The Catholic Case for Communism

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I’m sure they’ll reward him with his very own labor camp when Canada falls.
 
Not only is it indefensible for a Catholic magazine to have published this, it wasn’t even a quality piece. If you’re going to cross a line, why do it in such a shoddy, sub-par way?

The article addressed none of the arguments against its thesis, no directly relevant texts of the Magisterium, made no natural law arguments, etc. It basically just said that liberal capitalism has led to suffering in various cases (which is true) therefore communism is the right alternative (glossing over the suffering communism has inflicted). His whole argument amounts to some quotes of Dorothy Day–who rejected communism root and branch–saying some nice things about the motivations of some communists.

The Church’s social teaching, especially those letters of Pius XI (Divini Redemptoris and Quadragesimo anno of special note) thoroughly address this lame argument (including the real problems that lead to people of good will being deceived by communists) yet the author ignores it all.
 
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Coming soon to Amerika Magazine:
The Catholic Case for Nazism
The Catholic Case for Apartheid
The Catholic Case for the Ku Klux Klan
The Catholic Case for the Rwandan Genocide
The Catholic Case for Pedophilia, Pederasty and other Differently Ordered Sexual Orientations
 
Cannibalism during the famines in the Ukraine (the state would put up mocking posters saying that it was a crime for parents to eat their children), cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution in China, cannibalism in Cambodia under Pol Pot . . .

Is there a Catholic case for cannibalism? Who does Catholicism say ought to be killed and then eaten?
 
Yes, perhaps, given the completely absent-minded, thoughtless, and irresponsible nature of the article.

By the way, the enormous communist mass-murders in the Ukraine are known as the Holodomor. I was having a senior moment at the time and couldn’t remember that word.
 
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snarflemike said:
Read “The Gulag Archipelago” and you will never, never be the same.
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There is a YouTube version. I agree with you completely, you cannot read/listen to this literature without realizing how devoid of humanity and sanity this ideology was and how oppressive and authoritarian it needs to be in order to stay in power.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1 of 7

Warning : It is a long hard and even depressing piece of literature, but that reflects the subject matter and it is illuminating.
 
I did read it. It is filled with half truths. I will give an example. From the article.
Something like this is paralleled in “The Communist Manifesto,” when Marx and Engels underscore that abolishing private property means abolishing not personal property, or the kinds of things an artisan or farmer might own, but the amassed property held by the rich, which divides human beings into antagonistic classes of people—in other words, the kind of private property that most of us do not have.
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Now lets see what Marx actually wrote:
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
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Marx never said that the property of artisans and farmers would not be destroyed, he just said that was not needed because it did not exist. What he did say, quite explicitly:
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
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Now, there is no doubt that Marx was mainly referring to bourgeois private property, but we cannot assume he did not mean all property which can generate wealth. Indeed, would we argue that Marx did not intend to eliminate the property of the nobility?

And, we as a final analysis the actions of the communists themselves. The very first thing they did, in every country they took over was the collectivization of farms. And never did they limit their collectivization to just the large land-owners, they always included the private plots of the small peasants. Time and time again, they took what ever land the peasants had for themselves, and only allowed them to have back small amounts of land years later as a means to try to allieviate the problems with collectivization.

I could point out other half-truts in the article, but I won’t take the time. I will say that the author unfairly criticizes Dorthy Day for her stance against communism also.

I certainly undertand the dangers in society of concentration of wealth. Indeed, one of the dangers is communism itself.
 
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Yes, the article conveniently ignores the Church’s actual pronouncements against communism, the reasons for those condemnations. Indeed, it does not make a “Catholic Case” for communism, it simply argues for communism.

It also ignores (perhaps “lie about” is a more accurate wording) the fact that atheism is an integral part of communism. It is not just what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao happened to adopt and attempt to enforce, but it is embedded in the very philosophy that undermines communism itself. From Trotsky’s Last Testament, written shortly before his assassination:
I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.
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Finally, the author conviently ignores Marx’s call to abolish the family and home-education. These two things alone, are enough to make Communism completely at odds with the Church’s social teaching.
 
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CilladeRoma said:
I have heard that the editor of ‘America’ has written a piece about the article, explaining why it was published, but I have not seen it yet.
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I will look this up later today and see what I find. For now, all I can do is lament the fact that this article could have been published in any Catholic magazine. Indeed, the idea that a defense of communism in any sort is again acceptable in even liberal publications is a sad reflection of where we are in our society. The 20th century was such an abomination. I am reminded of David Berlinsky’s quote:
It is in this sense that the twentieth century, having introduced into human history crimes never before imagined, or if imagined, never before undertaken, is immortal, and will, like the crucifixion, remain a permanent part of the human present.
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The fact that people are forgetting how horrible it was, that we are downplaying how horrible it was, is very alarming.
 
The continued intrusion of socialism we see in our country is an indication of things to come. Socialism is a 2nd cousin to communism.

