Socialists like to maintain the myth that they have a monopoly on protecting the rights of workers and the working class, but a significant role in this belonged to Christian trade unions and the Church, which worked quietly to improve the situation of employees, avoiding propaganda of class hatred.
Christian leaders were aware of the depth of the problems of the market economy and the plight of wage earners, and even more so of the threatening consequences of socialist revolutions and the brutal totalitarianism that always followed. Therefore, Christians made active efforts to ensure that society found a golden mean between the development of entrepreneurship and a decent level of wages. The latter stemmed from two key principles of Christian democracy: human dignity and respect for labor.
Even in the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII “Rerum Novarum” of 1891, which paid great attention to the problem of combating social inequality, it was noted: “…It is necessary to come immediately to the aid of people from the poorest strata, since a large part of them are in conditions unworthy of human beings. Both institutions and legislation began to move away from the Christian spirit, and it happened that the labor force was gradually left alone, defenseless, face to face with the inhumanity of the masters and the greed of the owners. Greed, covetousness, and usury, so many times condemned by the Church, continued to exist under a different guise. Let us add to this the monopoly of production and trade, which has reached such a degree that a handful of rich people have imposed a yoke on the many proletarians that is not unlike that of a slave.”
In the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century, it was Christian trade unions that were committed to results, not to strikes for the sake of class hatred and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the extermination of the bourgeoisie, as the socialists did, that managed to reach compromises between factory owners and workers. An important feature of all postwar Christian democratic parties was their leftist orientation, but it was formed not under the influence of Marxism but as a result of the experience of the Great Depression and World War II. During the war, the influence of the state on economic processes and the regulatory policy of the state apparatus increased, which explained the leftist sentiments in Christian democratic parties.
The Christian Democrats paid so much attention to the protection of workers and the poor that the programs of the postwar Christian Democrats in many ways resembled the postulates of socialists and communists. Christian Democrats emphasized the need for social and moral reforms. However, their rhetoric was not oriented toward classes. The Christian Democrats were not Marxists; they were ethatists and assigned a key role to the state as an independent arbiter between classes.
For example, in the development of the German CDU program, the most influential document was the 1949 Düsseldorf Theses developed by Ludwig Erhard, in which the party declared its focus on a “social market economy.” By this, the party understands a socially oriented system in which economic freedom and free competition of individuals and businesses should be in harmony with the principles of social justice and civic solidarity. Private ownership is combined with social responsibility, social protection and support of the education system, which should create equal starting opportunities for all members of society. The role of the state is to create favorable conditions for economic development and to adhere to the principle of subsidiarity, i.e. to help only in those matters in which personal responsibility is not enough to achieve the public good and social protection. In the economic sphere, the CDU sees the main task as supporting economic growth and reducing unemployment, reforming taxation and health care systems.
Both the CDU and the CSU initially emphasized social justice. Josef Müller, a well-known Catholic opponent of the Nazis who was close to social democratic views, was elected the first chairman of the Christian Social Union. Konrad Adenauer strongly supported the creation of CDU social committees, groups that worked among workers and were considered the most left-wing in the party. It was cooperation with social committees that increased the party’s electoral chances.
Only after overcoming the poverty and social insecurity of workers in the 1950s and 1960s did Christian Democrats take a centrist and conservative position. Unlike the socialists and the New Left, Christian Democrats, having improved the situation of workers, began to emphasize the integration of society rather than the search for new forms of inequality and struggle for the sake of struggle and the destruction of society.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk