinist above all, will contribute uniquely to the triumph of the modern conception of capitalism, which has been well evidenced by two German sages, Max Weber and then Troeltsch.
Calvin’s doctrine, as far as lending with interest is concerned, is absolutely contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, since it does not establish hierarchy between the “spiritual” and the “temporal”; it considers labor praiseworthy, the serious exercise of the profession, and therefore the acquisition of wealth as legitimate.
From this point of view, his sc doctrine resembles the Jewish conception, of which we will have to examine the consequences later.
Individualism, which characterizes the Calvinist Reformation, is well matched with the individualism of the capitalist centers in formation in the sixteenth century, and it is a very remarkable fact that cities like Lyon, and above all Antwerp, have been won so strongly for the new religious ideas It will be seen later that it is precisely Puritans, like Jews, who are among the most active agents of modern capitalism.”
(2) Max Scheler, in his essay The Resentment in Morality (Translation of German by José Gaos) (p.
208-212) deeply exposes this uneconomical character of modern civilization that produces to infinity pleasant things that produce no one's enjoyment.
“Modern asceticism is revealed in the fact that the enjoyment of the pleasant, to which everything useful refers, experiences a progressive displacement until, finally, the pleasant subordinates to the useful Also here, the motive that drives the modern man, a supporter of work and usefulness, is resentment against the superior ability to enjoy, against the superior art to enjoy; it is hatred and envy against the richest life, which always generates a capacity for richer enjoyment.
Thus it inverts the value of the pleasant and its enjoyment with respect to how useful it is but the “relationship” with something pleasant, turning the pleasant into an “evil”.
It establishes a very complicated mechanism for the production of pleasant things, putting at its service an incessant work without paying attention at all to the final enjoyment of these pleasant things.
And since this work at the service of what is useful, in the form of an unlimited impulse, has been psychologically born of a limited capacity for enjoyment, and since, moreover, the existing capacity for enjoyment is being consumed more and more, it turns out that those who do the most useful work and the more take over the external means necessary for enjoyment, are the ones who are least able to enjoy; and instead, the richer groups of life those who precisely the desire to enjoy does not allow them to go through the work of others, increasingly lack the means that must be added to their ability to enjoy in order to engender a real enjoyment.
With this, modern civilization receives the tendency not to let anyone take advantage of the infinite cluster of pleasant co-sas it produces.
And we ask: To what does this infinite production of pleasant things come, if the type that is exhausted in producing and possesses them is the one that, by nature, cannot enjoy them while the one that could enjoy them does not possess them?
With the same vehemence with which pleasant things are produced without ceasing by spending ever more intensity and energy in this activity and even sacrifices of vital force, with the same vehemence the enjoyment of these things so painfully produced are rejected, considering it as “bad”.
This gives modern civilization a specifically “comic” and “grotesque” aspect.
Ancient asceticism forged the ideal of getting the maximum enjoyment of the pleasant with the least possible number of pleasant things and, above all, useful things.
He wanted to elevate the ability to extract supreme joys, even from the simplest and most accessible things, everywhere, from Nature, etc. and the mandamicnts of voluntary poverty, obcdience, chastity, contemplation of the world and of 93 divine things had the consequence of this elevation; so that, with few pleasant things and in particular useful “pleasant mechanisms” were reached the same degrees of enjoyment that a weaker life can reach only by means of useful only a means of obtaining enjoyment, it is a greater number of such things.
Being the useful thing only a means of obtaining enjoyment it is clear that who with a minimum amount of pleasant things can enjoy as much as another with a greater amount, it is the one who possesses the maximum capacity to enjoy.
Wanting it or not, ancient asceticism raised the capacity for enjoyment, and therefore life.
Modern asceticism has developed an ideal that is, in its ethical sense, the exact antithesis of the ancient: the ideal of minimum enjoyment with a maximum of pleasant and useful things.
That is why we see that where work has acquired the greatest proportions (e.g. in Berlin, and generally in the northern German metropolis), the ability and art to enjoy has fallen to the lowest degree imaginable.
The multitude of pleasant stimuli justly kills the function and cultivation of enjoyment, and the more ubiquitous, cheerful, noisy and attractive the outline sc hacc, the sadder the inside of man is usually.
Very joyful things contemplated by very sad men, who do not know what to do with them; such is the “sense” of our culture, of this culture of pleasure and of the great cities.
* (5) Holy Scripture in countless passages condemns usury.
The psalmist asks, "Who will dwell in your heavenly tabernacle, O Lord, or who will rest in your holy mountain?"
The one who does not give his money to usury (Ps 14:5).
Ezekiel (22,12) reproaches Israel for practicing usury and in another passage (18,8) says: A man who will not lend usury or receive more than he borrowed, nor receive usury or interest... this one will live happily.
Exodus (22,25) If you lend money to the needy of my people who dwell with you, you will not reward them as an exactor, nor oppress them with usury.
Leviticus (25,35-37) If your brother were impoverished, and unable to avail himself, receive him as a stranger and a pilgrim, and live with you, do not charge usury from him or more than you lent.
Thou shalt not give him thy money, and of the groceries thou shalt not require him an increase over that which thou hast given him.
Deuteronomy (23,19) You will not lend money or grain or anything else to your brother, but only to foreigners.
But you must lend to your brother without usury.
With regard to charging an interest on /ucrum cessans or deprivation of making a profit with-testa St.Thomas (I-II, q.
78, a.
2, ad 1) that it is not lawful to provide compensation to reward the loss that is considered not to profit from the money borrowed since it cannot sell what atn does not have and whose possession can be prevented by a multitude of causes.
St.Thomas admits no other legitimate title that the damnum emerges, that is, when by the fact of lending one suffers loss in his assets as the one who by lending his money cannot repair the house in time and then suffers the damage of its collapse.
In this case, it can justly demand compensation.
But it does not admit the title that is called the /ucrum cessans.'
(4) “In a recent work entitled Les Miraceles du Crédit, M. E. Mireaux, director of the “Temps” has formulated the following law, applicable to our entire modern banking system: “The volume of bank deposits depends, with respect to a given issue of currency, on the proportion between payments with cheques and payments with species”.
The longer the use of the cheque is extended, the more abundant the credits made available to the bankers are accordingly.
Having explained the theoretical reasons for this law, M. E. Mireaux gives his proof drawn from the observed facts.
From 1924 to 1929, American fiduciary circulation has remained almost unchanged; however, because of the development of the use of the cheque, and only for this reason, the mass of means of payment, made available to the American economy, in the form of credits, has increased by 13 million dollars, that is, by 29 percent.
Increase in bank credits in the United States, due to the generalization of the June 1924 cashier's cheque, $45.3 billion.
94 June 1929, $58.5 billion.
Difference in excess: $13.2 billion.
Thus, in five years, the credit power of American banks has increased by thirteen billion dollars.
The technicians have tried to calculate the substantial reality represented by this enormous accumulation of credits.
The calculations refer to the second half of 1928: In the United States, total monetary availabilities (currency or bank credits) amounted to more than 57 billion dollars.
With the gold lace of the issuing banks was just a little over three billion dollars, the gold cover of the paper and credit dollars turned out to be only 6.5 percent.
Scis dollars and a half gold thus serve as a guarantee to 100 dollars currency or bank credits.
The American monetary system can be represented as a pyramid resting on its cusp.
In England, the coverage of circulation paper currency and currency credit was slightly higher: 7.53 per 100.
In France, where the check is relatively underutilized, the gold cover was 24 per 100.
Even if the use of the cheque has increased in the proportions we have mentioned above the possibilities of credit expansion, the bankers have not declared sc satisfied with that.
The city of London has managed to admit that the credits or currencies of gold standard countries, which, as we have just seen, often represent no more than 6 or 7 per 100 precious metal, could serve as a guarantee, with the same title as gold, to the monetary circulation issued by the Institutes of issue of the continent.
Thus, a title representing a credit for more than 80 per cent of its value should serve as a guarantee for a currency issue, which is itself a source of new credit.
This doctrine, known as the Gold Exchange Standard, and put into effect on the world economy.”
Pierre Lucius, Failite du Capitalisme?, Payot, Paris, 1932, pp.
69-72.
And (5) The curious thing is that the contradiction of the golden monetary regime sows such appalling instability that it tends to exceed itself until it ends in suicide.
You want to exterminate gold as a monetary sign.
The monetary theories of Irving Fisher (Eilusion de la monnaie), Keynes J. M. (Monetary Reform), Cassel Gustav (Das Stabilizierug un Problem oder der Weg zu einer feasten Geldwesen), and more explicitly Sylvain Asch (Monnaie et Finance) seem to claim this.
Exterminate gold would be replaced by a paper coin, which would be the purely monetary expression, value-sign of the amount of natural wealth.
