Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s socio-economic thought is found in his books, “Rebuilding Russia,” “From Under the Rubble,” “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” and his address to the 1978 Harvard graduating class. As Solzhenitsyn relayed to author Joseph Pearce in his book “Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile,” he arrived at his conclusions unaware of the early Distributist movement or E.F. Schumacher’s neo-Distributism. Nevertheless, his vision is complimentary to the Distributist thesis.
Our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, spawned endless debates between conservatives and progressives, each painting two incompatible portraits of Soviet life. For some, Communism was a worker’s paradise of egalitarianism, liberty, and democracy. For others, Soviet life meant being under the thumb of “Big Brother”; a tyrannical force in control of every aspect of society and guided by the materialist myth created by a few well-to-do bureaucrats. One man’s underground publications settled the debate, shocking the naïve Western world and sparking outrage in his native country. Through books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the cold realities awaiting those willing to stare down the Soviet regime. And he did not fail to deliver. Solzhenitsyn described the human cost of Communism: detentions, murders, lies, and forced labor camps for the innocent and the brave, including the author himself.
For Europeans and Americans, Solzhenitsyn was a hero.
But when Solzhenitsyn committed the sin of criticizing the West in front of the 1978 Harvard graduating class, and dismissing Western materialism as a false alternative for the world, those same European and American thinkers that once cheered Solzhenitsyn as a champion for freedom consequently berated his scrutiny and ignored Solzhenitsyn’s social, political, and economic analysis, as well as any of his proposed reforms. This was particularly true of proponents of neoclassical economics and market deregulation, as Solzhenitsyn, once crushed under the boot of massive centralized government, was expected to champion the Non-Interventionist State. Instead, he predicted disaster for institutions apathetic to economic and social involvement. After all, government regulations—within recognizable limits—serve to protect the common good and to keep the fallen nature of man in check. What’s more, public institutions should recognize man’s requisite for spiritual development and generate provisions for them, not fight or ignore these needs. Pope John XXIII, in the encyclical Mater et Magistra, called this task of the State its reason for being (raison d’être), as government bodies are responsible to oversee the common good and cannot afford to be “aloof from economic matters.”
Like Solzhenitsyn, G.K. Chesterton was a celebrated dramatist, political analyst, and unapologetic Christian. Along with Hilaire Belloc and Dominican friar Fr. Vincent McNabb, Chesterton conceived a movement to incarnate the social vision of Holy Mother Church. After all, the social encyclicals were the first to tackle the economic tug-of-war between capital and labor from the highest ecclesiastical position: the Papacy. Under the name “Distributism,” these men sought to counter the socio-economic system in place by subordinating the economic order to the higher sciences, reincorporating justice as an integral component to the marketplace. Distributists supported subsidiarity, the strengthening of local economics, and the widest diffusion of land ownership. Laws favoring self-ownership for the common man and for the propertyless were perceived as instrumental in reaching equilibrium both for the family and the community, as property freed them from the dependence on Big Business and Big Brother, which are essentially one and the same. The author of “Rebuilding Russia” was also suspicious of both Capitalism and Socialism, and perceived them as co-dependent rather than distinct economic theories.
“But just as we feel ourselves your allies here [in the West], there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.”
For Solzhenitsyn and for the distributists, the demise of these two systems didn’t lay in their misuse. Their failures were an organic consequence of the penchant for the cult of man. As Solzhenitsyn astutely wrote,
“I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the very basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”
It was intuitive for Solzhenitsyn that centralized government acted as an organism attentive to the needs of its citizens for those matters local government could not address. A policy of subsidiarity (the smallest competent authority, whether central or local) effectively met the challenges of security, stability, and accountability for the nation as a whole and the smaller communities in particular. But it was the latter Solzhenitsyn turned his attention to; focusing on popular local governments overseeing the common good in the tradition of the Russian zemstvos.
Created under the reforms of Alexander II in the 19th century, zemstvos disappeared with the advent of socialist uprising, effectively ending any form of independence for the yeoman in lieu of the concentration of power at the central level. Zemstvos were a form of self-government consisting of elected boards and councils made up of large land proprietors, small landowners (including clergy), wealthy townsmen, urban classes, and peasants. Elected individuals representing these distinct groups of owning classes would determine the economic needs of any given locality. In Solzhenitsyn’s mind zemstvos would be instrumental in restoring post-Communist Russia. With the easing of concentrated power, Solzhenitsyn believed the just wage and local craftsmanship would “come to light,” restoring an economy of permanence, instead of mindless consumption. This would shift the focus from desire to need, and subordinate the material to the spiritual.
In Joseph Pearce’s biography Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, we learn of Solzhenitsyn’s appreciation for Distributist thought included Catholic convert and German economist E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher, author of the book Small is Beautiful, spent most of his life crusading for small-scale economics, intermediate technology, and an humane economy of use, as an alternative to exhaustive expansion and economic license. Just as the Distributist movement did before him, Schumacher urged the restoration of local—or decentralized—economics and farming, combined with responsible eco-friendly development to end the depletion of natural resources.
Likewise, Solzhenitsyn argued for a sane economy providing civilization with stability, instead of an “uninterrupted rise in the level of material existence.” Solzhenitsyn spoke favorably of traditional, repairable, crafts replacing shoddy manufactured goods intended for consumers to replace at the slightest defect. Products and technology, he argued, should be measured by how well they serve our needs, particularly our spiritual ones, as our primary concern must be for our inner development, which frighteningly had shifted at the hands of a society bent on material acquisition or outer development. Production should flow as an agent which is subordinate to our inner development within a society sheltering the soul first and foremost.
No greater example could be given than his famous book Letters to the Soviet Leaders, where one can quickly view his closeness to Small is Beautiful and his distance from The Wealth of Nations.
“What must be implemented is not a ‘steadily expanding economy,’ but a zero-growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous…we must renounce, as a matter of urgency, the gigantic scale of modern technology in industry, agriculture, and urban development…”
It should give any reader pause how a man whose life began in the midst of Communist culture could condemn not only the Soviet way of life but ours as well. Dismissing the criticism, embracing Western materialism as a “better” alternative to Communist materialism, is to avoid the elephant in the room. For some, being in a pit without snakes is better than being in a pit with them. Solzhenitsyn brilliantly asks us why we should be in a pit at all.
I wonder what Solzhenitsyn and Chesterton would say about the topsy turvy world we live in where the things central government should be doing (like marshalling resources to protect our coastline from the BP spill) are ignored by the federal government and things that could be handled much easier at the local level, like the provision of quality health care they are falling all over themselves to control?
Although I understand how distributists understand the word “capitalism” I think it’s important to point out that not everyone shares the same definition. In fact, I’ve heard certain quarters refer to the Chestertonian definition of capitalism as “mercantilism”. I think we run into some unnecessary misunderstandings if we don’t make sure everyone is clear on terms that are subject to misinterpretation.
Dear Judith,
Chesterton described it as: “That economic condition in which capital belongs in bulk to a relatively small class called capitalists, and in which the large or determining mass of the citizens, being themselves without capital, are obliged to hire themselves out to these few capitalists for a wage.” (On a Tiresome Word, G.K.’s Weekly)
Belloc went further and called it, “a state of society in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of the citizens dispossessed.” (An Essay on the Restoration of Property)
But perhaps a better definition is, “that system, contingent on the maximization of token wealth, under which a few owners of capital control the means of production, and where justice follows economic expansion, and is not considered prior to exchange.”
Various people in the world get the loan in various creditors, because it is easy.