What Marx Got Right | Fr. Patrick Briscoe & Fr. Bonaventure Chapman
September 12, 2024
Fr. Bonaventure: And this is Father Bonaventure Chapman.
Fr. Patrick: Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy our podcast, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Father Marx-aventure.
Fr. Bonaventure: [laughs] Fr. Marx-aventure, yeah, not Livesplaining, but yeah.
Fr. Patrick: That’s right.
Fr. Bonaventure: No, it’s fine. I love names like that.
Fr. Patrick: We can trade the gimmick around a little bit.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes.
Fr. Patrick: We don’t have a Marx puppet, though, do we?
Fr. Bonaventure: We don’t. We have Friedrich Nietzsche. You know, they do make one.
Fr. Patrick: Maybe we could get a Marx puppet in the future.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, it’s true.
Fr. Patrick: And we’ll think about that. We’ll pray about it. Today’s episode is going to be great as we dive into Marxism. What Marx got right, what Marx got wrong, but really taking a look at the nature of work. But before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit about one great opportunity for priests. We know we have a number of priest listeners to the podcast. It’s a huge privilege for brothers to have you tuning in. And we want to make sure that you know about the opportunity to go on retreat with Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. John Bergzma at the St. Paul Center. The St. Paul Center, if you don’t know, it is a fantastic project for the renewal of Catholic biblical theology. If you attend one of the retreats they host for priests, you will have four days of Biblical formation, fraternity, and spiritual renewal. It’s really great. It’s one of the best kept secrets, I think, of priest conferences for priests in America. So there’s a whole array of retreats they’re offering in 2025. You can check them all out. If you’re a priest, consider joining one of the three annual priest retreats in 2025. Visit saintpaulcenter.com. That’s stpaulcenter.com/priest to learn more, sign up today. If you’re a layperson, you might consider also sending a priest you love. So you could pay the expenses or help encourage a priest to take the time to go on the retreat. That might also give him the tools he needs for his Sunday homily, which will downstream affect your life for the better. So again, that information is available at Saint Paul Center dot com slash priests. One other quick announcement. This one’s about Godsplaining. We have an upcoming event, it’s really fun when we do these in person events, it’s great to meet new people who listen to the show, we have a Day of Recollection in New York City at the fantastic St. Joseph Church in Greenwich Village that will be on Saturday, October 19th. More information about that can be found at godsplaining.org/events.
Fr. Bonaventure: There we go. Done. Out of the way.
Fr. Patrick: All the work. Finished. Fr. Bonaventure, what was the most difficult job you had growing up?
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, good question. Difficult. I mean, I moved large dog food bags around for a while, but that was pleasurable.
Fr. Patrick: That was at a pet store?
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I was working at a pet store.
Fr. Patrick: A pet store would be a fun job.
Fr. Bonaventure: They didn’t really have animals though. I guess McDonald’s, there were certain aspects that were disgusting about it.
Fr. Patrick: You worked at McDonald’s?
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I worked at McDonald’s. So I remember on my first day, I remember having to take out large bags of trash or something, and then had to like step on them to get them into the trash bins the big containers and my foot went right through into just ton of muck and sludge such like this I pulled out it’s up like up to the knee in this you know it just got back on the uniform and all this sort of thing now my my foot’s wet for the entire day and cover with the disgusting stuff. So that was that was like gross, but I mean, but it wasn’t a bad job. It was a nice, yeah, it was pleasant. Menial labor is fun, just doing random things and small cleaning tasks and making burgers and customer service. I was put on customer service quite early because I could talk reasonably with people and be friendly. So yeah, that’s, I think that’s probably the, I mean, the most drudgery job and you just always smelled like onions because of the refrigerators and such. And they always burn my hands with on the, on the, uh, little grill thing. Hot oil would fly everywhere. So still have a few burns on that. But I mean, it’s not nothing really. –
Fr. Patrick: Easily the best and worst job I had was that summer after my senior in high school, I was a camp counselor at a Boy Scouts of America camp, so that was before this Scouts for America or American Scouting or America for Scouts or whatever it is now. Back when Boy Scouting was for men, and that was a great experience. So I was a waterfront counselor and then taught other scouting, traditional scanning skills like lashing and knots and how to start a fire with nothing. All those great life skills you use everyday. [laughs]
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, you know, as Apocalypse happens, I’m coming up to find out how to start a fire.