It is difficult to foresee whether this path is a way to reconquer the sense of money, pure instrument, as Aristotle and St.Thomas wanted, or instead, the supreme attempt of the modern world, world that ultimately rests only on a piece of paper, to disassociate itself from the gold by which it is still attached to the sensitive reality.
However, it is interesting to note that this solution would almost coincide with what is taught by “The Protocols of the Highs of Zion”, Act No. 20, when they relate the monetary policy that the Jews, once owners of the world, would follow.
And (6) The documentation provided by Werner Sombart on the identification of the loan to interest and Jews is very interesting: “But there is, on the other hand, a circumstance also relative to the wealth of the Jews that requires some clarification.
It is the vast employment that the Jews made of their money in view of the loan.
This particular employment, very frequent and very widespread (the evidence that we have of it allows us to affirm it with certainty), is clearly one of the factors that has contributed the most to preparing the advent of capitalism.
If the Jews reveal themselves in every sense fit to favor the capitalist evolution of the economy, this is due by the way, and it can even be said first of all to the function of lending95 mounds of money (large and small) that they had assumed; for from the loan of money capitalism has been born.
It is that the money loan already contains in germ the fundamental idea of capitalism, which owes to the loan of money its most important characters.
On the money loan, the contract beam of.
trade has become an essential element: the negotiation that aims at service and reciprocity, the promise that compromises the future, and the idea of provision constitute its content.
Any idea of subsistence is removed from the loan stop.
The act of the loan is stripped of any concrete character (“technical”), it is an economic act of a purely spiritual nature.
In the lending of money, the economic activity itself ceases to have any meaning: the one who merely lends money renounces all rational activity of the body and spirit.
So the value of this occupation sc is displaced: clla is entirely, not in the occupation itself, but in its result.
Only the result still makes sense.
In the money loan for the first time appears the possibility of earning money otherwise than with the sweat of the forehead, of making others work, without resorting to coercion 0 to violence.
It is visible that all these particular characters of the money loan are not, properly speaking, but the particular characters of the economic organization as it exists in the capi-talist system.”
(Werner Sombart, Les Juifs et la Vie Economique, Payot, 1923, Pp.
247-48).
It is also interesting to highlight the Jewish influence through the Protestant Reformation, its immediate bond.
Thus says Werner Sombart himself: “Several times I have said that it is Max Weber’s studies on the role of Puritanism in the development of capitalism that have encouraged me especially to undertake my research on Judaism, especially since reading his studies had acquired the conviction that the fundamental ideas of Puritanism, those that have had an essential importance for the development of capitalism, are already expressed much more strongly and emphasized in the Jewish religion, which, of course, has their priority.
It is impossible for me to demonstrate here, with all the evidence of the case, the accuracy of my view: I would need to confront the results to which I have come throughout this long chapter with the fundamental ideas of Puritanism, such as they have been exposed by Weber.
It seems to me, however, that such a confrontation would bring about a complete agreement between the Jewish conceptions and the Puritans, at least with regard to the main points examined in this chapter: the preponderance of religious interests, the idea of reward, the rationalization of life, the “intra-world” asceticism, the intimate mixture of religious representations and material interests, the calculating conception of the problem of sin and many other features are also found in both cases.”
“Puritanism is nothing but Judaism.
I believe that, after Weber's and mine research, affinity, and even more: the spiritual identity that exists between them will not be difficult to establish.
It would be a little difficult to answer the question of whether Puritanism had suffered from the outside influence of the Jewish religion and, if so, what such influence might have been.
The close links that, at the time of the Reformation, had been established between Judaism and some Christian sects, and the fever that had then been declared by the Hebrew language and Judaic studies, are known more particularly that, in 17th century England, Puritans surrounded Jews with an almost fanatical cult.
Not only were the religious conceptions of such influential figures as Oliverio Cronwell inspired from one end to the other in the Old Testament, without Cronwell himself dreaming of a reconciliation between the Old Testament and the New and with an intimate union between the Jews, God’s chosen people, and the Anglo-Puritan religious community.... “It is equally established that the clergy and the Christian laymen of the time read assiduously not only the Old Testament but also rabbinic literature.
It is therefore natural to admit that Puritan doctrines come directly from Jewish doctrines.
We leave the Church historians the task of.
to establish this fact with all the necessary clarity.”
96 (Idem, Idem, Pp.
320-22) The loan at the interest and conduct of the Church We will point out in this note what, except for the best criteria, has to be thought with regard to the Church's conduct regarding the loan at interest.
1* - Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the Church always condemned any perception of interest in the money borrowed, unless extrinsic titles to the same loan, such as consequent damage authorized the claim of a reward.
