Spencer Heath Archive

Item 158

Pencil by Heath on the backs of The Master an Apartment Hotel, New York City, letterheads.

No date

CIVILIZATION AND THE COMMUNITY

A socialized or civilized condition is one in which men do things together and do them by consent. Consent requires inducement or counter-consent. Doing things thus is called exchange. Men have nothing to give but their services. Nothing can be exchanged but unlike services and commodities into which services have been wrought and stored. Men cannot exchange services or goods containing them unless they securely own them. Men cannot own things except under protection of community life. Men cannot exchange things except by and of community services. /Sentence? Check original/ Services (including commodities) are exchanged between men — men as individuals and as groups. Services are furnished directly to individuals or groups. Services are also furnished by providing them through a certain place for general use of the occupants or inhabitants. Such a place is called a community and such services community services. It may be a building or a territory. If it is a building it is called a hotel or apartment house or an office or industrial building. If It is a territory it is called a town, city, state or nation. A community must have space, population, services and property. The services and properties must be exchanged among the members. To be exchanged it must be owned and administered. The community properties and services must have community or public owners to administer and exchange them. The individual properties and services must have private owners to administer and exchange them. For the community services that they receive, the occupants of the community must give to the owners of the community properties and services a portion of their private properties and services. Such private property and services as is rendered up in exchange for community services is called rent. The rent paid by the occupants of a hotel or other community building is paid in exchange for the common and general services the occupants enjoy. Special and particular services are paid for separately and not in the rent. The rent paid by the occupants of a town, city, state or other territory is paid in exchange for the common and general or public services that community affords. The amount of rent paid for community services depends upon their exchange or market value. This is contractual and fixed by the owners of different communities or different owners of the same community offering their community services in competition with each other downwardly in price while those who would occupy the community and enjoy its services bid upwards against each other until the selling and the buying sides of the market are in agreement as to the price. In a hotel community the owners of the community properties, facilities and services administer them for the benefit of the occupants. In this way they cause the occupants willingly to pay rent for them to an

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