CAPITALISM, HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE SPIRITUAL ROMAN-CHRISTIAN HERITAGE

                Never before has it been so important to look into the causes of social problems that now exist on an enormous scale throughout the world.  
              We must stop and think about the meaning of the words that we now use in our modern language, this being essential in trying to give a concrete contribution to the solution of the great problems of today.  
           After having positively valued the acceptance of “capitalism” in the sense of free economy or freedom of  commerce, the Centesimus Annus (n° 42) says: “...if by Capitalism one intends a system in which the liberty in the economic sector isn’t set in a solid legal context which renders it of service to the integral human liberty and is considered as a particular dimension of this liberty, with a centre of religious ethics, then the result is decidedly negative.”.  
          Capitalism is essentially- as we will go on to demonstrate- a leap back to the values of legal ethics, because it substitutes the centralism of man with the centralism of capital.  
             The expression used in Centesimus Annus “...a system not set in a solid legal context...”, calls to mind the anathema of Christ: “Be careful, you, who dictate the law”, because the stratagem to “load the others with unsupportable weights and not lift a finger” is essentially law.  
             Not by chance, with solid roman wisdom, Menenio Agrippa pointed out in the apologia of limbs rebelling against the stomach, that the judgement of values is normal when one distinguishes the instrumental or functional moment- objective- prerogative of the body, from the hedonistic moment- subjective- prerogative of the social community. This principle, in all its universality and perpetuity, is the foundation of the Roman-Christian legal tradition: and the essence of the natural law (right).  
               To arrogate the hedonistic moment of value, it was necessary for the Law Lords to propose to the community an instrument that had a mere image of a person. The conception of this hypothesis has been, in modern culture, the “not I” by Hegel, defined as coinciding with “I”. We realize in that way the transposition of “I” to “not I” that justified the great immanence of the instrumental moment, objective, in the hedonistic moment, subjective.  
                In such a way, society has been defined as a concept lacking of human content, as a mere “legal ghost”, a precious instrument in the hands of powerful groups, exclusive participants of a cultural initiative.  
           Once the coincidence between “I” and “not I” was realized, it was consequently possible to mistake mine for yours because yours could become mine.  
            This is Capitalism, not only a modern phenomenon, but one that has had a clamorous historical precedent: Mammon.  
            Mammon is in fact the anonymous society, the corporation, “ante litteram”: as the concept of a public body was absent, they resorted to the only concept of a body different from the human body, at that time existent: Divinity.  
              So, not by chance, Mammon in the Aramaic language means Money. It was therefore, Mammon, the instrumental subjectivity to which we attributed the hedonistic moment of value, that is, the property of money in the act of issue (emission).  
          While the community created the value of money, the Law Lords, utilizing Mammon, actually became the money owners.  
            Still today, the central banking system works with exactly the same characteristics, that expropriate and debit the national community’s money, because it is given out in loans, and money lending is prerogative only of the owner.  
               I’d like to remind you of the incisive words of the papal encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno (n° 105 and 106): “Nowadays, above all the saddest thing is not only the concentration of riches, but, also, the accumulation of enormous power of an overwhelming ownership of the economy, in the hands of few people, and these, frequently not owners but depositors and administrators of capital, who dispose of that capital as they wish.  
This power becomes more than ever overwhelming with those who, keeping money in hand, behave as Lords; in that way they are the distributors of the blood itself, on which the economic organism lives, and they have, in hand, so to say, the soul of the economy, therefore nobody can breath without their authority.”  
          Since an instrument with no-one to operate it isn’t conceivable, the concept of instrumental subjectivity necessarily supposes an exploiting subjectivity, based on an economic conception of ethics.  
            Reducing the concept of society as an instrument, it is all too clear that the only possible hypothesis is to use and not serve.  
             The man in the street consolidates the conviction of an abstract and mythical interest, even if it is different from his own, judged to be worth a positive consideration, exactly because they have hidden under the appearance of an ethical sacrifice, the economical sacrifice. So the amount of individual economic sacrifices has imposed on the national communities “unsupportable weights” a benefit of few knowledgeable people who manipulate the cultural and sociological strategies to rule the world.  
             The illusion of the participation of inexistent social interests, has expressed, in the term “communism” the assonance and the illusion of communion or joint ownership, and in “share title” the appearance of ownership of a quota of the capital.  
          As in the socialist system the property belongs to the ghost state and not to the citizen, so, in the corporation the property belongs to the ghost society and not to the member.  
             The socialist State and corporation are therefore the two faces of capitalism. The socialist State is nothing more than a giant corporation.  
The coincidence between “I” and “not I” has consented the possibility of an absurd organic representation in the hedonistic moment of value.  
               As established, in a normal judgement of value, the hedonistic moment is strictly individual and not delegated, the conceptual coincidence between “I” and “not I” realizes an abstract subjectivity to which is attributed the hedonistic moment of legal values and, consequently, of economics: that is property.  
            This transposition of the hedonistic moment works apparently in favour of the instrumental society, substantially in favour of the exploiting society. Through a clever legal trap an analogical situation, when an owner feeds his horse, is realized: he who benefits from the fodder, in the physiological sense, is the horse, he who benefits in a legal sense is the owner.  
             The transposition of the hedonistic moment of legal instruments, from man to legal person thus transforms the exploiting societies into human farms, and to man- deprived of legitimate law- leaves nothing more than the mere physiological benefit of goods (of property).  
