Two radicals

Pope Leo XIV and Karl Marx

Last week I wrote about Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arguing that it constitutes one of the most comprehensive repudiations of the 21^st century right that any major international figure has offered so far. Of course the Pope has denied that this is a specific denunciation of Donald Trump, and he has (correctly) noted that he has been preaching more or less the same message for many years, long before Trump came on the scene. Nonetheless, Leo cannot truly believe that readers will not recognize the systematic, point-by-point attack on the main pillars of the MAGA movement. It isn’t even plausible to say that Magnifica Humanitas was a generic critique of right-wing authoritarianism, because Trump’s peers in other countries combine their xenophobia with populist policies, as David Ost has analyzed brilliantly in his new book, Red Pill Politics. Those movements combine the persecution of minorities with genuine material benefits to those who fit some standard of national authenticity, even if those benefits turn out to be illusory over the long term. Trump, in contrast, offers a techno-fascistic libertarianism, with policies shifting wealth even further into the hands of the already wealthy. His rhetoric of populist resentment was never more than a façade. When the far right ruled in Poland between 2015 and 2023, they actually passed programs that narrowed the gap somewhat between rich and poor (though this metric had been going down even before then). Under Trump, the situation of the poor in the US has worsened, and the accumulation among the billionaires has skyrocketed. So Leo’s critique in Magnifica Humanitas, focusing as it did on the commodification of the human person under laissez-faire capitalism (alongside the sins of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and militarism), was undeniably aimed at MAGA’s distinctive ideological stew.

Long passages of Magnifica Humanitas could have been lifted from the pages of any socialist manifesto written over the past two centuries, leading many on the right to accept Laura Loomer’s accusation that Leo XIV is a “woke Marxist Pope.” Some confused right-wing Catholics have pushed back by insisting that this can’t possibly be true, because Marxists are committed to spreading atheism and inciting class conflict. I’m not going to directly engage with (or link to) the feverish swamps of right-wing social media, but it is actually worthwhile to consider what genuinely distinguishes the Pope from Karl Marx. While this might seem like a silly comparison, it actually accentuates some often overlooked aspects of both Catholicism and socialism.

An important point of background to Marx’s writings is his long-running feud with what he called “utopian socialists” and anarchists. There is a reason we consider all these groups to be on the left, despite their differences. They all want to see a world in which humans are valued as people, and not treated as commodities to be bought and sold on a labor market. They all insist that liberty is superficial if it is confined to the political and judicial realms, because economic inequalities create power dynamics that severely limit genuine freedom. Leftists have many ideas about what sorts of inequalities (if any) are acceptable, but all agree that disparities in income or wealth must not be allowed to create significant disparities in power. They all insist on a holistic and open view of society, so that benefits for individuals or subgroups should not infringe on the well being of other individuals or subgroups. This same holistic perspective leads to concerns about the environmental impact of human actions.

What distinguishes Marxism within this broader leftist camp can be boiled down to two key questions: why is our world so far from our ideals, and (even more important) how do we get from here to there? For Marx, answering the first question generated an answer to the second. He argued that a dynamic understanding of history would show us that we exist within a specific flow of time, so that the past shapes our identities, goals, and values, as well as the systems and institutions within which we realize them. It follows from this premise that we cannot merely wish a better future into existence. The slogan “imagine the world you want to live in” is worse than a cliché, because it suggests that our utopia can be created if enough of us want it to be real. Even plans to actively create that utopia through determined political mobilization are problematic, if this is understood to mean that we can invent a better world through a single revolutionary rupture. Marx’s ideal could only come into being through a step-by-step process of historical development. While he didn’t write about this process in much detail, he made it clear that it required at a minimum a level of productivity and technology necessary to eliminate meaningful forms of scarcity. “To each according to their needs” is an absurd principle unless everyone’s needs can indeed be met. The other nonnegotiable prerequisite is movement towards greater democracy, understood as a system in which people are genuinely invested in the well-being of the society as a whole, and treated as the subjects rather than the objects of policymaking. A key phrase here is “movement towards,” because this, too, is a historical process. Just as material abundance won’t appear overnight, neither can genuine democracy. In fact, one of the most profound insights of Marx was that these aren’t separate processes at all. They each nourish the other, and can only grow in tandem.

