Warren’s framing of codetermination as essentially capitalist has aroused ire on both the Right and Left. National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson painted the bill’s pro-capitalist packaging as subterfuge and hysterically warned that it represents a “batty plan to nationalize everything” and would “constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history.” Meanwhile, Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman panned the ACA as cynical, a “feint to the left” that “outbids even Bernie Sanders” while still allowing Warren to “present herself as a credible champion of traditional Democratic Party capitalist values” and “a bulwark against the party’s recent, inexplicable outbreak of ‘socialist’ madness.” “The irony is complete,” he writes, since “to position herself as the savior of capitalism, Warren has floated a measure that, in real life, has only ever been championed by socialists.”

The attempt to precisely situate codetermination within a capitalism-socialism binary is a mostly pointless exercise. If one defines capitalism as “private ownership of the means of production” and socialism as “social ownership of the means of production,” then it ought to be clear that codetermination is not quite either of those things. The problem is that ownership has multiple dimensions: it can entail control rights, or the power to make decisions about how to use or dispose of property, as well as residual claimancy rights, or the entitlement to the stream of profits generated by productive assets. Codetermination confers some measure of control rights on workers without necessarily making them residual claimants; it gives them voice in the workplace but need not guarantee them a cut of the profits.

In this sense, codetermination can be thought of as the inverse of profit-sharing plans or employee stock-ownership plans, which grant limited or no control rights but do provide some compensation that is tied to the firm’s performance. It can also be understood as a less complete form of worker ownership than that seen in worker cooperatives—businesses that are wholly owned and managed by the workers. And it should also be contrasted with labor unions, which confer no ownership rights but do let workers bargain collectively with their employers for higher compensation and better conditions of employment.

Williamson’s bleating about nationalization and state seizure of property is self-evidently absurd, but Ackerman’s more nuanced take also suffers from having been shoehorned into a reductive framework. In particular, his account of codetermination’s genesis as the work of socialists alone is at best incomplete and at worst misleading, since a number of its key early proponents drew their inspiration not from Marxism, but from the emerging tradition of Catholic social teaching.

Legal scholar Ewan McGaughey, citing the work of codetermination expert Hans Jürgen Teuteberg, identifies the German social philosopher and Catholic theologian Franz von Baader as “the first to affirm a legal claim for worker participation” as far back as the 1830s. The law would not vindicate such a claim until 1891, when the German government passed the first legislation granting workers the right to form “factory councils” that could offer (non-binding) input on decisions affecting the workplace. (Incidentally, that was also the year that Pope Leo XIII issued his seminal social encyclical Rerum novarum.) A young priest named Fr. Franz Hitze, who served as the first Professor of Christian Social Teaching at the University of Münster and who had written on the subject of capital and labor, was tasked by Kaiser Wilhelm II with assisting in the drafting of the law.

Hitze was again instrumental in the passage of a more ambitious 1920 law that mandated works councils in all businesses with more than twenty employees, as was another priest, the Labor and Social Minister Heinrich Brauns. Both saw the proto-codetermination embodied in their approach as a bulwark against the bolder demands of the Marxist Left. Theologian and social ethicist Manfred Spieker writes that it “was due to [Hitze and Brauns’s] influence that the radical socialist concept of the soviets did not come to bear on the Work Councils Law.” Spieker also points out that Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno cites Brauns, albeit not by name, as an exemplar of Catholic involvement in politics.

The basic contours of Germany’s modern codetermination regime came into being shortly after the Second World War. According to the American diplomat Herbert Spiro, it emerged as a pragmatic response to the monumental task that the Allied occupation faced in rebuilding the devastated German coal and steel industries. While socialists at the time demanded full-scale nationalization, the Allied command was reluctant to impose such a system without a democratic mandate, and many trade unionists were leery of effectively returning to the status quo ante. Because there was a critical need for technical expertise to guide the rebuilding effort, and because many of the former industrial managers and factory owners were exiled or in prison camps as a result of “denazification,” the only people left to turn to for expert advice were the leaders of the reconstituted labor unions, which had been largely suppressed under the Third Reich.

One steel manager who had never joined the Nazis and was therefore available to be consulted by the Allies was the Catholic Heinrich Dinkelbach, who ended up developing a plan for oversight of the revived industrial sector that involved 50-percent representation for the trade unions. Ewan McGaughey reports that Dinkelbach was later made a papal count for his efforts, suggesting that the Vatican thought highly of the results.

In 1951 Germany enacted additional legislation on codetermination that required half of the supervisory boards of coal, steel, and mining concerns to consist of elected representatives of the workers. Herbert Spiro claims that “it is doubtful whether Chancellor [Konrad] Adenauer would or could have gotten the then predominantly Catholic CDU [Christian Democratic Union] to vote for the special codetermination bill in 1951, if [a] doctrinal rationale had not previously been provided.” The unique historical circumstances that obtained in Germany after the war provided rich soil in which codetermination could take root, but it would never have fully blossomed without the fertilizing influence of Catholic social teaching. Pace Ackerman, socialists were not its only champions—and in many cases were not its champions at all.

The principles of codetermination have been consistently alluded to and affirmed in papal encyclicals since at least Quadragesimo anno, as Marymount University theologian Matthew Shadle shows in an August 2018 essay for Political Theology. Shadle explains how Pius XI developed Leo XIII’s simultaneous defense of both labor unions and private ownership of the means of production in Rerum novarum by insisting that workers ought to become “sharers in ownership or management or participate in some fashion in the profits received.” He also calls attention to how John XXIII’s discussion of the topic in Mater et magistra (1961) constitutes even further development, since it moves beyond Pius’s appraisal of worker ownership as a means of ensuring a “just distribution of goods” and toward an appreciation of the intrinsic value of a participatory workplace—one that becomes a “true human community, concerned about the needs, the activities and the standing of each of its members.” In economic terms, we might say that Pope John shifts the emphasis from residual claimancy to control rights.

This theme of participation is also taken up by John Paul II in Laborem exercens (1981), which speaks of “joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, [and] so-called shareholding by labor.” And when Benedict XVI writes in Caritas in veritate (2009) that “business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business,” he sounds an awful lot like a spokesman for Warren’s ACA.