Living The Worthy Life: Sheen V Marx Who Was Right After A ll?

Growing up as a member of the Baby Boom Generation, I never was captured by the spirit of Communism or Socialism.  Many of the areas where my relatives came from were the same areas that now were under the yoke of Communism- North Korea, Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, China, and Russia. I learned first-hand what my distant cousins were going through on a daily basis.  

Fast forward to this generation.  It has been thirty years since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  It is almost 30 years since the USSR fell (1991).  Now, most people in education (both students and teachers) have little personal knowledge of what horrors of Communism were actually like.  In fact, among the young today 18-25 voters, they are the largest supports of the candidates who are advocating large government socialist programs.  

Of course, they do not call it socialism or communism, they call it neat terms like Universal Health Care or Free College.  No matter what you call it.  It is still socialism. 

Basically modern socialists are utopians. When Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez was questioned in July 2019 on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah about how to source the taxes for state-provided education and health care, her response was “Somewhere.”   
 
That is right, money grows on trees.  Pope Leo XIII, who established the Feast of the Holy Family in 1893, warned against socialism actively destroying the family. He explained, “The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.” While Leo XIII defended the natural family, socialism is about the state’s redefinition of family.  

Friedrich Engels, whose “Origin of the Family” was published seven years before “Rerum Novarum,” claimed that capitalism was the “defeat of the female sex… The woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for breeding children.” Marx and Engels claimed that in an ideal socialistic society, divorce would be easy, there would be “open marriages” of a sort, and the state would be in charge of childrearing. The state would supplant the family. The weakening of the family unit leaves people vulnerable to socialism’s seduction. 

Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote in his 1948 book, Communism and the Conscience of the West, "As Western civilization loses its Christianity it loses its superiority." "The Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made to the image and likeness of God and reduced him... to a component part of the universe... This distortion of the true nature of man was due principally to the philosophy of historical liberalism, which saw man as endowed with no higher destiny than the economic. There is no word more "dangerous" than liberalism because to oppose it is a new "unforgivable sin." 

Now fast forward to today, things are much different. Marx has found a new life and the Church is going through some very rough times.  Today, educators are teaching that the Church is evil and Socialism is good. To understand a great deal more on this subject all one has to do is to look more closely at the events that took place on May 29, 2015, at the Left Forum in New York City, when Chris Hedges joined professors Richard Wolff and Gail Dines to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing. The following are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion at that meeting. 

Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called "the bourgeois mode of production." He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction.  

He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since "the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" and "the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships ... the relationships which make one class the ruling one."  

He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was "an astronomer of history, not an astrologer." Marx was keenly aware of capitalism's ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism's most prescient and important critic. 
 
In a preface to "The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" Marx wrote: 

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. 
 
Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. 

Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development. That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when. We are called to study Marx to be ready. 
 
The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism. 
 
But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on the scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes. 
 
Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature. 
 
Marx warned that in the latter stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe," he wrote. "It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere." These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPP and CAFTA to further weaken the nation-state's ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end, these corporate monopolies would obliterate the free-market competition. 
 
A May 22, 2015 editorial in The New York Times gives us a window into what Marx said would characterize the late stages of capitalism: 

As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world's currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good. 

The Times goes on: 

The banks will pay fines totaling about $9 billion, assessed by the Justice Department as well as state, federal and foreign regulators. That seems like a sweet deal for a scam that lasted for at least five years, from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2013, during which the banks' revenue from foreign exchange was some $85 billion. 

The final stages of what we call capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all. Corporations gobble down government expenditures, in essence, taxpayer money, like pigs at a trough. The arms industry with its official $612 billion defense authorization bill—which ignores numerous other military expenditures tucked away in other budgets, raising our real expenditure on national security expenses to over $1 trillion a year—has gotten the government this year to commit to spending $348 billion over the next decade to modernize our nuclear weapons and build 12 new Ohio-class nuclear submarines, estimated at $8 billion each. Exactly how these two massive arms programs are supposed to address what we are told is the greatest threat of our time—the war on terror—is a mystery. After all, as far as I know, ISIS does not own a rowboat. We spend some $100 billion a year on intelligence—read surveillance—and 70 percent of that money goes to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, [which] gets 99 percent of its revenues from the U.S. government. And on top of this, we are the largest exporters of arms in the world. 

Bishop Sheen concluded, ¨Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. The industrial civilization of the Western world has no intent to destroy man's freedom or to deny his personality. But Communism does. Denying God, it reduces man to a robot.¨ 

Bishop Sheen saw what was about to happen to the American family and the country.  He saw what was about to happen to our Government.  He saw what was going to happen to our Church.  Now, my question to you would be, why postpone his beatification?  He clearly understood more what is going on today than we do.