I have been reading the Official Report of the All Friends Conference, the first international conference of Friends held in London in 1920. The conference was held in response to the horrors of the first world war and it focused initially, on the peace testimony, but it ended up having some radical things to say about the wider social order—the capitalist economic system and the political and social institutions that enabled and favored it.

The Conference was held in a mood of deep soul searching, since so many Friends had served in the war, in contradiction to the peace testimony, and this seemed to challenge Friends’ commitment to the testimony. At the same time, both state and wider societal persecution over conscientious objection had descended on many other Friends, and by association, on the whole Society, because of their resistance.

Furthermore, especially for those attending from London Yearly Meeting (now Britain YM), the Conference also progressed in the light of that yearly meeting’s proceedings of the past few years. LYM had convened a Committee on War and the Social Order in 1915 charged with studying the causes of the Great War and with proposing steps to more effectively prevent such a horror from occurring again.

The Committee came back with an indictment of capitalism as a chief cause and with some principles that had a flavor of the small but influential Quaker Socialist movement. A Conference on War and the Social Order was held in 1916, which brought to the Yearly Meeting Seven Points of the Message of All Friends, quoted here. Unable to come to unity on these principles, they were returned to the quarterly meetings for comment in 1917 and by 1918, all had replied. A new set of eight principles called Foundations of a True Social Order was approved that year, somewhat watered down from the insistences of the more radical quarters, but still focused on the social order—the economic system—with a prophetic voice (quoted here).

During the world conference, one “Subject” focused on Personal Life and Society and the minute approved from that Subject included the following, which has distinct echoes from the efforts of the Committee on War and the Social Order:

Turning to more particular proposals, we ask Friends to give special thought to the following, and to consider how far they indicate a direction in which advance may be made:—

Fuller recognition in every relation of life of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of man, and the vast implications flowing therefrom. And endeavor after greater simplicity in our personal way of life, asking ourselves—How far does my life recommend to others the cause I have at heart? The limitation of the return upon capital. The surrender of the absolute control of industry by capital, the furtherance of the spirit essential for co-operation, and the fuller recognition of the sacredness of personality. Some method for giving security of employment to the worker.

The Fatherhood of God

Note that Friends still looked to the Christian framework for the foundation of testimony, presumably primarily the peace testimony in this case, rather than the notion of a divine spark in everyone, as Rufus Jones had reinterpreted the phrase “that of God in everyone” about twenty years earlier. This helps to corroborate Lewis Benson’s speculation that it was the AFSC (which Jones had cofounded during the war) that popularized this idea.

Simplicity

In some of the presentations to the Conference and in the vocal ministry that followed these messages, as recorded in the Report, Friends had searched their own lifestyles and complacency regarding the peace testimony before the war, and found themselves wanting. And as regards the “social order”, they saw that the progressive changes they were proposing for the economic system required changes on their own part, if they were to be consistent with their beliefs.

Limits to return on capital

Here you can see the hand of the socialists and this is a remarkable, radical proposal. This is the sentence that prompted me to write this blog post. These Friends are calling for a cap on corporate profits. They don’t get specific about where the surplus profits beyond the cap should go. However, the focus on and off during the conference had been on labor, and the fifth proposal is for unemployment insurance, so we can imagine that they would return the surplus to the workers in one way or another.

Restructuring the economy

Control (economic democracy):

This final proposal is the other reason I wanted to pass this on to my readers. It has three parts, focused on control, competition, and “personality”. First, as regards industry control. Support for the Labour Party was strong in England at this time among Friends and labor’s plight loomed large during the Conference’s deliberations. The yearly meeting saw that, to make lasting and fundamental change, workers had to be given a say over their own labor.

Competition:

While giving market competition some credit, they also saw it as a cause of conflict, and even of the violence experienced in the war. They desired an economic system that focused more on cooperation and they called upon “industry” to understand its mission as one of pursuing service to society rather than profit for the individual.

Personality:

The word ‘personality’ had a broader meaning early in the twentieth century than it usually does today; it didn’t mean one’s style as a social person. In the 1880s, it came to mean ‘personalty’, one’s personal goods and personal estate in an economic sense. As used here, the word carries some of these connotations, but also something more: the broad sense of those qualities which make a person what she is, as distinct from other persons, and which distinguish personhood from ‘thingness’. Nurturing individual “personality” was a consistent theme throughout all these British discernment efforts—that each individual should be free to develop their talents, their lives, their personal resources in whatever ways gave them fulfillment.

Employment security

Friends saw clearly that the fear of losing one’s job was a sinful form of disempowerment. It was oppressive. And it should be dealt with somehow.

Are you thinking what I am thinking? That these Friends were unrealistically optimistic about their prospects regarding these principles? And that we have made very little progress indeed. Unemployment insurance is the only ideal that has been realized, if only partially.

But there is here a solid foundation for a Quaker testimony on economic justice.