This is where Catholic social teachings enter the picture. Leo XIII is famous for his condemnation of laissez-faire capitalism in Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labor (1891), but he was also the author of Quod Apostolici Muneris: On Socialism (1878). In these texts he launched a polemic that has been distracting readers ever since, because he mounted a critique of socialism that mixed genuine differences of opinion with straw-man arguments. The most persistent of the latter is the idea that socialism is bad because it provokes class conflict, rather than seeking solutions that would benefit everyone. Anyone who actually reads Marx will see immediately that he was describing class conflict, not inciting it. Marxists have always insisted that their goal is social harmony, which can only be achieved if class conflict is overcome. Once again, this can only happen through a historical process, and since that process will require the dislodging of entrenched systems of power, it will entail some degree of conflict. Saying that Marxists are in favor of conflict is akin to claiming that Catholics support sin, because they have constructed an elaborate theology explaining why people sin, and how it can be overcome.

If we get beyond such vapid polemics, we see quite a bit of common ground. Most fundamentally, both Marxists and Catholics oppose the commodification of human beings. They use different terminology and make different ethical and anthropological assumptions, but both arguments come down to the claim that humans should be respected and valued as humans, not as mere cogs in a machine of production. They are equally critical of those who place efficiency above human flourishing, and those who value some categories of humans above others.

And this is precisely where the differences between these two worldviews become clear. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the states that tried to implement socialism in the 20^th century is well aware that the citizens of those states were, in fact, commodified and objectified. This fact was documented and analyzed in the pathbreaking work of scholars like Martha Lampland and Michael Buraway, but even before then it was evident in working-class protests throughout the history of state socialism. When demonstrators in Poznań in 1956 held up banners saying “down with the red bourgeoisie,” they were decrying their exploitation within a productive process that seemed, from their perspective, to be indistinguishable from capitalism. That wasn’t an anti-socialist slogan (they certainly didn’t want to bring back the real bourgeoisie); it was instead a demand that socialism be realized.

This is where the argument about process and history matters so much. Already in 1926, Evgeny Preobrazhensky argued that socialism had to be constructed, not simply created. Since “to each according to their needs” required abundance, the level of productivity of the USSR had to be massively improved. Even capitalist societies in the 1920s were a long way from being able to provide for the needs of every citizen, and the Soviets were even further from that goal. This required investment, and thus some socialist version of the capitalist process of “primitive accumulation.” It required industrialization and the use of labor to accumulate yet more wealth, and thus some socialist version of exploitation. This wasn’t hypocrisy: it was a recognition that you can’t get from point A to point B without traversing the space in between.

Even on the left, one often encounters the claim that socialism “failed,” or “was never properly tried,” because the system in the Soviet Bloc included capital accumulation and exploitation (not to mention political authoritarianism). This critique is based on the same flawed reasoning that underpins many social science theories, which imagine universal laws about human communities and seek out the right policy recipe that will allow a certain goal to be realized. If that goal is general human flourishing, we position these proposals on the left; if the goal is productivity and profit, we place them on the right. Marxism stands entirely apart from that, because it begins with the assumption that we live in history. Marxism has never been about formulating and then imposing the right mix of laws, systems, and policies, because Marx wouldn’t have ever imagined that his ideals could come into being in such an ahistorical way.

In this sense, Catholic social thought can be placed into the same basket as Keynesian liberalism. In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV supports his critique of capitalist objectivization with some vague calls to come up with better state regulation, and urges individuals to change the way they deal with their fellow citizens on a daily basis. All of this is laudable, but Marx would have responded that it was painfully naïve. Like the state officials who were supposed to manage and contain capitalist excesses in Keynesian plans, Leo positions “people of good will” as moral beacons who will convince government authorities to pass laws mitigating the pathologies of information technology in particular and capitalist commodification more generally. If I am right to treat Magnifica Humanitas as the first truly American papal encyclical because of its pointed critique of the MAGA movement, then we might also say that the solutions in this text recall the welfare-state capitalism of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” or Johnson’s “Great Society.”

Marx was not merely opposed to such plans; he was dismissive of them. Even if buttressed by the best intentions, they offer only short-term solutions that will sooner or later be overturned. As the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki argued back in 1943, attempts to humanize capitalism through policy instruments could never succeed, because the political and regulatory realms could not be separated from the economic realm in that way. The basic structures of capitalism, as long as they were in place, would eventually generated forces that would undermine those regulations and restore the problems that the reformers had hoped to solve. Leo falls into the same trap, because he doesn’t grapple with the question of how we can get from today’s reality—the reality that generated the AI monstrosities and the political sociopathy that he critiques so eloquently—to a world in which his ideals actually have a chance at being realized.