                A pseudo form of liberty is so realized from the need of bread, but not from the spiritual need of being able to expect it.  
                 It follows that in a “consumistic” concept we define the distinction between a free man and a slave, by basing the facts on a simple quantitative valuation that the free man is free only because he is fatter.  
          Christ said: “Man cannot live on bread alone”. This tells us that the ulterior need of freedom, in an ethical and legal sense, cannot be satisfied by a greater quantity of bread.  
              On these promises we explain how the concept of capitalism realizes, on the supposition of an economic concept of ethics and using the fundamental parameter of the instrumental subjectivity (a constitutional State, a socialist State, a corporation, a multinational etc...), the subtraction of the hedonistic moment from man, giving it to the legal person that is to the societies that exploit him (power groups, the dominant class, major share holders, etc...).  
             The most imposing form of this pathology of values is brought about by giving the right of ownership (property)- legally protected- to the legal ghosts of instrumental subjectivity.  
          Under this aspect, there is no difference between State capitalism and private capitalism, if not in the different normative source which says in State capitalism, it is law, in private capitalism, it is a contract. In fact, in a socialist State the property belongs to the State and not to the citizen, while in a corporation the property belongs to the society and not to the members: both these formulas are the cultural grand of an exploiting society that deals under the appearance of general interest, that is its own interests.  
            That is why we cannot seriously make history of a constitutional State if we don’t make history of the masonry; we cannot make history of the socialist State if we don’t make history of the dominating class; we cannot make history of the corporation and of the multinationals if we don’t make history of the major share holders union.  
             The explosion of these imposing manifestations of pathological legal-ethics gives the proof of a fundamental insufficiency of the modern school of State doctrine and the structure of  societies, when it is expected that the principal ethic is rendered immanent in the legal instrument.  
           Only he who loves a population is fit to govern, because it’s only he who loves that is disposed to serve and he who does not love, to be served. Love  cannot be an object of a legal obligation, the legal obligation is necessarily on the out side, above the Constitution.
            Between love and the constitutional law exists the same incompatibility found between a king and the blade of a guillotine.  
                In first place in the hierarchy must be man and not the instrument: a human person not a legal body. The right is always an instrument because it’s the result of a creative activity of the spirit, and the instrumentalization is never the primary moment of the spirit. In first place are always the final choices. And it’s only in a moment logically and chronologically successive, that the instrument is conceived and prepared.  
             The limits of the constitutional State are in the fact that, at his summit, we find a “past will” that is of course the will of the legal norm. In the legal norm “living will” is absent, the will of living man is missing, the will of he who’s able to love and serve is missing.  
           Once the “past will” has been represented, the “living will” becomes that of an exploiting society, and for all that has been said above, necessarily has economic ethics.  
             The principle of natural and Christian law that it’s better to be honest, better to be right (“Follow the will of our Father who is in heaven and the rest will be given to you in abundance”), is substituted by the principle that what is better (convenient) is that which is right.  
          Wanting to put at the summit of the State the will of a king- loving or tyrannous-, or wanting to put at the summit the “past will” of a Constitution- that brings a pacific decadence because it doesn’t contain love-, makes perhaps the great pendulum that is history.  
               So we must receive in the Constitutions the essential principle of natural law so that the hedonistic moment of legal values- and all other values- must be exclusive prerogative of man and taken from the instrumental subjectivities, that is exploiting societies.  
          What must interest the science of law isn’t that the political regime be democratic, monarchic, dictatorship or oligarchic, but to affirm the criteria that must be used to realize legal bodies able to satisfy the need of justice.  
           With the transposition of the hedonistic moment from man to legal body, a society of despair is born. Hope is in fact a prediction of the hedonistic moment, and when that moment is taken away from man and pretentiously given to a legal ghost, the living become invidious of the dead (people). It’s not by chance that the suicide of young people has by now become a social illness. These young people die well-dressed and well-nourished, just starved of love or perhaps better to say starved of loving, that’s starved of ideals.  
             The economic ethic, from the Hegel mould, has within itself an original vice: after having reduced reality to “the thinking self”, no form of utility other than the utility of “I” is accepted, thus reducing and mistaking the concept of “utility” for that of  “egoism”. On the supposition of this cultural strategy there’s no space for saints or heroes: the only possible ideal is, in the best hypotheses, that of the “fat and desperate” man: living proof of the failure of the rationalist and atheist schools, that have been constructed and moulded in this way.  
               Bread alone- expression of a mere “consumistic” concept of human hedonism- is not enough: it’s necessary to give to man an extra qualitatively different.

          “Something exists that is owed to man because he’s man”, teaches John Paul II. The word “owed” supposes a “legal pretext”. The right to expect is therefore the extra. And the expression “...because he’s man”, means that just he exists, man can legitimately expect the economic content of social rights.  
             The fact that vital longing, itself a source of value, emerges from the following axioms: 
               - Wealth doesn’t exist in a world of dead people;  
               - So, the supposition of wealth is the life;  
               - Man, just because he’s living creates the value of goods which he needs; 
               - Man contributes in creating conventional monetary values, because he accepts money as a means of payment, and that is as a measure of value and the value of measure;  
               - So, man recognized the equivalent of this value, as an object of legal expectation and not as a generous contribution or benevolent concession.

Dr. Avv. Amedeo Carrocci