OH, but it's a fact that she at one time belonged to the communist party in America. Many Catholics hate to admit this, but they also misunderstood what the communist movement of her time was about. It wasn't Stalinist Communism, but a community based communism.
The problem with their ideals was that unless the entire community is dedicated to that ideology, if fails.
See her biography;
Dorothy Day : Biography
Jim
Many interesting people used to belong to the communist party in one form or another. My mother's uncle used to and yet I remember having this wonderful discussion with him on the Second Amendment in the 1990's where he argued that the correct Constitutional interpretation was exactly that one the Supreme Court held in Heller. Wilhelm Reich used to before he was disillusioned with it, and his "Mass Psychology of Fascism" which was written initially about the Nazis is quite belittling of the Communists. It is full of phrases like "Even Lenin noticed...", the implication being that Lenin was not the brightest bulb when it came to understanding collective behavior.
So I have no problem with her past membership here. In fact I think that would have given her a unique perspective on the writings of Belloc ("The Servile State" in particular) which must have pushed her on the road to distributism.
What I am saying is that her philosophy as a Catholic was pretty purely distributist, and this is different, on a fundamental level, from Communism because of the vast differences in how private property rights were seen. To the communist, personal and family ownership of property is a tool of class oppression. To the distributist, it is a tool of liberation. Both share a common critique of liberal capitalism, but their solutions to the problems diverge so much that they can hardly be seen to have any continuity at all.
The classical distributist view (based largely on the idea that we are created in God's image) is basically that humans are creative and have a need to be creative. Private property rights are thus a right to one's own artistic sandbox, if you will. Because people are happier and more productive when they are creative, and they can only be creative with things they own, everyone must own as an individual or as a family, and to the extent possible, the medium of his or her work. The classical distributist is then skeptical of laws like minimum wage laws, because they help make people dependent on an employment relationship where they do not have the possibility to be creative. Day's general writings are pretty clear that as a Catholic she was clearly in this camp.
Similarly the classical distributist in me in the current crisis hears all this talk about job creation and says "jobs are the problem, not the solution. If the government wants to help, let them help those who are out of work become self-employed and thus masters of their own destiny." But instead we discourage that as a society. We can't have those out of work using their benefits to subsidize going into business for themselves. We must have them dependent on that work relationship.
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