Fr. Patrick: So I really love that job, but by far the worst part of it was helping campers check out. And that was on Saturday mornings, and it was a couple hours of cleaning at a summer camp, which included things like checking latrines, and hauling trash, and…
Fr. Bonaventure: Nothing like cleaning bathrooms.
Fr. Patrick: …we had a couple incidents that were every bit as disgusting as you were describing. But I think this episode is important because there’s a lot of Marxist language in the culture today. And I think people aren’t aware of just how much this impacts them in radical ways. So for people just tuning into the conversation, just thinking about Marx as something other than a kind of slur or a buzzword. What is it that they need to know, Father Bonaventure, tee this up for us.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, the first thing is I suspect most people don’t really read or understand Marx, who use Marxist language. I mean, there are certain large scale things, but under any great philosopher or any great thinker, many schools will form, so many people call themselves Aristotelian, but they might be very different from other Aristotelians, same thing with Thomists or Comptians, true very much so with Marxists. So you have people saying they’re Marxist, when actually, it’s to read the text myself and teach in Marx, I teach Marx at the CUA, not explicitly, I’m not exclusively, I do teach me explicitly, Uncle Karl…
Fr. Patrick: But you’re not looking to recruit people to be Marxist, so let’s clarify that.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s the thing, in so far, well, only in so far as Marxists are Aristotelians, yes, and turns out there’s a lot of relationship between the two, but in so far as Marxist are, it’s just revolutionary, kind of proletariat, take down the bourgeoisie, sort of thing. They don’t realize Marx is not a revolutionary for like revolutionaries sake. He has a larger vision, which is largely tapped into what it means to be a human. When you read Marx actually, if you read the Communist Manifesto, you get like a podcast version of someone’s actual lectures. It’s inflammatory. But when you actually read the 1844 manuscripts or the preface to political economy or the German ideology or whatever you might be in Marx, you realize this is a profound German thinker and he has a real attentiveness to what it means to be a human and that so many of his would be disciples just aren’t attentive to those aspects of it. So he has something of a similar vision to Aristotle in the sense of the point of humanity is to get to a certain flourishing. And it just so happens that he thinks that communism is that kind of utopian flourishing. But again, most people think of communism as this like socialist, maybe North Korea, like everyone looking the same and sort of thing, top down to tall tarotism. And Marx has no vision for that. Marx’s vision, he says it in the German ideology, is that he wants you to be able to, I think it’s hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and critique in the evening, like that you are free as an individual to do anything that you want to develop your capacities to be a hunter, a fisher, and a philosopher that everyone has this ability.
Fr. Patrick: So, first of all, you know, I need to address this claim you’ve made that podcasts are inflammatory. We would never, we would never just sit down in front of the camera, pull up to a microphone and start talking. We would never do that and say inflammatory things by that action. Okay. So that moving on though to this important claim that you laid out is that Marx actually is establishing and launching a vision of what it means to be human.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s right.
Fr. Patrick: And in these latter points, you gave something that is not altogether offensive to me. This idea that human life is something that comprises this balance of hunting, fishing, and critiquing, or as we might put it more simply, work and leisure. And that they’re both in there, because if you’d asked me like, what’s the fundamental goal of Marx, I would have said…
Fr. Bonaventure: Revolution probably, right?
Fr. Patrick: Revolution. Yeah, absolutely, we would have said it.
Fr. Bonaventure: That is not the end, there’s a means to you.
Fr. Patrick: So you’ve already convicted me, corrected my interpretation there in a really important way. But this vision that he’s offering of the human being is not altogether compatible, it’s not altogether incompatible. It goes both ways with the vision of human life as proposed by the church, especially by Pope John Paul II. So one thing that I think we should do here as the conversation goes on is kind of line up some of these real points of tension or points of overlap as it may be. As we get into them, we’ll find similarities and differences. We might even find that the biggest differences are similarities.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes, who knew?
