Rundale

By Patrick Doyle

Creative Commons, Lucas Aerospace Workers Road-Rail Bus, Bishops Lydeard, WSR 27.7.1980

This September two articles appeared in the international media that linked Catholicism to two distinct cultural phenomena of 2024. Both reveal the continued relevance of religious morality today, even within a nominally secular society, but offer radically different visions of the way cultural Catholicism manifests in the world.

The first outlined a disturbing trend amongst a cohort of right-wing politicians and grifters who adopt a Catholic pose. In Vanity Fair, Kathryn Joyce explored how people like JD Vance, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon have seemingly assumed the mantle of Catholicism intent on conducting a so-called ‘culture war’. Some leading American Catholics view Pope Francis’s emphasis on questions around the environment and poverty as a sign he is a ‘Marxist globalist’ or ‘antipope’. This performative confessionalism shows how religion is linked to the politics of a new right. But what of those of a different political persuasion?

A second, closer-to-home article, offered an alternative viewpoint when author Sally Rooney stated ‘there is something Christian about my work, even if I would not describe myself as religious’. Rooney remains opposed to Church teaching on issues like abortion and gay relationships but sees Christianity as a hallmark of her work and acknowledges ‘its centrality to my ethical life’. The Catholic values in which she was raised represent ‘a really beautiful, rich and worthwhile spiritual and intellectual tradition of thinking about ethics, about our relations with other people.’

Can the Church’s ethical insights help us to address the most pressing questions of today, particularly those that stem from our current socioeconomic model? Looking back to a time when committed (and cultural) Catholics worked to reform capitalism can help us imagine different ways to organise society in the present and provide tools necessary to critique the morbid symptoms that define our contemporary polycrisis.

Over a century ago, the tradition of Catholic social teaching inspired various intellectuals and activists to embark upon the work of ‘social reconstruction’. This amounted to the wholesale reimagining of property ownership, the promotion of co-operatives and worker-managed industries, as well as using technology to support human flourishing and the common good. It was through such moral arguments that some Irish thinkers prioritised human dignity over the pursuit of an economy predicated on non-redistributive growth. The rest of this article examines how workplaces became sites of moral contestation where living wages, alternative relationships to technology, and greater worker ownership were viewed as signs of a just society.

A Living Wage

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church developed a moral critique of capitalism and its acquisitive rationale. Deeply concerned with the effects of spiritual and moral desolation fostered in capitalism’s wake, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum crystallised a body of thought that prescribed a way for Catholics to behave in the world. While charting a path between capitalism and socialism, it nevertheless set forth a series of rights and obligations for labour and capital that encouraged an emerging generation to think outside the constraints of economic orthodoxy and engage with material issues in rather radical ways.    

One person was John Ryan, an Irish American priest, who campaigned for living wage laws and greater social welfare protections that saw him attain the nickname of the “Right Reverend New Dealer”. Ryan was energised by Rerum Novarum, writing his doctorate on the moral necessity of living wage legislation. Writing in 1906, Ryan set out the case for a living wage and Catholic engagement with the cause of social justice arguing ‘religion, as represented by the oldest and largest of the Christian denominations … urges a definite and considerable measure of industrial justice.’

According to Ryan, every worker deserved a living wage that provided enough to live in dignity (not just subsist) by virtue of the fact the produce of one’s labour was not only a consumable good or service, but a living expression of the human personality. This meant, regardless of the social status attached to a profession, a worker’s claim to a dignified wage was irrefutable: ‘the right to a Living Wage is individual, natural and absolute.’

While this was not a cause taken up by a majority of clergy and laity, those who did were seasoned polemicists who promoted this strand of Catholic thought with tenacity. The Irish Dominican preacher, Vincent McNabb, stated the case for a living wage as one of the most pressing economic obligations to be acquitted. He argued in print and as a habitué of London’s Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park that ‘I believe that a Living Wage of the worker is the first charge upon the work, and therefore upon the national Income which is the result of work.’

Against Human Machinery

McNabb also observed what he believed were the dehumanising consequences of the capitalist economic system. To him, the great moral challenge was to preserve the human essence within the practice of work. In his essay ‘Human Machinery’ McNabb argued ‘there is a danger that industrialism, which has degraded qualitative production into quantitative, and has substituted token wealth for real wealth, may arrest the crystallization of peace by seeing everything in the artificial light of the factory and by stating even human activity in terms of a machine.’ McNabb even saw a person’s unwillingness to work as an important feature of humanity: ‘Perhaps the wages are all right, but work has got on his nerves, or he wants to get drunk to forget being jilted … or any of the ten thousand psychological “jams” that never trouble the interior of an AI machine.’ It was fear of a worker resembling an artificial intelligence that McNabb identified as a moral hazard within capitalism.  

