Spencer Heath Archive

Item 635

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation

December, 1955

     CAPITAL

*Capital is anything that is used for the service of others. It is the subject matter of administration. You can’t administer any capital without serving someone else with it. It is the thing with which they are served. Capital is often thought of very narrowly as being only tools, as though the lumber that goes through a saw mill isn’t just as much capital as the saw is. Both serve the customer. The saw is administered, and the lumber that goes through the saw is administered. One is just as much capital as the other. And so all things that are the subject matter of contract thereby are capital. But these same things before they become the subject matter of contract, and after they have ceased to become the subject matter of contract, are no longer capital. And a science of economics, or any social science, has to do with those things only during that portion of their existence after they become capital and before they cease to be capital. It is only while they are as capital that they have any part in the operation of a social science.

“And even then, they are not properly the subject matter of socionomy, but of the psychological processes which are the subject matter of socionomy.”

Correct. And they are the physical environment. And the physical things are no more the subject matter of a social science — although they are the groundwork, physical environment of it — they are no more the subject matter of the social science than the rock is any part of the sponge; it is the environment necessary for the sponge to organize and operate. It is no part of the living thing. And in the same way, physical things are no part of the social structure; they are only the environment of it. Even wealth is no part of the social organization itself but only the environment or the media in which it acts.