The last summit document on the subject is Benedict XIV's famous bull Vix pervenit, which is reproduced here in appendix, and in which the Holy Father condemns the perception of any interest, no matter how little it may be, and even if the money borrowed is to be used in productive works.
2" - By Calvinist and Puritan influences as Max Weber and Werner Sombart (Les Juifs et la vie économique) have shown, the loan at interest was introduced and generalized in the economic relations of Europe until it was promulgated in the Constituent Assembly of the French Revolution, after a long debate.
With this economic life reached a very different pace from that achieved in previous times, so that authors such as Werner Sombart (the cited work) and Henry Sée (Les origines du Capitalisme) do not hesitate and, with reason to my mind, to attribute to the loan interest, as for the first reason, the wonderful development of the modern economy.
3* - As the pace of economic life varied, the chances of making the money productive multiplied so that practically the money could be considered productive.
Then it seemed logical that anyone who lent money should also demand that benefit which was as connatural to the money itself and which was represented by the legal fee.
There was then a sufficient title, namely, the deprivation of that benefit as a connatural to money, so that every lender would demand an interest.
For this reason the Church with great wisdom allows in this hypothesis of the modern economy, that Christians perceive the ordinary interest of borrowed money and thus orders that those who perceive interest (Pio VIII, 18 August 1830) and the Code of Canon Law, Canon 1543, should not be disturbed: “If one expendable thing is given to another to be his and then be restored in the same quality, no gain can be received by reason of the same contract; but in the provision of a Jfungible thing it is not his illicit, to receive the profit authorized by law, unless it is stated that it is immoderate, and even a greater profit, if there is a just and proportionate title.”
4% - The Church's conduct is completely uniform and consistent with the legislation on interest lending.
If it seems to have changed, it is because the economic conditions have changed and then the same doctrine is applied differently.
5 - Since the present book is not a code of morality in which it indicates how to behave, Christians in the current economic life to neither sin, but is a philosophical-theological analysis of the current economic life itself, of the present economic hypothesis, I try to study in itself the loan at interest that forms the heart of Capitalism, to conclude that the modern world, by introducing the Puritan-Calvinist theory of Loan in interest in the economy, has made a huge mistake because it has sanctioned an injustice that in the long run must be nefarious.
Indeed the loan at interest, that is to say the perception of an interest under the loan, is in itself unjust as Saint Thomas has shown and as the Church still now maintains it (See Genicot, Institutions Theologie Moralis, edit.
undecimal, vol. I, p. 3.
530) and it must be harmful, because although it greatly develops economic life, this development does so for the benefit of a privileged minority and at the expense of the social body; from where it must end in an economy convulsed by a terrible and universal social struggle.
6* - From where I believe that the modern economic hypothesis, in which the interest loan is in effect, must disappear, if you want a healthy economy.
We simply have to go back to the non-capitalist economy.
(See Abate Jules Morel's paragraphs in appendix.)
The Church today refrains from making judgment on this hypothesis of an economic regime, with the interest loan by essence or engine.
Assuming the existence of the hypothesis, it authorizes the perception of interest because there are extrinsic securities to the same loan, which justify it.
In my view, the hypothesis of modern economy, with the interest loan by essence or engine, is evidently contrary to the doctrine of the Church as set out by St.Thomas in his articles on usury.
My thesis is not new because it has been defended by the sociological school in Vienna, with Vogelsan, and by La Tour du Pin.
7" - Supposed to be these observations, certain phrases which in the hypothesis of modern economy may seem false or exaggerated should not be broken down from the book.
The phrases must be read in the context within the logic with which the thought unfolds.
So e.g.
when I say (p.
139) “if the money is borrowed, the interest that the capital claims properly is a theft”, should not be understood under the current economic conditions, where the money has become productive and where, therefore, there is an extrinsic title to the same loan to claim interest; but must be understood by examining the internal concept of the loan and by taking into account an economic organization in which the currency had no other purpose than to be a mere instrument of exchange.
When it is read on page 138: “Capital is not entitled to any interest”, the word interest must be understood not as profit or profit, but as a fixed term yield that was due to capital, by virtue of an infallible breeding of any currency.
The hypothesis that there is an extrinsic title to the loan to claim it is therefore ruled out.
8* - In summary that the entire chapter of Finance should be read taking into account that the present book seeks to indicate guidelines to which a social economic regime based on Christian social principles should be adjusted and in no way pretends to be a directive for cases of consciousness that can be offered to those acting in modern cognitive life.
E 98