Socialism and Its Limits

The term socialism appeared in the 1820s–1830s, in France and England, to designate doctrines that place the "social" above the individual and seek to reorganize society around work and cooperation rather than competition and profit. From the outset, it is a plural word: there is not one socialism, but socialisms sometimes opposed to one another.

A family of doctrines, not a single bloc

Three main branches are classically distinguished, corresponding to three historical moments.

Utopian socialism of the first reformers — Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Robert Owen (1771–1858) — imagined ideal communities, phalansteries, cooperatives, and relied on moral persuasion and example more than on revolution. Karl Marx would call it, not without contempt, "utopian" because it was not based on an analysis of economic forces.

"Scientific socialism" is Marxism: Marx and Engels claimed to have discovered the laws of historical development. The engine of history would be the class struggle; capitalism would carry within itself the seeds of its own destruction; the proletariat would be called upon to overthrow the bourgeoisie in order to establish collective ownership. It is this branch which, radicalized, produced communism.

Reformist socialism, finally, or social democracy: from the end of the 19th century, part of the workers' movement renounced violent revolution and chose the path of the ballot box, trade unions, and gradual reforms (universal suffrage, social laws, redistribution, public services). Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Jean Jaurès in France are among its figures.

The common core of socialisms

Beyond these differences, a family resemblance remains. Socialisms generally share:

• a critique of capitalism as a system of exploitation and concentration of wealth;
• the conviction that private ownership of the means of production is the main source of injustice, and that it must be collectivized in whole or in part;
• the primacy of the social over the individual: man is thought of first as a member of a class or collective, more than as a person;
• great confidence in organization, the State, or the collectivity to produce equality;
• often, an immanent eschatology: the expectation of a reconciled society here below, without transcendence.

It is precisely these traits — especially the last three — that would meet the Church's critique.

Socialism and communism: kinship and difference

Pius XI fixed in 1931 a distinction that social doctrine would retain. Communism is the branch of socialism that has "descended" into violence: it pursues "an implacable class struggle and the complete disappearance of private property", by all means^[2]. So-called "mitigated" or moderate socialism, for its part, "has retained the name of socialism": it condemns recourse to violence and tempers class struggle and the abolition of property^[3].

Communism therefore has its own article, which treats dialectical materialism, the persecution of the Church, and the record of 20th-century regimes. The present article concerns socialism as a broader family and the decisive question: even in its softened form, is socialism compatible with the Catholic faith?

Before marking its limits, justice must be done to what socialism saw truly. The Church never denied it: the social question was real, and burning.

In the 19th century, the industrial revolution threw masses of men, women, and children into often inhuman working conditions: endless days, starvation wages, insalubrious housing, no protection against sickness or unemployment. Triumphant economic liberalism held these sufferings to be the natural price of progress. It was in this moral void that socialism raised its voice.

Leo XIII, opening Rerum Novarum, describes this misery without mincing words:

"...a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself." — Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891^[4]

The socialist diagnosis — there is a structural injustice, the poor are crushed, this cannot last — the Church shares. More: it claims to have spoken for the poor long before socialism existed, through the Gospel, the Fathers, Christian charity, and the constant denunciation of usury and avarice. The cry for justice does not properly belong to socialism; it is first of all biblical.

The tragedy, for social doctrine, is therefore not that socialism demands justice: it is that it was mistaken about the remedy, and that in being mistaken about the remedy it was mistaken about man himself.

Pontifical condemnations of socialism are ancient and constant. As early as 1846, Blessed Pius IX denounced "that most perverse doctrine called communism"^[5]. In 1878, Leo XIII, in Quod Apostolici Muneris, ranked "socialists, communists and nihilists" among the authors of that "deadly plague which insinuates itself into the innermost members of human society and leads it to ruin"^[6]. But these condemnations are not anathemas without reasons: they rest on four fundamental objections, which social doctrine clarified over the course of a century.

