Jesus prefered the poor to the elite business class or arrogant know-all eggheads (known back then as money changers and pharisees ). Card. Wyszyński, who had thoroughly studied Marxism, worker issues and the trade-union movement, favoured a Third Road between socialism and capitalism.
Yes, it's very much my view that part of the problem of Polish communism was that it was just brutal unrefined Soviet-style communism instead of something more resembling Titoism. The problem with Yugoslavia was the role of the Party (mainly that managers were still chosen by the Party rather than by the workers) - but the theory of labour was essentially that workers are entirely responsible for the success or failure of the economy. It didn't work too well in practice, but the basic idea was very acceptable - workers had every right to share in profits and had the right to take part in decision making. The problem as I understand it is that the State would bail out failing businesses - so workers and managers alike had no reason to act responsibly.
I didn't know that Wyszynski held such views - do you know of anything that he wrote about the matter? I'm very much of the view that Catholicism and the Third Way in economics are very compatible - and there's nothing wrong with that.
In Poland people avoid the socialist label because it was once associated with the PZPR and many think of it to this day in terms of totalitarianism.
Yes, it's a huge problem. There's a massive difference between Soviet style rule and genuine socialism - there's absolutely no need to rule with a stick if everyone has responsibility for their own actions. Of course, it also means that the workers need to accept responsibility too - which in the case of the coal mines, we can see that they don't want it. But in general, I thoroughly support the idea of the workers being responsible for their own place of work. If they do well, of course profit-sharing makes sense. But they also need to accept that if they do badly, then times will be bad too.
This thread is wandering...