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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 21, 23 May 1949, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Four hundred employers from all over the world were told exactly what they had come to hear last week in Vatican City: namely, that “free initiative of individuals” and not socialism is the key to economic progress.
The speaker who addressed these employers was Eugenio Pacelli, who is better known as Pope Pius XII in his capacity as head of the Roman Catholic Church.
According to the Associated Press, Pacelli told the employers that there is in the world today an “opinion, unhappily too widely spread, that between them [workers and employers] there is an irreducible opposition of divergent interest” and that this opinion is “erroneous and bad in its consequences.”
Pleading for elimination of mutual suspicion by workers and employers, Pacelli said the answer to the world’s economic ills must be found in employer-worker relationships which preserve the authority of the employer while providing for “the prosperity of all the members of the people.”
It is assumed that the employers were highly pleased by this speech. We might wonder whether or not the workers tramping the Ford picket line at the time the speech was delivered could agree that the important thing for prosperity is to ensure the “authority of the employer.” If the organized auto workers had not “usurped” some of that authority or at least “infringed” upon it in their contract, they would have no defense against the speedup today and wage cuts tomorrow.
The same is true for the idea put forth by Pacelli that workers and employers really have the same fundamental interests. To be sure, many workers and even labor leaders of high position share in this opinion. Unfortunately, very few employers are of the same mind, although they are always glad to spread the idea among their help.
But when it gets right down to cases, the employer is absolutely convinced that it is his job to produce dividends, and that any means to that
end is justified. Thus when profits fall, he throws workers out on the street (and their families on relief rolls), speeds up the work, and cuts wages. The only thing which limits his production of profits at the expense of his workers is the power of their organization.
For the employers know very well (their bookkeepers can show it to them in the book balances at any time) that both wages and profits have to come from the same place. There is no way around that fact under the “free enterprise” system, and no economist has found a way around it, and no religious leader has been able to exorcize it.
If profits and wages have to be drawn from the same kitty, at any given time more profits mean less wages, and more wages mean less profits. If the kitty is big, both may be able to get along. But when things begin to contract a. little, there suddenly appears an “irreducible opposition of divergent interest.” The worker wants a living wage and employment, and the employer wants a profit, regardless.
Pacelli had quite a bit more to say, according to the papers, but we don’t have space to comment on all of it. He spoke against “statism,” and we’re against that too. He said that “the economy is not by nature an institution of the state; it is, to the contrary, the living product of the free initiative of individuals and groups freely constituted.”
Well, we don’t rightly know what the economy is “by nature.” We hope, indeed, that some day it may become “the living product of the free initiative of individuals and groups freely constituted,” and that’s why we are for socialism.
One of the chief reasons for our determination to put an end to the system of capitalism is precisely that under this form of economy the vast majority of individuals cannot exercise any “free initiative” at all. (Just try a little “free initiative” on any assembly line in the country.)
“Free initiative” under this system is reserved solely to the biggest banks, corporations and bureaucratic governments. Those who can exercise it are a tiny minority of the population and they exercise it without any consultation with the majority, and, in fact, at their expense.
We note that the big employer- controlled press gives Pacelli’s economic opinions front-page space. For workers, the result of accepting these economic opinions is simply to disarm them in the face of the employers. This is just as true for those workers who accept the religious leadership of Pope Pius XII as it is for those workers who do not.
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Last updated: 1 August 2019