I’ve posted this link before but I think it is applicable here, as well.

tfpstudentaction.org

10 Quotes by Popes Who Condemn Socialism

These 10 popes explain why socialism is so destructive to society.
tfpstudentaction.org tfpstudentaction.org
 
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Please to not take this as a defense of socialism. But if there is one thing that I do agree with Marx on, it is the extreme distaste of assuming there is too close of a relation between socialism and communism. One only has to read Marx’s diatribes against the socialists of his day (and they were true socialists, who wanted all means of production to be state owned) to know there is a big difference.
Indeed, it is extremely telling, in my mind, that the author wrote an article titled “The Catholic Case for Communism” and not “The Catholic Case for Socialism”
If one wanted to advocate for a system of stated owned means of production, but not a system which instituted atheist, not the destruction of the family, not the complete state control of education, not the destruction of all societal instututions, not the destruction and replacement of our complete culture, one would argue for socialism. One certainly would not assume the name of Communism, because one doesn’t support communism and one would not want to associate oneself with the horrible crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Pol Pot, et al.

Likewise, if ( as the author implies), one only wants the common ownership of large scale production, but wants to allow for small businesses and farmers to be left alone, one would not call it communism. Perhaps distributionism, but not communism.

Communism was much more than a (failed) economic system. Communism was not socialism. And the relationship was not that deep. The relationship did not go beyond an economic relationship (and Marx even thought that socialism’s economic programs were far to limited).

As for arguing against Socialism, we do ourselves a disfavor when we link it too closely to Communism. Its a trap. We are written off by the left as simply anti-communist reactionaries (albeit, that’s a label we should all wear with pride). And are then dismissed.

There are certainly socialists, and democratic socialists with communist sympathies (Bernie Sanders comes to mind). But lets not fall into the trap of associating them too closely. We can argue, very effectively, against socialism on purely economic grounds. We should not argue so much against communism, we should stamp it out.
 
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I read the editor’s defense of publishing the article that was referred to above by @CilladeRoma. It would seem he would be open to publishing everyone one of your proposed articles if one can find a Catholic who has a positive opinion about those topics.
America , in other words, is not a journal of Father Matt’s opinions. Not even I would want to read such a magazine. This is a journal of Catholic opinion, and Catholics have differing opinions about many things. Our job is to host a conversation among Catholics and our friends in which people can respectfully and intelligently disagree. Accordingly, we publish something in almost every issue with which I personally disagree. I hope we publish something you disagree with, too. If not, we are not doing our job.
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www.americamagazine.org

Why we published an essay sympathetic to communism

You should not assume that America’s editorial position on communism has changed very much. It has not, Matt Malone, S.J. writes. What has also not changed is our willingness to hear views with which we may disagree but that we nonetheless think are worth hearing.
www.americamagazine.org www.americamagazine.org
 
After 100 million+ deaths, it doesn’t matter what Marx wrote about communism. Whatever he wrote is irrelevant; the true history of communism was written in the blood of a hundred million plus victims during the 20th century. The blood of the victims supersedes whatever Marx wrote on the matter, and it erases whatever mistakes Solzhenitsyn might have made discussing the matter.

At this point, all philosophical and/or political hand-waving about misinterpretations of communism or attempts to exculpate communism are totally irrelevant. Communism is mass-murder and genocide, nothing more.
 
I was looking at Pope Francis in that picture when the Bolivian President gave him the hammer and sickle with Jesus on it. The expression of “Oh no! What do I do with that!” is literally written all over the face of Pope Francis. I don’t envy Pope Francis that situation.
 
tafan2 said:
I read the editor’s defense of publishing the article that was referred to above by @CilladeRoma. It would seem he would be open to publishing everyone one of your proposed articles if one can find a Catholic who has a positive opinion about those topics.
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That would be under the assumption that all opinions are equally valid. That is rubbish. Some opinions are true (defence of the Catholic faith) and others are blatantly false (defence of Communism or the immoral ideologies and practices I noted). And some ideologies are utterly incompatible with Catholicism. People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.
 
I agree whole heartedly. The defense by the editor, along with the story published, can only lead one to believe that it does not matter to him if some ideologies are utterly incompatible with Catholicism. However, we both know he would not publish an article on The Catholic Case for the Rwandan Genocide. So instead what we learn is that as much as he says he disagrees with communism, he does not believe it is utterly incompatible with Catholicism. Scary.
 
Certainly you make a valid point. At this point, communism by name or deed can only be considered a horrible evil. However, and you can see this in the OP article, so many of the communist sympathizers make the case that, no, Stalin and Mao and all the others countries which had communist revolutions abandon Marx. Marx, even Lenin some will say, never wanted these evils. So this too needs to be argued as a falsehood. There is nothing that happened in any of the communist revolutions that would have surprised or upset Karl Marx. At least not until the communist states of China and Vietnam started allowing a bourgeois economy develop after the failure of the communist economy.
 
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