The anthropological error: man reduced to society

The first limit, the deepest, is an error about man. Socialism tends to think of the person as a mere product of social relations: change the economic structures, it says, and you will change man. Saint John Paul II gave it its sharpest formula:

"The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Indeed, it considers the individual as a mere element, a molecule of the social organism, so that the good of each is entirely subordinated to the functioning of the economic and social mechanism." — Saint John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 1 May 1991, no. 13^[7]

Reducing the person to a molecule of the social body is to strip away what founds it: its transcendent dignity, its freedom as a moral subject, its vocation to God. Where faith sees in each person an immortal soul created in the image of God, socialism — especially in its materialist version — sees only a being determined by its economic condition. The dignity of the human person is at stake here, and with it the whole of social doctrine, which flows from it as from a first principle.

The abolition of private property: a false remedy

The second limit concerns socialism's central means: abolishing private ownership of the means of production. For Leo XIII, this is precisely where the remedy becomes unjust and aggravates the evil it claims to cure:

"...the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice, inasmuch as every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own." — Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891^[8]

The Church defends private property as a natural right, an extension of the person's freedom and responsibility, a guarantee of independence from the State. But — and this is where social doctrine escapes liberalism as much as socialism — this right is not absolute: it bears a "social mortgage", ordered to the universal destination of goods. Socialism is right to refuse selfish and unlimited property; it is wrong to conclude that property must be abolished instead of regulated so that it serves all.

Class struggle against social harmony

The third limit is the erection of class struggle into a law of history and a method of action. Marxism holds the conflict between proletarians and bourgeois to be inevitable and necessary; it makes it the engine of progress. The Church sees in it a poison that sets as enemies men called to cooperate. Leo XIII opposes to this logic the harmony of classes:

"...capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity." — Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891^[9]

To the war of classes, social doctrine substitutes justice in labor relations (just wage, right of association, dignity of the worker) and solidarity. This is not a naive harmony that would deny real conflicts: it is the refusal to erect hatred and antagonism into a principle.

Materialism and forgetting the last end

The fourth limit is of a spiritual order. In its consistent forms, socialism is materialist: it confines human hope to the earthly horizon and makes economic equality the supreme good. It "ignores and neglects", writes Pius XI, the sublime end of man and of society^[10]. Yet man is not made only to produce and consume in justice: he is made for God. A society that perfectly organized material goods but extinguished the sense of eternity would have missed the essential.

That is why, even in its non-atheist versions, socialism collides with a vision of society incompatible with the faith. Pius XI sums it up:

"Whether socialism be considered as a doctrine, or as a historical phenomenon, or as a movement... if it really remains socialism, it cannot be brought into harmony with the dogmas of the Catholic Church... since it conceives human society in a way utterly alien to Christian truth." — Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 15 May 1931^[11]

Statism and the threat to freedoms

Finally, by concentrating property, production, and decision-making in the hands of the collectivity or the State, socialism tends toward statism: it absorbs intermediate bodies, stifles initiative, and threatens freedoms. This is the logical price of abolishing private property, which was also a rampart against power. Social doctrine opposes to this slope the principle of subsidiarity: what persons, families, and intermediate bodies can do must not be absorbed by a higher authority. Pushed to the extreme, this concentration leads to totalitarianism — a drift the 20th century tragically verified in communist regimes.

The practical question that constantly recurs is this: if violence, atheism, and the total abolition of property are removed from socialism, does there not remain an acceptable socialism, even reconcilable with the Gospel? It is to this question that Quadragesimo Anno responds with a still-famous clarity.

"Mitigated" socialism: a deceptive rapprochement

Pius XI honestly recognizes that moderate socialism has evolved, that it now condemns violence and tempers its demands, to the point that some of its requirements "often approach the just demands of Christian reformers of society"^[12]. The pope therefore does not close his eyes to this softening. But he warns: this surface rapprochement does not remove the fundamental opposition. Even softened, socialism retains a conception of society in which human association is ordered only to material utility, and in which the person remains subordinated to the collective.

Can one be Catholic and socialist?

Hence the verdict of principle, one of the most quoted in all of social doctrine:

"Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist." — Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 15 May 1931^[13]

This sentence must be read for exactly what it says. It does not declare that every voter for a party bearing the word socialist would be outside the Church, nor that every social measure demanded by socialists would be bad. It targets socialism as an integral doctrine: as a system claiming to explain man and society in a closed, materialist way, foreign to the supernatural end. Taken thus, "true socialism" and "true Catholicism" cannot coincide, because they rest on two opposed visions of what man is.

