Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

1. Communist-Collectivist Socialism
Two focal points can be distinguished in the teaching on the economic order as presented by
communist-collectivist socialism:
a) Historico-Sociological Materialism
Under the spell of the historico-sociological materialism founded by Karl Marx, communistcollectivist
socialism advances the thesis that, on the one hand, every economic order is determined
by the current stage of the technological mastery of natural forces and that, on the
other hand, it conditions the ‘ideological superstructure’ (law, philosophy, art, religion, etc.).
The following passage, which has been described as ‘classical’, from the preface to Marx’s
work, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (l859), is famous: „In the social production of
their lives, people enter into certain necessary relations independently of their wills-production
relations that correspond to a given stage of the development of their material productive
forces. The totality of production relations forms the economic structure of society,
the real basis on which a juristic and political superstructure rises up, and to which given
forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life conditions
the social, political, and spiritual life process in general.“ 25 Marx thus asserts that the current
technological procedures of production (the ‘productive forces’) create the economic and social
order appropriate to them (the ‘production relations’). He ventures the proposition: „With
the acquisition of new production forces, people change their mode of production and with the
change in the mode of production (the way of earning their livelihood) they change all their
social relations. The hand mill results in a society with feudal lords, the steam-powered mill
in a society with industrial capitalists.“ 26 One is even more amazed when Marx then continues:
„But the same people who organize the social relations according to their material mode
of production also organize principles, ideas, and categories according to their social relations.“
27 An importance is thereby attributed by dialectical materialism to the current economic
and social order as in no other system; for Marx affirms that the „juristic, political,
religious, artistic, or philosophical“ contents of the so-called „ideological superstructure“ are
„conditioned,“ „determined,“ „ultimately determined,“ „posited in the world,“ „transposed,“
„translated,“ „revolutionized,“ and „produced“ by economic relations. The spiritual, according
to Marx and Engels, „flows“ from the economic; it is the „etherealized form“ of social
relations which are its „cause.“
Like the theses of dialectical materialism in general, all these formulations are unclear, onesided,
and highly contestable oversimplifications. Did the hand mill and feudal system of the
Middle Ages put the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas „in the world“? Are Christ,
Paul, Augustine, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Luther, and so on to be understood only in terms
of the economic? 28 Compelled by criticism, Marx and Engels had to reformulate and limit
their thesis several times: the spiritual is indeed „posited in the world“ through economic
facts, but then nevertheless retroacts „upon its environment and even upon its own causes,“ so
that there results an „interaction on the basis of the ultimately prevailing economic necessity“(Friedrich
Engels). 29 If a certain, although relative importance is already accorded in this
proposition to the „ideological superstructure,“ Bolshevism turns the greatest attention to the
ideological. Continuing in the line of Ivan Pavlov’s dog experiments, which could provoke
states of anxiety through garbled signals, permanent brain washing was carried out by it; and
here the method of garbled signals has for several years also been extended to the world not
25
K. Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Ber1in, 1947), 13f.
26
K. Marx, „La misère de la philosophie,“ in Frühschriften (Stuttgart, 1953), 497f.
27
Ibid., 498.
28
Cf. Joseph Höffner, Die Religion im dialektischen Materialismus, 4th ed. (Cologne: Presseamt des Erzbistums,
1973) (Reprint n. 4).
29
Cited in G. A. Wetter, Der dialektische Materialismus (Freiburg, 1952), 55.
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