[Peace-discuss] What is wrong with capitalism?

[C. G. Estabrook]

What is wrong with capitalism, then, is not that it involves some people being 
richer than I am. I cannot see the slightest objection to other people being 
richer than I am; I have no urge to be as rich as everybody else, and no 
Christian (and indeed no grown-up person) could possibly devote his life to 
trying to be as rich or richer than others. There are indeed people, very large 
numbers of people, who are obscenely poor, starving, diseased, illiterate, and 
it is quite obviously unjust and unreasonable that they should be left in this 
state while other people or other nations live in luxury; but this has nothing 
specially to do with capitalism, even though we will never now be able to alter 
that situation until capitalism has been abolished. You find exactly the same 
conditions in, say, slave societies and, moreover, capitalism, during its 
prosperous boom phases, is quite capable of relieving distress at least in fully 
industrialised societies - this is what the ‘Welfare State’ is all about. What 
is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it 
is precisely here that it comes in conflict with Christianity. Capitalism is a 
state of war, but not just a state of war between equivalent forces; it involves 
a war between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of life, as an 
economy, and those who do not. The permanent capitalist state of war erupts 
every now and then into a major killing war, but its so-called peacetime is just 
war carried on by other means.

  --Herbert McCabe, OP, “The Class Struggle and Christian Love”, in *God 
Matters* (London: Continuum, 1987, 2005), pp. 192-93.