It is either a
baffling paradox or a supreme irony that many people in the United States who
call themselves solidarists often have neither a real understanding of
solidarism, nor any practical experience in implementing the solidarist
approach.
 |
| Lech Wałęsa |
Few people are
aware, for example, that Solidarność, the
Polish Solidarity union (Niezależny
Samorządny Związek Zawodowy „Solidarność” — “Independent Self-governing Trade
Union ‘Solidarity’”), co-founded by Lech Wałęsa, its first president,
considered the “Just Third Way” of the interfaith Center for Economic and
Social Justice (CESJ) consistent with the Solidarity movement’s philosophy and
goals. Members of Solidarność accompanied the CESJ delegation and participated in
the private audience with Pope St. John Paul II, during which His Holiness gave
CESJ his personal encouragement for its work in social and economic
justice.
Solidarność
had Every Worker an Owner, the orientation
book for CESJ’s 1986 Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice
(copies of which had been presented to President Ronald Reagan and Pope St.
John Paul II), translated into Polish and distributed 40,000 copies throughout
the country.
 |
| Alberto Martén |
Yes, Wałęsa
and Solidarność are
well known in the United States. What
should be at least as well known (but is not) is the solidarity movement in
Central and South America, especially as exemplified by Solidarismo
Costariccense
(Solidarity of Costa Rica), and its founder, Don Alberto Martén Chavarría — who is the main
subject of today’s posting.
On March 26,
2009, his one-hundredth birthday, Don Alberto was declared “Benemérito de la Patria”
(“A Worthy of the
People”; literally “A Worthy of the Homeland”) by the national
legislature. Unlike some such encomia,
the honor was well deserved.
As his father was
in the Costa Rican diplomatic corps, Martén was educated primarily in
Europe. It may have been at that time he
first came across the thought of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., who transformed
solidarism from the socialist theory developed by the French sociologist Émile
Durkheim, into a theory consistent with Aristotelian-Thomism and the social
thought of Pope Leo XIII.
 |
| Rev. Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J. |
There is a
possibility that Martén may even have studied under Fr. Pesch directly,
something we have not — yet — been able to verify, nor what his relations (if
any) were with other students of Fr. Pesch, notably the members of the Königswinterkreis discussion group
co-founded by Dr. Heinrich Rommen. Pope
Pius XI summoned two members of the Königswinterkreis,
Father Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., and Father Gustav Gundlach, S.J., to the
Vatican in the early 1930s to consult on the writing of Quadragesimo Anno, “On the Restructuring of the Social Order.”
Pius XI added the
concept of a particular act of social justice to the thought of Fr. Pesch and
the solidarists, thereby giving concrete form to Leo XIII’s general theory. CESJ’s Just Third Way is a synthesis of the
economic justice principles presented by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler
in their two collaborations, The
Capitalist Manifesto (1958) and The
New Capitalists (1961), and Pius XI’s social doctrine. Kelso’s theories and practical applications
give a financially feasible and morally sound way to achieve the expanded
capital ownership vision of Leo XIII and Pius XI.
 |
| Louis O. Kelso |
Don Alberto
realized this, and corresponded at length with Louis O. Kelso, developer of binary economics,
discussing the compatibility of Solidarismo
with Kelso’s “expanded ownership revolution.” This he presented in
Central and South America as “El Tercer Camino,” or “The Third Way,” seeing
Kelso’s work as fully consistent with Solidarism and Catholic social teaching.
Dr. Martén was
also very friendly with CESJ. He invited Dr. Norman G. Kurland,
CESJ’s president and co-founder to Costa Rica in the early 1970s to meet with
business and worker leaders involved in Solidarismo.
Dr. Martén asked Kurland, who had worked
with Kelso and was instrumental in persuading Senator Russell Long of Louisiana
to champion the initial enabling U.S. legislation for the Employee Stock
Ownership Plan (ESOP) Kelso invented, to do a critique of Solidarismo. Don Alberto
wanted to see how the implementation of solidarism could be improved by
applying the principles and techniques of Kelso’s binary economics. Kurland and Don Alberto agreed on substance,
but differed on certain specifics on the best way to implement the Just Third
Way.
Nor was Solidarismo
Costariccense
Don Alberto’s only accomplishment. He was
also the founder and first president of Grupo
Acción Demócrata in 1943. In 1947 he
laid the seeds of Plan de Ahorro y
Capitalización, which came to be known as “the Martén Plan,”
Later, in 1948, Don Alberto
took part in the Costa Rican civil war.
He served as second in command of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (“National Army of Liberation”). During the subsequent junta government, he was
put in charge of the Ministry of the Economy and the Treasury, and
(contradicting the spirit of Solidarism) nationalized the banking system.
It was at this
time Don Alberto founded
the Oficina de Coordinación Económica
(“Office of Economic
Coordination”). He served from 1949 to
1961 as its Director General. This was
when he first introduced concepts of worker ownership under the name “Solidarismo.”
Don Alberto
Martén Chavarría died December
26, 2009. His work lives on in the
associations he founded and the many people whose lives he helped improve.
#30#
