The last two decades have seen an increase in calls to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor from authors who share Catholic Social Teaching (CST) with their readers.
Freedom and the Market
The Encyclical of Pope Francis “Laudato Si” is a comprehensive look at how all people need to respond to these existential challenges. Alex Mikulich, an anti-racist Roman Catholic social ethicist and activist and author of Unlearning White Supremacy: A Spirituality for Racial Liberation, from Orbis Books in spring 2022, writes that Laudato Si' calls us to radical abundance through economic 'degrowth'. Degrowth is perhaps the most undervalued insight of Pope Francis' encyclical "Laudato Sí', on Care for Our Common Home." Francis promotes degrowth because the "environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces."
Environment and Market Forces
Degrowth, an alternative way of being oriented toward radical abundance, began to emerge 50 years ago with the Club of Rome's 1968 study, The Limits to Growth, which documented the devastating ecological implications of unabated economic growth. In his recent primer on degrowth, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel explains degrowth.
Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that's fizzing with life. Growth for its own sake, Hickel laments, creates more "illth than wealth," when the ongoing pursuit of growth in high-income nations produces more inequality and instability, stress and depression from overwork, and increasing pollution and ill health.1Mikulich draws some terms from Raj Patel and Jason Moore, The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet.)
The Anishinaabeg, whose original lands were in northeastern America (now Canada), have the word minobimaatisiiwin, which means "a continuous rebirth of reciprocal and cyclical relations between human and other life." In southern African regions, Bantu languages have ubuntu, meaning human fulfillment through togetherness, and the Shona have ukama, which indicates "the interrelatedness of the entire cosmos, including the biophysical world." The Chinese shi-shi wu-ai and Maori term mauri express "interrelatedness through the entire life force of the cosmos." 1Matt Mazewski, a PhD student in economics at Columbia University and rapporteur of the University Seminar on Catholicism, Culture, and Modernity, reviews Freedom from the Market, America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand, by Mike Konczal. He hopes that Mike Konczal’s careful study of American history can help recover a forgotten tradition in our politics, and that his “Polanyi-ish and Pollyanna-ish” lens can reveal to a wider audience the many ways in which contemporary ideologies obscure important truths about the economy and society. In Freedom from the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand, the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal sets out to demonstrate how, “for all the language about how markets open up opportunities, they also create dependencies as well.” Konczal credits an acquaintance with helping him to refine his “Polanyi-ish, and Pollyanna-ish, thinking,” a reference to the twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi, whose ideas permeate the book.
In his introduction, Konczal lays out five key reasons why “freedom requires the suppression of the market”: (1) markets allocate even essential and life-sustaining goods on the basis of ability to pay, rather than need; (2) they are less effective and efficient than the state at providing certain goods and services, such as health insurance, because of the logic of what economists would refer to as “market failures”; (3) market interactions, and in particular the employment relationship, can often be occasions of “domination by the will of others”; (4) the creeping commodification of everything “leaves no reward for things that don’t function as commodities,” such as the unpaid labor of those who raise children or care for elderly or disabled family members; and (5) markets themselves cannot function without state action, like that required to enforce contracts, protect property rights, or maintain a stable currency.2Freedom from the Market offers a refreshing corrective to “anti-Polanyian” thinking.
The perspectives on political economy, in Freedom from the Market, and its idea of freedom as requiring far more than just the absence of external coercion, lines up quite well with that of Catholic social thought.
The late Canadian theologian Fr. Gregory Baum wrote of the “affinity” that exists between the thought of Polanyi and that of Pope Francis, even if there exists no evidence of a direct influence of the former on the latter. Likewise, an article published in the Atlantic a few months after Francis’s election commented on the efforts to label the pope a Marxist, and instead offered “a case for the pontiff’s debt not to Karl Marx but to Karl Polanyi.”2The warning in Laudato Si that reliance on market solutions for climate change, environmental degradation, water resource protection, and loss of biodiversity point to concern of a lack of a response in harmony with Catholic Social Teaching to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.
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