Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

the wage system bear inspection by the Christian conscience? It is remarkable that the Christian
social movement posed these questions more than a hundred years ago. The worker,
Bishop Ketteler (1811-1877) explained, invests his or her „flesh and blood“ and works away
„a piece of his or her life, as it were, everyday.“ Here it would be fair to make him a 'partner'
and a 'co-owner' and to overcome the wage system in this way. 1 Baron von Vogelsang (1818-
1890) also advocated assigning workers „an entire gamut of participation rights,“ so that in
the end one „could hardly distinguish whether the entrepreneur was the owner of the establishment.“
2 In France, writing in 1945, the Dominican Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges counted
the wage-relation -at a considerable distance, of course -as part of „the system of villeinage
and slavery“; for what they have in common is that in every case one „more or less buys one's
man,“ granted „with his more or less free consent in the wage system... but without any participation
in the management and the profits.“ 3 Marx's thesis of the self-alienation of the
worker is well known:“ The worker thus feels present to himself only outside work and outside
himself at work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not
at home. His work is thus not free, but coerced, a compulsory work...its foreignness emerges
in the fact that, as soon as no physical or other coercion exists, he flees from work like a
plague...it belongs to another, it is the loss of himself' (Marx, 1854). 4
b) Technicalizing and rationalizing work
Manifold engines and machine tools efficiently attuned to one another deter- mine the work
process of the modem factory. The accumulation of these machines and the extremely efficient
production process lead, on the one hand, to the extensive division of human labor into
individual maneuvers and, on the other hand, to the combination and incorporation of these
individual actions into the integrated manufacturing process. Serious doubts are raised against
this technicalizing of work. Man is allegedly considered only as a function and a factor of
production within the impersonal framework of technical equipment. Through drill and discipline
one tries to make him 'tough' in order to get as much out of him as possible. Technicalizing
has condemned man to mindless, monotonous, nerve-racking, mechanical work and tuned
him in to the forced rhythm of the conveyor belt.
Handicraft has been replaced by the lever, which so exhausts the senses that they only react to
strong stimuli in the evening. Friedrich Georg ltinger says technology is „of a demonic and
titanic character“ since it transfers the law of rigid mechanics to man and has thereby led to
the „atrophy of the mind“ and to „dullness of work and working life.“ 5 Similarly, Hans
Sedelmayer says that technology has shifted the focal point of human work „into the enormous
realm of the inorganic“ and has thereby made man himself «inorganic and amorphous“
as the servant of his creature, the machine, which is itself to be understood in turn only as the
creation of a mind turned towards the inorganic with every fibre of his being.“ 6 Constantin
Virgil Gheorgiu has made the objections against technology culminate in the charge that
modern man has become the slave of his technological slaves: „Every patron learns something
from the language and the manner of his servants. ..We learn the laws and language of our
slaves -thus of our technological bondsman -in order to be able to command them. We dehumanize
ourselves by making the way of life of technological slaves our own. ..The collision of
two realities -technology and humanity -has taken place. The technological slaves are the fu-
1 Kettelers Schriften, ed by J Mumbauer (1911), 1II:56ff. Cf Joseph Höffner, Die deutschen Katholiken und die
soziale Frage im 19 Jhdt., in idem, Gesellschaftspolitik aus christlicher Weltverantwortung (Münster in
Westphalia, 1966), 159-182.
2 Wiard von Klopp, Die Sozialen Lehren des Frh v Vogelsang (St. Polten, 1894), 463, 469.
3 1n Economie et Humanisme (September--October, 1945). German translation in Dokumente 10 (1946) n5
4 K Marx, Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart, 1953), 289. 127
5 F G Junger, Die Perfektion der Technik, 2nd ed (Frankfurt am Main, 1949), 19,23, 122.
6 Verlust der Mitte (Salzburg, 1948), 139ff.
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