Spencer Heath Archive

Item 512

Penned by Heath on small notepad paper together with Item 511.

Before World War II?

 

 

 

          The distance between society and savagery is measured by the extent to which force or fraud is displaced by consent and exchange.

     Buying and selling is the keystone of the social arch that spans from savagery and death to civilization and life. Exchange is the only pro-social process and nothing can be owned or exchanged save services, either current or as accumulated in properties.

     Nothing can be exchanged unless it be owned, and there is no exchange except by consent. Property, inviolate, in one’s own present and in one’s accumulated labor is the foundation of trade and therefore of all that distinguishes men from beasts.

     There can be no property except there be public services. Government, as a service agency, is requisite to all pro-social relations, all community life.

     All production consists in buying and selling. All exchange consists in selling and then buying.

     All production consists in buying the three services of capital, labor, and government (public services) for interest, wages and rent and contributing administrative services.

     All exchange consists of two parts: first, selling one’s own services (for a wage) or one’s own combined with pur­chased services. Second, buying the equivalent services of others. This completes the exchange.

     The equivalence or exchange ratios of services is determined by the voluntarism of the market in which the owners of current or accumulated services vote their desires and consents as to their terms of exchange which they express in terms of value or price. Value and price actually exist only where there is an actual exchange. Any other value or price exists only by imagination. Value is incident not to services or goods but to exchange. It relates services and commodities to one another in terms of their exchangeableness.

     Ownership is pre-requisite to exchange. So long as services are in course of trade, exchange is the only function of ownership.

     Consumption and use, other than for trading is an indivi­dual and not a social process. It is not the social function but the end for which the social function of exchange is per­formed.

     Since ownership is social-ized only by trade all impairment of trade is impairment of ownership