Fr. Patrick: Anything could be possible. But we could get into, we could get into the reality of work, how we understand it today, how John Paul II understands it, and how Marx understands it, and then see downstream how some of the effects of this understanding of work and things like the development of technology influence our understanding of culture.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think if there’s two, you know, point to moment, bring about what Marx is right about or two things that be helpful that we learn from Marx and not from just Marx, but that he makes highlights is the issue of work and alienation and what it means to be a human. And then of course, as the second point you could say is culture and its relationship to technology and say, sub-rational processes. And the first one he seems to be in lockstep with say, the John Paul II, surprisingly. And the second one we’d want to qualify a bit, although his insights are significant. So I remember teaching this came up because while teaching, I have my students write a paper on, comparing John Paul II to some of the philosophers we read. And one of the, and then I wrote a short paper for them to just display what might be a good idea. What it might look like, a paper, sort of thing. And I was shocked at how looking at John Paul II’s 1981 and cyclical Labor Exertions, so on human labor, human work, how Marxist it sounded after having taught and teaching Marx and how some of the same themes about work and alienation came up. So I just titled this little thing, “John Paul the Marxist?” John Paul the Marxist in question mark. Because generally think of John Paul II, we think of the anti-Marxist, the man who one of the three great leaders who brought down communism uh… in in in the soviet union and such and so obviously anti-Marxist and his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus celebrates the end of of communism and Marxism in a sense so i was shocked to find actually deep down uh… they have a similar vision of what it means to be human in many ways, although it gets played out very differently.
Fr. Patrick: So is John Paul II a Marxist?
Fr. Bonaventure: In a way, yes.
Fr. Patrick: [laughs] In a way, yes. All right. Well, let’s take a look at him. So I’ve got some quotes that, you know, I’m going to, throw at you. Let’s do it. I think one, one is very important for our understanding of the human being, right? And is fundamental to Thomists, which is that man is made in the image of God. You know, this of course, scriptural, it’s biblical. It’s part of Catholic doctrine more broadly, but it’s a really important idea for Thomists. John Paul II in this encyclical, letter in Labor Exertions, “Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate the earth and carrying out this mandate, man every being reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe.” Part of our being made in the image of God then seems to mean that we must take on work. This is a creative responsibility we have is not just an urge we have it’s not simply an impulse but it’s part and parcel of our flourishing and something about us is incomplete if we don’t do it.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, this is right jump all the second in that in the circle makes a good point that we are working animals homo-laborans and that we are to do this because we are different from other animals, for instance. And you think, well, of course, other animals work, beavers make dams and sort of things. But that’s not really the work that a human does. A human does a work in a way of creating something oftentimes new, inventing, developing, whereas animals, they do work, but it’s kind of moving around. It’s not a project. They don’t have aims and intentions other than just kind of natural instinctual stuff. What John Paul II points out is that as humans work is not just a punishment, of course, that the quality of work and the type of work we do that Genesis about is now taking on a certain stress and strain, but rather the fact that we are to be workers, co-vice regents, I think is one of the terms. So we rule and dominate in a way that animals don’t dominate. A lion might dominate you in some ways by eating you. But it doesn’t dominate you in the sense of rational control, of organizing and going up. Whereas humans, when we do work, we’re ideally bringing something new in fruition and we’re making a place more human and more humane.
Fr. Patrick: So hear me out on this. I think that the kind of work an animal does is more like what artificial intelligence can do. So we have here the House of Studies these big gothic alcoves, these large entrances that lead to some of the side doors of the house. And they’ve had these beautiful Victorian light fixtures in them. They were open to the air. And for years, birds have come and made their nests in these light fixtures. They were thwarted by our excellent procurator, the Economic Administrative of our community, who recently installed new light fixtures that have little hats, lids, roofs, if you will. And it is no longer possible for these birds to build their nests in the light fixtures. Anyway, what I noticed is that every year the bird built the nest in the same place in the light fixture and the nest looked exactly the same. You know, birds are not capable of running Zillow. Where they, where you would produce like a whole app of houses, a whole index of creative points, right? And so animals just kind of do these things by instinct and then there’s a difference there. That qualitatively, you know, it won’t work means. –
Fr. Bonaventure: They don’t, they don’t transform, you could say, the structure of their life through this work. They do things to get things done to sustain basic principles. Whereas man transforms not only the environment in the world around him through domination and subjugation and through the culturalization, all this, but actually himself through this. We work on ourselves as we are working. It’s our work expresses who we are. That’s why it’s not strange when you ask someone, you meet them with their name, and you say, “What do you do?” Now obviously we don’t always identify with our jobs, but it seems a natural thing to ask, “Well, what is your work?” That’s not random that has to do with you. I think this is one of the key points to Marx’s critique, which is I think right on, or at least it’s significant, and JP II uses this language of alienation, which people are familiar with, that in Marx’s critique of capitalism is that in capitalism, because of the division of labor, because of these economies of scale, we become alienated from our work, not only in the products, people always go to this first step. He has a fourfold alienation. And people think, “Oh, it’s just an alienation from your products, like the workers should own more of their stuff.” And they shouldn’t just be paid wages, but they should be able to sell what they — So the product side of alienation. Like, you make something that doesn’t belong to you. What belongs to you is the wages. Really, all your labor belongs to you. But Marx actually has four alienation points, and that’s the simplest one, the product one. He also says that we’re alienated from our producing. So this is what JPII calls the subjective side of work. So our work, when it becomes in certain capitalistic systems and division of labor, so monotonous that it could be done by a machine, then is it really human work? And Marx says what capitalism tends to do because of its economies of scale is to make work in-human, not just like factory labels, you know, dangers, but actually just pulling a lever all the time. If you could be replaced by a machine, then that work is not expressing homo-laborans who you are.
Fr. Patrick: Right. Let’s get a little bit more into this because you know, as we were talking about our summer jobs, there’s some things about that kind of work that’s difficult, but also we wanna say that a job like that is actually good for us. In growth, I’m sure your father would say that it was good for you to work with McDonald’s. My father would say, that it was good for me to have worked at the summer camp. Maybe John Paul II’s father said it was good for you to work at the quarry. Maybe President Biden’s father said it was good for him to have learned to drive a Mac truck. Or whatever story is being told there. So the reality is that there’s a certain growth that can happen from even pretty menial work. So refine that point a little bit. What’s the difference between that kind of argument of the way that even a kind of simplistic work builds-billed character and the argument you’re advancing, which is that that kind of work actually is alienating from our identities as human beings?
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, so this is a danger with, and this is where I would critique Marx or at least raise questions about him, is that Marx seems to have everything from a bottom-up perspective so that your consciousness and your free choices to take on things to shape even how your own awareness of work is. He doesn’t seem interested inthat. It’s the work is driving everything from bottom up, whereas we believe that we have a rational soul, spiritual and material, blah, blah, blah. We can take work up into us just like we take our passions up to us and redirect them. So even in the menial job, although, and this is a good point, it drives towards or can easily fall into in-human, I’m just a cog in the wheel kind of thing. One at some point can also draw up those jobs and see oneself as learning the virtues from them of responsibility, of taking pride in particular things, which is a subjective work. It’s not just putting in time, but it can be that. But what I think Marx is right is that the more menial the task gets, the more it requires of someone to do the hard subjective work of making this a valuable occupation. I think we’ve all met people who take what we would think of as menial tasks or minimum wage jobs very seriously because they take pride in that and they see the virtues of that. But it’s not a given and those people are not the majority. Marx is right, I think, to say that the majority will just kind of slouch towards Gomorrah in this way.
Fr. Patrick: Right. John Paul II says, “Because as the image of God man is a person that is to say a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself and with the tendency to self-realization, as a person, man is therefore the subject of work.” And so what I hear you advancing is saying that that this is really important because of our rationality, because of the way that that allows us to orient the horizons of our life and to perfect ourselves, to build up virtues, which of course rely on our rationality, and make us more completely who we are. I love this example though, that you’re pointing to the sort of person that does a job that might seem simple but does it very well. I mean we’re becoming increasingly reliant on certain kinds of what might be described as blue-collar labor but are increasingly less so because of the theuneration, which is being afforded them. But jobs like plumbing, heating, cooling, these are great jobs. They’re very noble. And they’re, I think, noble for this reason because they afford, they afford man to use his rationality. Like you call in a plumber, you’ve got, you’ve got a problem. You need someone who can solve a problem in a way that a machine as of yet can’t solve and can’t diagnose a problem. And so for that reason, plumbing is kind of glorious work because it engages rationality, right? The problem is solving. And then the self-realization, we’re depending on the plumber. All of society needs this man, it needs this job.
Fr. Bonaventure: And that is the subjective side of things that the work is that man is not for work, but work is for man. It’s like Sabbath and the Son of Man. So that work is intended to do work on us. Like when we’re doing this with the difference between Poises, the making, and Proxis, the doing. Right? So when we’re working, it’s not just a making of something external object, rather it’s a doing that shapes us. And the concern of both JP II and Marx is that this can in the modern economy become forgotten and drudgery and the way it shapes us can actually be vicious in that way. Now, this is not against, of course, capitalism as a, as a economic system, but a danger in it is that it can alienate not only our products most, but again, our producing. And even who we are, Marx talks about this deeper alienation of our “gattungswesen”, the species being, the sense that we are being that are rational and that by certain work and in attentiveness to that work as a subjective force, we are actually becoming less rational, becoming more just like regular or humdrum animals. So our species, the human species, is falling down into lower species.
