Spencer Heath Archive

Item 998

Fragments presumably intended for insertion (since many are numbered with asterisks) in an essay in preparation or under revision.

1930s?

 

 

 

 

It was the virility of northern tribes that raised Hellenic glories upon Minoan slaves. Another northern vigor, suckled by the She-wolf of the Sabine Hills, rose into full dominion over the ancient slavish world, only to break itself against Gothic walls and in turn, succumb to the vigor and valiance of northern tribes anew.

Without any theory to justify its existence, with no recognition of its own essential function in the social order and therefore without any constructive program or policy, the institution of property in land is fast crumbling away.

Every institution, every social technique, must be empirical before it becomes rational. During its pre-rational period it cannot be understood. It carries on by a kind of social instinct reinforced by tradition, but never does the rationale disclose itself to the pragmatic or traditional mind. The high and deep secrets of nature are revealed only to the seekers and searchers who find beauty in their quest. [This paragraph struck out and replaced by the following:]

A traditional institution, custom or technique must remain empirical and blind until it becomes rational and enlightened. Its preservation and advance hangs upon the displacement of narrow and empiric thoughts and actions by broader, more general and enlightened ones.

This is the only dominion that an owner can exercise over his wealth and its value not disappear.* Footnote: A lender of capital is still its owner. He and the borrower become co-administrators on shares, the lender’s share being fixed in advance.

Dominion over the terrain is the basis of all social protection, source of all political authority and foundation of all public or community services. The social molecules that unite to form a society crystallize always upon the patriarchal pattern as the authentic form. Early society exhibits always a proprietary land-owning class having individual sovereignty over their separate domains and extending their collective ownership and sovereignty, often through an elected chief or king, to all their inter-community, public and political affairs.

The first social beginnings are in warm fertile lands. Here food, clothing and shelter are least required and most easily obtained and a primitive agriculture will support two out of the labor of one. Neither character nor capacity nor cooperation and exchange are essential to life, and the oppression of the users by the owners of the soil through tax seizures of part of their produce or their complete enslavement by seizing it all, is a natural and practicable, if unprogressive, social condition. It is characteristic of the fat and flat lands of the Orient. It accounts for their high death and birth rates and fatalistic philosophy and their successive submergences by conquests from higher and colder lands and less slavish states.

This combination in one of both owner and user is not found in early societies. It does not characterize ancient society in the rich river valleys of the south, where the owners of the soil are sharply defined from the users whom they enslave by compulsive tribute or taxation. Nor is it found in the early social integrations of the rugged north, in which untaxed free-men render rents to their land-lords by consent of custom or measure of the market in exchange for possession and protection and other common and public services that the lords supplied. In both these the public authority is actually or substantially in proprietary hands.

The ambiguous combination of owner and user makes its appearance in the later slave-based democracies and republics in which the public proprietors have permitted their political force and authority to pass into non-proprietary and therefore irresponsible hands. But when the proprietary interest in northern lands has been so corrupted by the encroachments of slavery and taxation from the south that it defaults upon its obligation to protect its free-men and forfeits all its political authority to kings by divine right or to what is called popular or elected sovereignty, then the situation of the land-lords of the communities with regard to the community servants is but little better than that of the users of the land. They too become subjected to indefinitely increasing depredations by way of taxation at the hands of the elected or accepted authority.

Discoveries and conquests of new lands, the use of new sciences and inventions and facilities of trade may delay the fall but, as the burden of taxation and debt continues to grow, enterprise becomes unprofitable and unsafe, employment shrinks, production falls, and the income and value of land necessarily declines.

The failure of owners to function as such, publicly and separately from the use of land, has given rise to the fallacious idea that taxation instead of rent is the normal and honest revenue of a community, that private use instead of public administration over land is the true function of its ownership and that tenancy, but not taxation, somehow involves a condition of servility. It is forgotten that in the absence of slavery or taxation, as in Saxon England, land-lord and free-man were correlative and reciprocal terms and serfdom was a consequence of Roman taxation under Norman rule.

In modern as in ancient times, just as all private enterprises require owner-administration, so do all the public enterprises by which the private ones are served. In both cases, whether they function little or much, the owners are sharply marked off from all subordinates or employes.

Merchandising — making sales — is the only mode by which ownership can be transferred for value received, hence the only equitable mode of distribution, the only true exchange.

All the wealth that is being used to prepare and provide products and services for others is capital wealth. So also are all the materials and commodities that in the course of exchange are being prepared for and distributed into consumers’ hands. All properties so used or being so prepared and distributed are social-ized properties or capital. Capital, then, is wealth that is owned for the use and benefit of others, and all capital, from the nature of its administrative ownership and use, is of necessity social-ized wealth. Such wealth must not be confounded with those negligible properties that never come into the exchange system nor with the relatively few goods that have passed out of that system into individual use and are in process of being consumed or otherwise destroyed.

Social stability and peace requires, therefore, not merely that goods and services come into being but also that they be administered and sold by their owners and thus distributed equitably on the basis of value received. This is the final [?] and wholly indispensable feature of owner-administration over any property or services. It applies no less to the distribution of public services than to any other and that is where the merchandising of these services by the community owners plays its supremely important role.

Because they are appropriators from others and not rightful owners of what they seize and possess, they can give it no productive administration and it yields them no income. The appropriated wealth, for want of authentic ownership, ceases to function as productive capital and melts away to be replenished only by further seizures which, in turn, are consumed and destroyed.