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On the third level, socialism is a culture.

This third definition is implied in the two preceding ones: if socialism gives precedence to real needs over profit and also over a pure technology of equilibrium and expansion – if socialism implies the participation of the greatest number in economic decisions – an entire conception of the human being is already outlined in this twofold exigency. The most fundamental and the most stable aim of socialism lies in its humanism. What are we to understand here by humanism? Three things, in my opinion.

1. We first find in the foreground the oldest theme of the founders of socialism: the theme of overcoming the alienation (la désaliénation) of human labor. Despite its profession of materialism, Marxism appears on this level as a fundamental humanism: it was Marxism that dismantled the mechanism by which the person lost his humanity and himself became merchandise, in the image of the fetishes he projected onto his own existence, the fetishes of merchandise and money. The profound sense of Marxism appears here: its materialism is the truth of man without truth. This truth is purely phenomenological: by this I mean that materialism is the precise description of alienated man; in this regard, the displacement of the critique of property we discussed in the first section has changed nothing concerning this descriptive truth. The alienating power of capitalism resides in the fact that, after having recognized the economic function of labor, capitalism lost its fundamental human meaning by subordinating it to the law of profit, that is to say, to the law of things and to the power of money. This is why we have never finished with this power of denunciation nor with the power of description emanating from Marx’s imposing work. I will return to this later: it is the enduring task of the Christian theology of labor to continually reconstruct the Marxist theses of alienation and overcoming alienation and to integrate them into a broad modern anthropology.

2. The second theme of this humanism is the control of the economic phenomenon by the human being. Indeed, an overcoming of alienation which was not the work of people themselves, but of a bureaucracy or an economic agency foreign to each of the workers, would only shift economic alienation into the political arena. This is why overcoming alienation has to be extended by what we have called above the socialization of the means of governance. The human significance of this theme is just as considerable as the preceding one, because it signifies that there is no socialism outside of the triumph of human responsibility over blind mechanisms, including those in politics, in the administration, and in the bureaucracy. If alienation signifies that the person has become a stranger to herself, there are many paths to this alienation, and socialism is in danger of creating new ones, under the pretext of putting an end to the earlier alienations of capitalism. To render a person the ruler of her history, to place back in her hands the power over the forces that unceasingly escape her, this is doubtless the endless task that truly deserves the name of permanent revolution.

3. But this is not all: new meanings of socialism have appeared as a result of the very practices of socialist societies, and they stem much more from the self-critique of these societies than from the critique of earlier societies. There is a danger not only that socialism is reduced, as we have just said, to the reign of administration and bureaucracy, but, more fundamentally, that it expresses the renewal of the project of bourgeois societies under another form: namely, a simple technology of well-being. Bourgeois society had conceived of capitalism itself as the means of attaining – through competition, the spirit of enterprise, risk and wager – the fundamental objectives of a utilitarian ethics. It might happen that socialism would be simply the renewal, by means of a better rationality and a better technology, of the same hedonistic ethics. Socialism would then be only a more advanced and more rational industrialization, pursuing the same dream of the Promethean conquest of nature and well-being. It would then only have pursued in a more rational manner the mastery of the world by means of a society of total satisfaction.

This danger is not a fiction; for a century, we have witnessed the gradual downfall of the great dream of the founders of socialism to base the most fundamental meaning of human activity in work. Yet, work appears more and more as merely the economic cost of leisure, while leisure appears more and more as a simple amusement and a simple compensation for the hardship of work, in proportion as labor is overtaken by mass technologies that insidiously pursue its degradation. We are completely capable of foreseeing and even glimpsing the dangers of a society of consumption, even of a society of abundance, in which socialism would be reduced to the paltry triumph of the socialism of the common man. At this level, it is therefore essentially a spiritual danger that lies in wait for socialism: this danger is already at work in the welfare state and in Scandinavian socialism.

In order to confront this danger, we must unceasingly return to what is least technical and closest to the “heart” of socialism. More profoundly than a technology, socialism is the cry of distress, the demands, and the hopes of people who have been the most humiliated. This is why today we cannot separate socialism from solidarity with the most underprivileged fraction of humanity, from the poverty of underdeveloped societies. The socialist motivation is fundamentally tied to the slave revolts, otherwise it is no more than that rational and dehumanized calculation whose ghost never ceases to haunt us. As Péguy said, “The affairs of socialism have never ceased to be the affairs of humanity.” The welfare state’s weakness lies in the absence of a human perspective. The strength of the socialist camp is, precisely, the sentiment of a collective work in action. For this reason, the friendship without borders extended to those who labor and suffer, and the keen sentiment of belonging to a single humankind, must never fade. Here is the place of utopia, which I have stressed so many times in this journal. Without utopia, there remain only calculation and technocracy. It is on this level of the unending spiritual elevation of socialism that the true dialogue with Christianity should be instituted, maintained, renewed.