Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung

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Karl Barth - Paul S. Chung


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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_bc7d5081-ef68-543f-804e-51eab33b9341">207 Through his open character and by introducing Barth to his large circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, Thurneysen was a stimulus to Barth. Barth came into contact with religious socialist conferences through Thurneysen. Barth’s acquaintances with Kutter and Ragaz were also initiated by his lifelong friend, Thurneysen. From 1914 to 1916 Barth corresponded with Ragaz on a regular basis.208 Thurneysen’s writing on Dostoevsky, his work on “Socialism and Christendom,”209 and his project on new homiletics affected and contributed to the development of Barth’s dialectical theology.

      After finding Herrmann’s signature on the war manifesto, Barth expressed his disappointment to him.

      Two texts without information on the time of formation consist of data and notices regarding the history of two important industry plants: the firm C. F. Bally in Schönenward, and Sulzer Brothers in Winterthur. Barth was interested in the family history of the firm owners, the technological development of their businesses, the social conditions of their companies, and also the religious self-understanding of these industry owners. It is not clear so far whether what is represented here are excerpts from the present history of the company or independent data collections of Barth. Barth’s intended use of the information can certainly be surmised. Through the collection of information Barth is concerned about the life circumstances and living conditions of his parish members and comrades. Because the two enterprises offer examples of the social conscience of certain capitalists, it is also conceivable that these texts could have been materials for the great dossier.

      This work is especially interesting because it documents a way of working, namely via empirical analysis. Barth worked with hardly accessible statistical material: wage and price scales, “household [income] calculations of workers,” statistics of working hours, paragraphs of labor law in various countries, Youth labor statistics, statistics about profit and receipts, insurance statements, records of bank dividends, a report of occupational hazards (from a tobacco worker), statistics about accidents, about women in the labor force (different from Swiss cantons), about money devaluation, about the cost of business middlemen, about age structure in industry, about the housing situation, about overpopulation in living space, and about vacation time. Here we see some discussions important for Barth’s holistic perspective, such as his critique of the so-called scientific management, the Taylor system, through which nourishment, motion, and timing of the worker as a human time machine should be regulated solely from the standpoint of economic efficiency.

      According to Barth, the current labor conditions included an enormous squandering of resources. Every increase in productivity was also for this reason to be welcomed because promotion of production means also progress for humanity under the given circumstances. The sole question for Barth was whether the economic effectiveness of the system operated at the cost of the humanity of the worker, whether the system displaced the “personality,” whether the ideal worker who experienced as few irritants as possible was in fact immeasurably more prone to nervousness and so to workplace accidents, and whether all this was not the quintessence and practical zeal of a through-and-through materialistic worldview. To this, Barth’s answer was unequivocal: as long as the economic principle of effectiveness stands in service to “the system,” i.e., capitalist production, then rationalization does not serve the general progress but


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