What is Socialism?*

What is Socialism?*
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com – Monday, March 12, 2012

“What is socialism? Like many another a noun that ends in “-ism,” socialism does not lend itself to a crisp twenty-five-word-or-less definition. There are certain fundamental features … which identify it as socialistic. [Article in “Fraternity Newsletter”- Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter- Jan. 2012]

•First, socialism is a thoroughly materialistic philosophy: secondly, it is against private property and advocates monopolistic control of property and its distribution by the state; thirdly, it assumes a naturalistic view of man and the human condition, a specific consequence of which is its adamantly anti-Christian stance.

•Socialism is a thoroughly materialistic philosophy… Socialism is incapable of looking beyond the body. The soul is completely neglected, for the most logical of reasons according to the socialist’s way of thinking, and that is because the soul does not exist. All that matters, for the socialist, is matter, for matter is all there is… For the socialist, man does live by bread alone.

•One of the more pronounced ironies of socialism, given its dedicated materialistic outlook, is its obsessive antipathy toward private property… The ownership of private property, for him, is tantamount to a crime against humanity…

•The idea here is that the state having complete control of property, will then benevolently see to the equal distribution of goods, so that economic equality will prevail in society and the distinction between rich and poor will be obliterated… Rather than abolishing poverty and want, socialism has proven to be remarkably adept in exacerbating both.

•Socialism is a naturalistic philosophy in the sense that it systematically, in principle, ignores the whole supernatural order – indeed denies its very existence – while claiming that there is only a single reality, and that is natural reality.

•Socialism’s antagonism toward Christianity follows logically from its naturalism. It was to this particular aspect of socialism that Leo XIII and Pius XI called special attention. There have been parties and movements which have adopted the label of “Christian Socialism,” but Pope Pius XI makes clear that the label represents a contradiction in terms. Someone who calls himself a Christian Socialist is either (a) not really a Christian or (b) not really a socialist…

•Pope Pius XI called communism the more violent form of socialism… And so it happens that socialism, the archenemy of religion, becomes, for many of its devotees, a substitute religion…

•As emphasized by both Leo XIII and Pius XI, socialism is thus putting itself at odds with the natural law itself, for the ownership of property is not simply a privilege but a God-given right. To want to deny a family a plot of land and a house they can call their own is in a real sense to dehumanize them, to try to cancel them out as individual persons and make the little more than cogs in the vast machinery of the state. What socialism really wants to do is to supplant the ways of God with the ways of man…

•Socialism is indeed a deadly plague, the great enemy, and that is because in all essentials it is a godless political philosophy.”

G.H. Kubeck –*the author is D.Q. McInerny, Ph.D. Prof. of Philosophy, Our Lady of Guadadalupe Seminary