Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1280

Carbon of a letter to Gilbert M. Tucker, Box 54, Capitol Station, Albany, New York

October 30, 1939

Dear Mr. Tucker:

I appreciate your letter of October 16th, and hope later in the winter to be able to see you both in New York and at my home in Maryland. I will be particularly glad to have Mrs. Tucker stop long enough to enjoy my Evergreen Gardens for a while.

My definition of capital is not applicable to any situation where there does not exist a community or social aggregation that has become such by reason of its members entering into the service of each other by means of the exchange process and relationship. In other words, capital, with me, is a term of political economy and has no meaning outside of the place where the polis, i.e. the social community, exists. Any goods or facilities used by an individual carrying on outside of community relationships is not even property or wealth, much less a special kind of wealth called capital, because it is only in the presence of community services and under community authority, that there can be any such thing as property. If the plow which your non-exchanging farmer, not functioning in any community or exchange relationship with respect to his produce, could be properly considered as capital, then the same could be said of any weapon or implement by which a solitary savage could increase the supply of his food, and we might even in this sense regard a web fashioned by a spider for the catching of flies, as capital because it enables him to obtain more food. The terms of political economy are properly designed for interpretation of politico-economic phenomena, and while it is entirely permissible for purposes of rhetoric to carry them into other fields, such transposition of the terms, I think, rather tends to becloud them with more ambiguity when used within their own proper frame of reference. From the whole context of Henry George, I am quite sure that his definition of the wealth produced by land, labor and capital as rent, wages and interest, has reference only to what happens among persons who are associated together in community relationships of service and exchange. It is a very prevalent error — one indulged in by the greatest thinkers — to try to interpret social institutions in the light of imaginary situations and illustrations in which no social relationships exist. This is the error that vitiates all of the Robinson Crusoe type of illustrations and examples and the mistake underlying the whole of Herbert Spencer’s reasoning in Social Statics in respect to the institution of private property in land. Here it was not the reasoning or formal logic that was at fault; it was the premise on which the reasoning was based, these premises being, in the main, supposititious cases of conflict of interest without reference to there being any social organization involved. If property in land is, as I veritably believe, the social institution which provides for exchange relationships between public authority and the common services of the community and, thereby, provides all the security there is for other exchange relationships, then this institution could not be rightly interpreted except in the light of the community functions which it performs. Since Herbert Spencer imputed no social function to land ownership, it was, of course, impossible for him to describe it as a social institution. When people try to explain relationships of a higher order in terms of relationships of a lower order, it is something like trying to explain algebra in terms of arithmetic, or explaining geometry in terms of algebra alone. The social relationships of mankind cannot be explained in terms of those relationships which precede the social state or condition. If in your own book you have tried to do this, I think you will be able to recognize the inadequacy of such explanation. Unfortunately, I have not seen your book, nor do I find the circular in reference to it that you speak of having enclosed. I do find, however, a circular entitled “We, The Citizens.”

As soon as I get back home, I will go through the T. R. A. circular and see if I can make any explicit criticisms and suggestions that might be helpful. If I can, I will be glad to have another copy of the booklet to use as you suggest.

I infer from your letter that you will not be in New York until after Christmas. Hence I am not making any attempt to reach you here while I am here at the present time. I do not understand your post script as follows: “Did I ever send you the enclosed? Use it if you should be up this way.” I do not know what enclosure this refers to.

Very cordially yours,