What's the Pope on about? Downplaying the class struggle in relation to the stabilisation of commodity prices through new arrangements on a universal scale, i.e. a new new international economic order? Blaming the material embodiment of human intelligence and skill itself, i.e., technology, for problems that arise from the capitalist relations of production in which technology is developed and deployed in biased ways? Insisting that owners of the means of production ensure that they not lie idle along with the proletarians who should be valorizing them (isn't this what he means universal use)? If not, what is the responsibility of property owners that he is invoking?
Jeez, Nathan if this impresses you, this raises all kinds of questions about the AFL-CIO by which you have been similarly impressed.
And if we're going to catholic here, has anyone read the liberation theologian Franz Hinkelammert's The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism or the work of Enrique Dussel? I am an atheist, but there is much of interest in their work. It would be interesting to read their criticisms of such pronouncements by the pope. Does anyone of any recent criticisms of papal authority penned by these two thinkers?
yours, rakesh
ps let's not let the National Review name our socialists for us.