Four Italian intellectuals with sympathy for the politics of the Old Left issued a “Ratzingerian Marxist” manifesto late last year:
Their manifesto is, in effect, an explicit declaration of appreciation of the vision of Pope Benedict XVI.
Tronti [one of the four] says:
The current interpretation according to which this is a ‘conservative’ pontificate constitutes a complete overturning of the pope theologian. Central, in Joseph Ratzinger, is the necessity of the public dimension of the experience of faith. Instead of contenting themselves with commonplaces, the cultures of the left should if anything raise themselves to this level and accept the encounter on the terrain of ‘indispensable principles.’ Any experiment in the transformation of reality cannot do without the spiritual element present in every human being. There is a very close connection between transcendence and revolution.
It’s that spiritual horizon which they see as forming the basis for productive dialogue, and even certain forms of political activism, with believing Catholics (two of the manifesto’s authors are practitioners of the faith, two are not). The common enemy would be a consumerist-inflected secularism and a certain strain of upper-middle-class liberalism with its attendant libertarian ethics:
The “Ratzingerian Marxists” charge the left in Italy and the West with having given in to “falsely libertarian cultures, for which there exists no right other than the right of the individual.”
In order to rebuild the foundations of the human community, the four identify therefore the decisive interlocutor with whom the left should engage not as some “borderline” theologian, but as Benedict XVI, the highest and most authoritative expression of the Catholic vision, in particular on “two fundamental themes of his magisterium: the rejection of ethical relativism and the concept of non-negotiable values.”
No formal response from the Holy Father yet–unabashed enthusiasm, of course, would seem to be ruled out by much of his prior work. In his 1987 essay on “Freedom and Liberation,” to take but one example, he writes, against the decade’s trendy liberation theology, that “the Christian faith knows no utopia in history . . . no doubt, that sounds very mythological to the man of today. But it is much more reasonable than the mixture of politics and eschatology [central to Marxism].”
Still, given his co-authorships of books with Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he were to address these four thinkers sympathetically. He certainly shares their concern for what they term the twenty-first century West’s “anthropological emergency.” And while many on the contemporary left rarely cease to extol the importance of “dialogue,” it would seem there’s a demonstrated commitment to that, and more of a genuine openness to certain elements of the Christian vision, among these more marginal figures than among their platitudinous peers.
h/t: Mark Misulia
January 23rd, 2013 | 5:11 pm
For me, this post (which was very interesting, by the way) called to mind the on-going dialogue between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek… that is to say, I’m not all that surprised that some Marxists would find much to admire in the thinking of a Pontiff who was a close collaborator with some of the leading lights of the Nouvelle movement.
January 23rd, 2013 | 7:23 pm
While their sympathy is a welcome promise for further dialogue and less polarization, the Marxists fall short in their notion of a relational-anthropology. They are certainly right that life-Christ is transformative for all aspects of life–political, social and economic very much included. Nonetheless, the Marxists dogmatically uphold an economic ideology, one that reality has shown wanting, as Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in Cuba. Thus, they conceive a relational-anthropology in largely economic terms and by default associate a relational-anthropology with “public” ownership of property.
In actuality, “public” ownership only means tax-dollar funded and all governments–regardless of how apparently democratically conceived–require political authority. Thus,complete “public” ownership, in actuality, always means State-ownership and this means bureaucratic-ownership.
While most seriously engaged citizens in the West, sparing creative subgroups as the above-mentioned, aren’t Marxists, we make a similiar mistake. That is, we tend to associate social solidarity with State-expansion, since, after all, the tax-dollar funded sector is the “public” sector. Nonetheless, while State-expansion funded is un-synonymous with solidarity, neither is subsidiarity synonymous with indiscriminate economic decentralization.
The Marxists Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI fans could potentially play an important tole in challenging us to better consider the consequences of our faith in social and economic life, a task that includes better understanding subsidiarity and solidarity.
January 23rd, 2013 | 7:27 pm
I will only add that State-expansion is as responsible as economic-decentralization for a disintegrated, “freedom of indifference”-centric anthropology (meant to add that).
January 23rd, 2013 | 8:58 pm
I’d think Ratzinger/Benedict’s rather pointed engagement with Marx in Spes Salvi would sound a caution against associating the pontiff with Marxism. In this encyclical he recognizes Marx’s genius but quickly exposes the blind futility of Marx’s thought when he characterizes Marx’s error as “materialism” and a lack of understanding of the human character: “He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom.” While certainly no libertarian, Benedict clearly recognizes the reality of human freedom at every level.
Additionally, in the same encyclical he characterized modernity as antichrist, typified by the French Revolution. I don’t think we can accuse him of any joining of “transcendence and revolution.”
January 31st, 2013 | 5:45 am
I have noted the strong social welfare component in Pope Benedict’s pronouncements and wondered why it is so ignored, especially in the United States. But the Marxists, in their attempt to hijack Benedict, have once more been led astray by their ideological blinders and naiveté. The Pope’s message is valued because it says the admonition “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” imposes an obligation on citizens of democracies to use government to show care and compassion toward the less fortunate among them. The message resists the takeover of government by those guided only by personal greed and “rugged individualism.”
It is almost comical to see the blinkered leftists try to hijack this rather specific platform and find an ally to wage an amorphous war against “common enemy…a consumerist-inflected secularism and a certain strain of upper-middle-class liberalism with its attendant libertarian ethics.”
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