Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

a) Lack of Property and the Lack of Self-Reliance
In the advanced industrial society, about eighty per cent of those working as laborers, officeworkers,
and civil servants are not self-employed. Since these strata of the population scarcely
possess any wealth, property has to a considerable degree lost its function of awakening and
strengthening personal initiative and self-reliance. In order to eliminate this unfortunate state
of affairs, leading men of the Catholic social movement have advocated for over a hundred
years the participation of broad strata of employees in capital formation. In l847, Peter Franz
Reichensperger thought that in this way factory workers would become aware „of working
well or poorly, not merely for a third party, but also for themselves.“ A share of the capital
would also „restore to them all those virtues and habits that distinguish those who possess
property from the propertyless“ (Die Agrarfrage, 253ff).
b) Lack of Property and the Lack of Economic Security
In modern society, the economic security of more or less propertyless employees does not rest
on private property. The complaint of the encyclical Quadragesimo anno, that the „immense
multitude of the non-owning workers on the one hand and the enormous riches of certain very
wealthy men on the other establish an unanswerable argument that the riches which are so
abundantly produced in our age of ‘industrialism’, as it is called, are not rightly distributed“
(n. 60), is sharpened by Alexander Rüstow, an adherent of neoliberalism, when he writes:
„That the distribution of wealth and income in our plutocratic economic order should have
anything to do with social justice is something that probably no one today would seriously
assert.“ In Germany, complaint is made above all that the considerable increase of wealth
since the Second World War has, in spite of the ‘social market economy’, benefited the nonself-employed
in a limited measure only, but rather has accrued to the state and to a relatively
narrow strata of the self-employed. The result is that the employee without capital expects his
or her economic security, not from private property, but from income and the system of social
security.
c) The Separation of Property and the Power of Disposal
In wide realms of the modern economy, ownership of the means of production hardly means
power of disposal and responsibility for the owner himself or herself. Exaggerating, Oswald
von Nell-Breuning says: „The great and influential entrepreneur of today is no longer the man
who brings forth a large capital and considerable means of production and employs them in an
entrepreneurial way, but a man who assumes and in many cases usurps control of the production
apparatus, factories, and whole complexes of enterprises which are not his own.“ If by
„ownership“ one understands „the legal right of an owner to dispose of that which he calls his
or her own,“ then one must say that „ownership thus understood has been defunctionalized in
the most far-reaching manner.“ 66
d) Ownership of the Means of Production
Against the thesis that private property is the guarantor of man’s freedom it is objected that in
the industrial society ownership of the means of production confers social power and thus
forces the employees into dependency on capital.
2. Six Forms of Ownership in Modern Society.
A comparison of the great importance for the political order that attaches to private ownership
under the actual conditions of ownership leads to the question of the manner in which idea
and reality can be approximated to one another. The distribution of wealth is sound only when
66
O. v. Nell-Breuning, „Eigentum und Verfügungsgewalt in der modernen Gesellschaft,“ Gesellschaftspolitische
Kommentare 3/17 (1956):4ff.
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