Real Wealth and the Communitarian Social Profit Motive of Communitarian Capitalism* (1983)

What is real wealth? It can't be material goods or ownership of property or power over others. No, these things can be bought out from under any individual or stolen or lost in any number of ways. Real wealth doesn't come from ownership of things or from power to control others. Real wealth can't be bought or sold because it isn't transferable.

Real wealth exists only in relationships between living beings. Real wealth can be measured only by oneself as a quality value of one's relationship to others. Consider: can love, genuine love as we understand it if not define it, be bought or sold? Can genuine friendship be bought or sold? Can genuine care and concern be given a purchase price? Can an unasked for, yet freely offered helping hand extended to you when your need is great be given any sort of quantitative value? No, these are quality aspects of relationships between oneself and others and exist only as such. Therefore, real wealth can only be present in quality relationship with others. Real wealth then is a completely social phenomena inseparable from one's community of friends and loved ones.

Real wealth imparts well-being because human beings are always dependent on one another for their ability to cope successfully with the problems of life. No one is an island and no one stands alone for long without losing well-being. Without threat of oppression human beings will naturally seek the well-being of real wealth relationships. This is the communitarian social profit motive at work.

The communitarian social profit motive works more or less unconsciously in all interpersonal relationships. There is no social profit in dealing with others who demonstrate antagonism towards one's conscious or unconscious goal of forming quality relationships with others because quality relationships always add to one's well-being. Political or economic or other practical benefits may tie people together but if the opportunity for forming quality relationships is not present, these practical relationships become a burden that will be discarded as soon as circumstances permit transfer to quality relationships offering opportunity to form real wealth. The communitarian social profit motive naturally seeks real wealth and is therefore, the prime motivating factor that drives everyone, each at their own pace which is set during early childhood, towards a final goal of building social capital or real wealth.

Material capitalism or material socialism are irrelevant to the ever-present reality of the communitarian social profit motive which is at work in every kind of human social structure. The survival and longevity of any social-economic system is directly proportional to each system's degree of facilitating formation of social capital or real wealth between individuals within the system. Communitarian Capitalism then is not an offshoot of either capitalism or traditional socialism but is instead a basic or root mode of social organization millennia old that reflects recognition of a universal human economy measured in terms of quality and not quantity values.