FOOD FOR THOUGHT            LABOUR OVER CAPITAL - THE KEY PRINCIPLES
FR FRANCIS MARSDEN        7 Feb 1988

ONE WORLD: City boardrooms and stockbrokers’ offices, champagne bars and fat cigars. Bowler hatted gents in pin-striped suits, carrying the Financial Times and crowding the Tube trains. Millions of pounds sterling to be made or lost in a morning’s dealing.

ANOTHER WORLD: the deafening noise of ring frames spinning in the mill. Oil and grease, fluff in the air. Bales hoisted up from lorries. Feeding armfuls of fibre into the card. Piecing up and doffing and pushing the full spindles along in little trucks. The brew-up every two hours. The Thursday wage-packet.

THIRD WORLD: The DHSS queue, the Jobcentre interview, the fortnightly Giro in the post. Long, boring, angry days. Staying in bed all morning, nothing to get up for, wishing the world would go away. The wife nagging. Another quarrel. Another letter, ‘Dear Sir, We regret that at present we have no vacancies for the type of employment you are seeking...’
THREE WORLDS IN ONE:	One world divided by the clash between the forces of labour and the forces of capital. A society divided against itself by the sinful effects of capitalist theory.
Can the insights of Catholic social thought show us where the modern economic system has gone so badly wrong? What are the faults of the theory on which it is based?
Firstly we need to examine the terms ‘labour’ and ‘capital’.
‘Labour’ means human work. By work, man shapes the world around him. He applies his powers of body and mind to raw matter. All human wealth and possessions arise through labour, applied to the earth’s God-given resources. ‘It is only by the labour of working men that states grow rich.’ (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum 27.)
‘Capital’ signifies property, money, resources, tools and equipment. All capital is a result of previous labour. Much of Britain’s wealth results from the labour of our forefathers.
A working man may store up a little capital for himself by diligence and thrift. He invests in new equipment to do a higher quality and quicker job. Labour plus extra capital investment here produce a greater output.
Or else a man may sell his labour for wages. He becomes an employee. He works with another’s capital and materials. The owner of capital makes a profit on the sale of the finished product. But ‘Capital cannot do without labour, nor labour without capital’ (RN 15). A machine shop is useless if no-one is prepared to work in it. A joiner cannot work if he has neither tools nor wood.
Labour and capital have to cooperate in a just manner for a peaceful and prosperous society. Marxist theory is a reaction against the abuses of liberal capitalism. It wants all capital taken over by the State and the abolition of personal property. With that, personal freedom also goes. This  attempted solution creates more problems than it solves. It also promotes class war and hatred between the classes who labour and the property owners. This often ends in mutual destruction rather than a just distribution.
The worker and employer have to make a wage contract. Theories of laissez-faire (free-for-all) capitalism state that market forces alone —the laws of supply and demand — should determine wage contracts.
However, if the market is left to work by itself, the strong can enforce unjust contracts on the weak. Poor people have to work or starve. Capitalists form cartels to keep prices up and wages down. During the Industrial Revolution and now in Third World countries, many capital owners keep much of the fruit of labour for themselves. They resist all attempts to legislate about working conditions, minimum wages, child labour and social benefits.
BANKRUPT
Alternatively, exaggerated wage claims by strong unions can bankrupt a small company. So when Mr Reagan or Mrs Thatcher advocate the free play of market forces, it is worth remembering that Pope Pius XI roundly condemned liberal capitalism for leading to ‘the international imperialism of money’.
The Catholic Church sees that a free market has to be governed by certain moral principles. Otherwise it is a jungle war. The working man has the right to a family wage. His wife and children should not have to go out to work. Workers have the right of free association, the right to form trade unions to defend their just interests.
Pope John Paul II criticises economics for its error of economism in the encyclical Laborem Exercens. The error is that labour is treated merely as a commodity to be bought and sold like sugar or oil, with no reference to its human dimension. Human labour is put on a level with lifeless materials.
This is to shove human beings into an accountant’s equation on par with fuel costs, raw materials and profit margins. It leads to decisions being taken about the fate of working men purely on the basis of profit.
‘RAW MATERIAL’
Human labour is not an inert ‘raw material’. It is personal. A man puts himself into his work. Man needs to work and exercise skill in a craft in order to achieve a sense of fulfilment and self-respect as a useful member of the human community.
True, work makes us sweat. It is a penance. But it is also creative, fashioning the world with God cooperating with one another. Man should be ennobled, not degraded, by his work (or the lack of it).
Liberal capitalism is just a theory of greed made to seem respectable. It tramples across man’s spiritual nature, his right to work and to a craft. Money and profit take precedence over truly human interests. The Pope calls this the error of practical materialism. It is the reason why the western economic system is having such miserable effects.
On the one hand the system can lead to the monotony of the car-assembly line. Raw materials go into factories and come out improved: living men enter and come, out degraded by soul-destroying boredom. Yes, they may settle for higher wage rates, but does that morally compensate for spiritual and mental atrophy?
On the other hand, for the sake of ‘efficiency’ and ‘productivity’, the system has thrown millions onto the dole. A factory on a 3-shift day sacks an entire shift and switches to continental 12-hour shifts with extra overtime. Family life is disrupted. Workers are pressured to work weekends or they feel they may be next out. The balance of life is destroyed for the material profit of a faceless holdings corporation.
The priority of labour over capital is a key principal in Catholic social thought. Humanity before profit. Man is more important than the products he makes. Man is the subject of work, and all work is in the service of man. He is not a mere instrument, a cog in the machine. The whole purpose of the economy is to provide him with the essentials of life.
The system should be made for man, not man fed into the system and chewed up. But how?