A number of more conservative publications have continued to bemoan the Pope's views; I remember a National Review cover a couple of years ago with the Pope and a caption reading "The Last Socialist."
--Nathan Newman
-----Original Message----- From: Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:14 AM Subject: RE: ANSWER: Name this socialist
Nathan, if you know a quick & easy way to get the essay, please let me know.
I was particularly struck by the populist slant that seems to blur the line -- properly in my book -- between "worker" and "self-employed", "proprietor", or "small business person," since the latter could be seen as workers with a few tools or limited capital. This may be reading too much into the passage. It also seems to pass muster as a straight-forward socialist statement.
On a slightly different note, the question you raise about the Catholic social teaching was faced in real terms by the fledgling Labor Party. We had gained the endorsement of a farmworkers organization, in Ohio I believe, of mostly religiously devout Hispanics. Some other endorsing union locals had a similar religious composition. If the LP took the standard, industrial strength position on abortion, it was expected that these folks would have walked away. So they didn't, giving rise to some controversy in the ranks. I took it as a sign of seriousness.
mbs
"property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of "capital" in opposition to "labor"-- and even to practice exploitation of labor--is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession--whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership--is that they should serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them."