The Nomadic Alternative – Page 163

and selling,** Locke said, "There can be no injury where there is no property." But where there is no property at all there is total chaos. If language has a biological basis, trade has a biological basis. The give and take of personally-owned possessions is simply the concrete embodiment of language and man's ability to communicate with each other. The therapeutic nature of bargaining between the actual owner and the actual purchaser of a thing will be self-evident to anyone who has bartered in an Oriental souk. Even a despised foreigner acquires status as a human being - as opposed to a mindless milkable animal - in direct proportion to the extent he drives a hard but fair bargain. Monopolists who fix price and dispossess small traders in attempts to impose from one centralized position their benevolence on society at large, simply remove the cement which keeps people friendly towards each other. They encourage boredom, feelings of deprivation and impotent futility. The hoarding of capital in the hands of the state, abstract and total, far from alleviating this condition, drastically worsens it. In this scheme State Capitalism is Super-Capitalism. But no society committed to growth can avert imbalance and inequity in its trading relationship with its neighbours.

The four causes of fights in a savage society are perpetuated in our own wars - revenge for the killing of a man in the middle of his life cycle, the taking of somebody else's woman, failure to share food equally and theft of personal possessions. For the Bushman theft is an outrageous reversion to animality. The thief no longer warrants consideration as a man and is put to death. Animals fight to stabilize the hierarchy of dominance. Men fight because parity has been disturbed. The Tasmanians, the most "primitive" of all savages, squabbled with their neighbours. But as the Rev. George Robinson showed in his diaries such outbursts blazed up when one party in a trading relationship failed to turn up with goods that had been promised. Trouble always follows when the notion of strict equivalence is upset, thus confirming a notion of Ib'n Khaldun that "the origin of all war is envy".

*Words used by the 17th Century Leveller, Gerrard Winstanley, quoted by Needham in Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. II, p.100.