50 Years Ago: Capitalism and christianity

The Christian will tell us that if only we would all show a spirit of brotherhood, the spirit of Christ, and exercise forbearance and be unselfish, all our industrial troubles would vanish. For the most part employers and workers, even those who are nominally Christian, make no special effort to apply their Christian principles to their relationship with each other. There are however religious persons, Quakers for example, who do profess that their religion can and does have a very intimate bearing on their everyday activities, including the running of a business. Thus the Cadbury family claim that the application of Quaker principles to industry has made Bournville something of a model for the industrial world, containing the hope of a solution for the problems of modern history.

The question has been raised in an acute form by the application of ‘‘rationalisation” in the Cadbury cocoa business, the subject of an article in the New Leader (Feb. 22) by a Quaker member of the Independent Labour Party. Three years ago, he says, there were distressing scenes when another 400 women, some of them over 40 years of age, who had been with the firm since early girlhood, were added to Birmingham’s 30,000 unemployed.

“I confess”, says Mr. Chamberlain, “that as members of the Society of Friends, I had hoped for great things from Quaker employers. I had hoped that they might have given a bold lead to other employers. But with the action of the Cadbury family my hope has vanished”.

It has taken 25 years for an ILP speaker and writer to learn that capitalism is a system of society organised not for the satisfaction of human needs, directly, but in the first place for profit-making.

(From an editorial “Capitalism and Christianity” in the Socialist Standard, March 1929)