Fr. Patrick: I will say this is one of the reasons why I like, in Germany, the fact that people wear uniforms, they wear them proudly. I like this very much because you can see a kind of nobility behind the sort of work that’s done and the recognition of this. And, you know, workers walking with a clean uniform, there’s something very distinguished about it.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that’s right.
Fr. Patrick: Okay, now to plug into them and go a little bit deeper into this point that you’ve raised, you’ve suggested that one of the concerns here with Marx that was that things get impacted in culture from the bottom up, that there are effects to a kind of understanding of work that find their way into our culture. And you know, John Paul II is very concerned, especially about the way that work impacts family life. So I’m wondering if you can, if you can show us a little bit about what Marx was or wasn’t concerned about the family and how John Paul II does or doesn’t agree.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, here’s another, so here’s another insight that I think is helpful to Marx and that we need to extend with him to just critique a little bit with JPII because JPII has a notion of freedom that Marx doesn’t have. And we’ll get to that in a second. But first is that Marx has this idea that the cultural life, social life, philosophical life, all of that is a third level. It’s like the third level in a house. It’s built upon an economic structure level, so the way we trade money in our products and things. And that’s built on the basement, the fundamental core of just technology and productive forces, the way energy is organized. And he thinks that actually it’s all bottom up, such that when technology is moving forward, the productive forces demand a new economy, revolutions happen because the old economy isn’t ready for this, and so it fetters it. But the cash value, of course, is that above it, the conscious life stuff, family, society, cultures, that’s all just growing out from the battle between the economic and the technological stuff. So that in a sense, it’s not chosen, but rather just determined by this way in a materialistic sense. Now, on the from the Catholic side of things, we want to say that actually freedom has a top down aspect that we can determine downward in our conscious life. But what I do think is important about Marx’s vision is that if we’re not careful, if we’re not careful, it is true that the bottom up stuff can determine the top down stuff. So for instance, Marx raises questions to the family and his, his critique of the of the bourgeois family, the traditional family, father, son, and mother and all of this. And his critique is that this is a family structure fitted for an older economy for a feudalistic agrarian all this and dad out working the fields, that’s the reason why we think of the traditional family is because of the traditional economic structure. But with capitalism and with whatever might come next, now that we’ve treating men and women the same factory work, children and factories, now that we change the economic structures and production things, actually it’s not surprising that our notions of divorce and family life and roles have also been changed. What’s interesting is he thinks that’s deterministic in the sense that like, you can’t fight it. I think we want to say with JPII because of freedom, because we do have an immaterial aspect that helps top down business, is to say, it’s a threat. It’s a danger. And we’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t think that our economic structures and the ways of our economic production relate and have effects if we’re not careful on how we think about family structures and societal structures and cultural structures. And I think Marx pulls back the curtain a little bit and helps us see that actually there is, there can be a real bottom up formation here that we slide into if we’re not attentive to.
Fr. Patrick: So to begin to wrap up here, so what do listeners need to walk away from? What’s the greatest similarity between John Paul II and Karl Marx and what’s the greatest difference?
Fr. Bonaventure: I think the greatest similarity is gotta be the focus on work as being a part of our essence. That work isn’t something that we were stuck with for now, but rather working is a subjective aspect of being who we are, and therefore how we work, and in what ways we work and how we can see ourselves as working, is important to who we are. That seems to be the similarities between them. The difference, of course, I think is that from Marx, you have a sort of deterministic, materialistic determination of all things such that the future societal structures, religion, morality, all of that is really determined by technology and economics battling it out in those lower floors of life. Whereas, JP II wants to say, “Actually, we have freedom. We can say no to particular types of organizations of society. And even we can say no in our own lives to particular sort of cultural arrangements. And then that’s not a matter of fettering the productive forces, but actually directing them to where they ought to be because of the notions of original sin that Marx is probably not inclined to think of very significant, we do take very seriously.
Fr. Patrick: In conclusion, join the revolution – sort of. Friends, I just wanted to thank you for tuning in for this episode of Godsplaining. Follow us on Facebook, the social media platform, X, Instagram, and wherever else we are. Like, subscribe and leave a five-star review. If you’d like to make a donation to our podcast, you can do so through Patreon, follow the link in the description. You can also follow links in the description to shop Godsplaining merch and to get information on upcoming Godsplaining events, like our day of recollection on October 19th in New York City at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. In the meantime friends, we are working for you. We are praying for you. We ask that you would pray for us. God bless.