Saint Paul VI would extend this discernment by distinguishing, within socialism, several levels that must not be confused: a generous aspiration to a more just society; historical movements with their organization and political aims; an ideology claiming to give a total and self-sufficient vision of man. The Christian may recognize what is just in the aspiration, but cannot adhere to the ideology underlying it — all the more since these levels, even distinguished, "must not tend to be considered as completely separate and independent"^[14].

The 20th century submitted socialist promises to the test of facts. Where socialism became a regime — in its communist form — it produced not the announced emancipation, but oppression. The collapse of "real socialism" in 1989–1991 seemed to vindicate a century of the Church's warnings.

The collapse of "real socialism" in 1989

A direct witness of this collapse, John Paul II proposed a reading of it that is not only economic. If collectivist economies failed, the deep cause is not primarily technical: it is the spiritual void and the error about man that undermined them from within. The crisis of socialism confirms, a posteriori, that the root of the evil was indeed anthropological^[15]. The history of this fall is set out in the article devoted to communism and its regimes.

Persistence and mutations of socialism

The disappearance of communist regimes did not make socialism disappear as a current. In very diverse forms — reformist social democracies, currents claiming democratic socialism, movements inheriting Marxist critique — it continues to mark political life. The Church does not pass a uniform judgment on all these currents: it assesses case by case the concrete measures they propose, in the light of its principles. But its fundamental warning remains: to the extent that a movement rediscovers a materialist anthropology, the primacy of the collective over the person, and the expectation of a purely earthly salvation, it falls back under the same critique. Conversely, what it proposes that is just — protection of workers, struggle against poverty, just wage, the role of trade unions — belongs in reality to justice pure and simple, which the Church defends for its own sake.

The critique of socialism would be only half understood if one forgot that it is accompanied, in the same popes, by an equally firm critique of economic liberalism and of unbridled capitalism. The Church does not defend one camp against the other: it denounces two symmetrical errors.

Neither collectivism nor individualism

The Catechism sums up this double distancing:

"The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with 'communism' or 'socialism.' She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of 'capitalism,' individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2425^[16]

On one side, socialism sacrifices the person to the collective; on the other, liberalism sacrifices the weak to the market. Social doctrine refuses both reductions and holds together what ideologies oppose: the freedom of the person and responsibility toward all; property and its social function; initiative and solidarity.

Permanent principles against both ideologies

In place of the socialist system as of the liberal system, the Church proposes not a ready-made third system, but permanent principles that must inform every just social organization:

• the dignity of the human person, first and last criterion;
• the common good, to which all power and wealth are ordered;
• the universal destination of goods, which founds the social use of property;
• subsidiarity, which protects persons and intermediate bodies against the State;
• solidarity, which binds all members of society in mutual responsibility.

These principles, deployed in the just wage, the right of trade unions, the defense of the family, and attention to the poorest, answer the aspiration to justice that socialism had captured — but without denying God or dissolving the person.

The Gospel, the true source of justice

Concern for the poor, which socialism believed it invented, is first of all Christian. It is rooted not in class struggle but in charity, and in the word of Christ who identifies the poor with himself:

"Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 25:40^[17]

Where socialism promises a fraternity without a Father and a paradise on earth, the Church proclaims a fraternity rooted in God and a justice that does not kill eternal hope. It is by fully living social doctrine — and the charity that crowns it — that Christians truly answer the cry for justice which socialism, for lack of a true vision of man, could not honor.

• Communism — the radical and atheist form of socialism, and the record of its regimes.
• Economic liberalism and Capitalism and its limits — the symmetrical error, likewise criticized by the Church.
• Private property according to the Church and The universal destination of goods — the natural right socialism seeks to abolish, and its social function.
• Totalitarianism — the political drift toward which collectivism tends.
• The dignity of the human person, The common good, Subsidiarity and Solidarity — the permanent principles of social doctrine.
• The just wage and Trade unions and social doctrine — concrete responses to the worker question.