Ryan and McNabb captured something of the mood for those whose criticisms of the economic system were moralised. These arguments found a new valency in the Great War’s aftermath, in  a pamphlet titled Social Reconstruction. In this work, Ryan put forth elements of what a post-war order should be. ‘The only safeguard of peace is social justice and a contented people’, Ryan told his readers while setting out measures that included a demand for universal living wages, legal enforcement of the right for trade union organisation across all sectors, the establishment of co-operative businesses and worker-managed industries, and the elimination of monopolies through state regulation and replacement by publicly owned alternatives. In short, a template for much more economic democracy was outlined. Thus, a vision of enhanced worker involvement in co-ordinating economic development was put forward, but hardly implemented in the ensuing years.

Human-Centred Technology

Moving forward in time, the potential for reimagining the social purpose of business through a new relationship between workers and technology was experimented with in the 1970s. In Britain, there were attempts to democratise a corporation associated with the production of military hardware. A chief organiser of this move to a model of worker management was Mike Cooley. Born and raised in Tuam and educated in the same Christian Brothers school as playwright Tom Murphy, Cooley established himself as an engineer, trade unionist, and original thinker on the relationship between humans and technology.

In January 1976, trade union shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace Corporation published an alternative plan for the company. The owners of Lucas had announced a restructuring of the business that would result in mass redundancies. In response, the shop stewards surveyed their members to understand what type of business they would run if granted power to set a new direction. Known as the Lucas Plan, this document established a blueprint for a radical reorientation away from building engines, planes, and military hardware towards socially useful production. This included technologies that might be described nowadays as climate conscious: wind turbines, energy-efficient homes, hybrid vehicles that travelled by rail and road. Workers built some protypes to win support for their ideas. However, the fact the approach circumvented the established hierarchies of management and traditional union leaders, meant the plan remained unimplemented.

In his pioneering book, Architect or Bee?, Cooley exemplified a perspective on work and human dignity that could be understood as part of a longer genealogy of Catholic Social Teaching. Cooley set out in the book’s opening pages:

‘The very first issue to tackle is our overweening faith in science and in technological change. Science is a shallow and arid soil in which to transplant the sensitive and precious roots of our humanity. Faith is indeed the correct word to use in this context. Science and technology are now leading edges in society in rather the same way religion was in medieval times.’ (2016 [1980], 8).

He believed an existential challenge that faced human society was our relationship to technological change. Far from exhibiting scepticism about the role technology could play in society, Cooley argued that it needed to be human-centred and used in ways that delivered socially valuable production. However, he argued the rollout of technology under capitalism prevented workers from contributing creatively to society through their work and talents.

One aspect of the Lucas Plan noted by Cooley was that trusting in the creativity of workers created opportunities to demonstrate they were concerned by environmental issues, the wider communities in which they lived, and in dealing with the ‘problems of growing structural unemployment they could use their skills and talents to support less fortunate sectors of the community.’ (2016,177). Cooley’s was a wholly different conception of work compared to today, but it was one in which echoed a vibrant moral tradition apparent since the late-nineteenth century.  

The fact Cooley does not frame his arguments in the language preferred by some of the earlier Catholic social theorists does not matter. What they shared was a desire to enshrine a living wage and dignity at work as a way to recognise the importance of an individual’s personality. It is striking to see how Cooley’s ideas were anticipated by Paschal Larkin, a Capuchin monk and university economist, who argued in 1917 that  ‘under the present capitalistic system there is very little account taken of the human element in industry. … In recent years the workers are not so much interested in receiving an increase in wages as they are in obtaining some control over the circumstances of their life and labour.’

We are living through a time of environmental collapse, violent dehumanisation, and undeserved faith placed in the rollout of AI systems and technology of dubious social value. Sally Rooney’s recent comments act as a timely reminder that thinking through a set of ethical dispositions, we are forced to reckon with what social justice actually looks like in practice. Thinking about how workplaces and technology should be humanised remains an important resource of hope and action.