Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1127

Pencil notation by Heath on small, six-hole ring-binder pages

No date

For long ages, barbaric men had no wit to transfer any property or service except by the rule of force and seizure. True, among family or tribal groups, there were transfers of articles or services without violence and with a degree of mutuality resembling exchange. But all such transfers were effected by the dominance of some of the members of the group and the corresponding weakness and subservience of the other members.[1] Even in the highest type of family and personal relationships, the exchanges of service are still on an emotional basis and are even considered degraded if they fall to the level of trading by measured exchanges. These personal relationships can range from the very degraded to the highly exalted, according to the quality of the emotions involved, but they cannot extend beyond the circle of those who are in conscious, personal contact with each other, and therefore they cannot interpenetrate and integrate a society as a whole. This is reserved for the economic organization in which the exchanges of goods and services are governed by the measurements of the market automatically accepted by all and establishing the exchange relationship throughout the whole society.