Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

doctrine of historical epochs the final phase, the communist paradise. Marx himself was very
reserved in the more detailed depiction of the final stage. He calls this state „the true realm of
freedom.“ „Co-operation and common possession of the earth“ will make mankind into a „union
of free men.“ Then society will be able „to inscribe on its banners: From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs.“ 38 The state will then die out or--as Engels
thought--“be transferred into the antique museum alongside the spinning wheel and the
bronze axe.“ A new age has begun. It will now be possible for each person „to do this today,
that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, to breed cattle in the evening,
or even to criticize the food...just as one pleases.“ 39 Lenin also professed this secularized messianism:
„Then the door leading from the first phase to the second phase will be opened
wide“; the bourgeois scholars can only „grin“ at this doctrine and make it appear as „pure
utopianism“ that every citizen would receive „without any control of his work as many truffles,
automobiles, and pianos as he wants, and whatever else.“ 40 In fact, however, this utopian
messianism was putting an ever more dangerous strain on Marxism, as the lively discussions
in the Soviet Union about the final communist stage showed. On October l8, l96l, Khrushchev
dared the prophecy that the communist society, with its „bowl always filled to the brim with
surplus,“ would be built up „in its basic features“ in the next twenty years. The Slovenian
author Zarko Petan writes: „All socialist fairy tales begin thus: Once upon a time it will be...“
But people cannot be put off forever and sacrificed to the Moloch of an earthly paradise that
never comes - apart from the fact that it is shockingly naive to see the happiness of man in
truffles, automobiles, pianos, and the bowl always filled to the brim with surplus. The communist
paradise is like a horizon: it withdraws as one approaches.
The Marxist doctrine of the last days is a promise of innerwordly salvation. Karl Marx secularized
the fate of the Jewish people (the slavery in Egypt and the journey to the promised
land) as well as the Old Testament expectation of messianic salvation and transposed it to our
time, the time after Jesus Christ - a bewildering reduction and imitation of the salvation bestowed
on mankind in Jesus Christ. Marxism is a countergospel: „His own evil shadow grins
at Western man from the other side of the Iron Curtain,“ writes C. G. Jung. The promises of
Marxism have not been confirmed where it attained to power, but only refuted.
Pope John Paul II sharply condemns Marxist collectivism which issues the call to the class
struggle it has proclaimed, wishes to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to introduce
the communist system into the whole world, but is not in the position to realize „the
primacy of man over the capital instrument.“ For „in dialectical materialism too man is not
first and foremost the subject of work,“ but „a kind of ‘resultant’ of the economic or production
relations prevailing at a given period.“ Capital falls under „direct control of another group
of people“ who „from the fact of exercising power in society“ dispose of the whole economy.
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2. Liberal-Democratic Neo-Socialism
The notion of the economic order of Western free democratic neosocialism is of an essentially
different nature. Neosocialism does indeed go back to Marx, but diverges from him in important
points, not least in the doctrine of the process of economic and social development, although
without having thus far broken through to a unified basic outlook. The true weakness
of neosocialism lies in its liberalistic conception of society which becomes manifest again and
again in cultural, educational, and school policy. 42 In economic policy, two conceptions are
characteristic for neosocialism:
38 K. Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms, 19ff.
39 K. Marx, Frühschriften, 361.
40 Lenin, Ausgewählte Werke, II:232.
41 „Laborem exercens,“ 13-14.
42 Cf. Wilhelm Weber, Christlicher Sozialismus?, Kirche und Gesellschaft, vol. 7, ed. by the Katholische Sozialwissenschaftliche
Zentralstelle (Mönchengladbach, 1974).
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