-----Original Message-----
From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
>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?
To argue that the Pope endorses "stabilization of commodity prices" seems a little strange. Where do you see that? The Church has been one of the bigger promoters of Jubilee 2000- the call for total abolition of third world debt-- and many other global ideas quite outside the New World Order economic thinking.
I would fully agree that the Pope downplays class struggle-- although he rather pointedly upholds the rights of workers to engage in such struggle when capitalists fail their Christian responsibility (which in my view leaves a rather large loophole for class struggle most of the time).
Your quick dismissal of the significant differences of the Catholic Church teaching from neoliberalism or even traditional Keynesianism -- as some of the discussions on Keynes just had would emphasize -- is what I would question. You don't have to agree with a whole strain of movement in the world to recognize the importance of engaging with it.
A lot of folks cannot distinguish between differences based on ends and means. At the end of the day, the corporate right positively want homeless in the streets because that serves their interests.
On the other hand, the Pope or various union bureaucrats or liberals of good faith positively want the end of such economic inequality. You (and I BTW) may think they are too timid or unwilling to deal with the necessity of deeper class struggle to achieve those ends, but that difference on evaluation of means makes it even more important to engage those people sharing similar ends values to convince them of moving their means more in the direction you or I may think necessary.
There are people and institutions that mouth egalitarian goals while venally selling out their constituency, but I think it is a mistake to underestimate the numbers of "sell-outs" based less on venality and more on timidity of spirit and mistaken(i.e differing) evaluations of strategic imperatives.
On a broad organizing front, I would generally rather engage with an open heart those who profess to share similar goals and try to convince them of the need for different tactics, than to just denounce them as irrevocably an enemy or opponent because they have different tactical and strategic evaluations. Sure some of those differences stem as well from goal differences, but I often find their is too much affinity on the Left based on similar tactics (despite widely divergent core beliefs) and too little affinity between those using different tactics who nevertheless share important value and goal beliefs.
My point on raising the Catholic Church doctrines on social justice is to note a rather important counter-vailing social strain agains the neoliberal current. Of course as left socialists, there is a lot more affinity with the suppressed liberation theology straing of the Church than the "dignity of work" strain of the Church hierarchy, but the latter is still quite different from the dominant culture of worship of entrepreneurialism and "winner take all" economic distribution.
As Max noted on his Labor Party post, this is not an academic point, but one that involves serious issues of how to organize a movement for social change, who will be invited to coalition meetings, and how to finesse real tensions over the issues that might divide those who share many core beliefs in other areas.
--Nathan Newman