this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.
Money is labor hours exchanged for equivalent goods and services. It’s a loop. If there’s no one to labor, and no one to buy the products of that labor, money isn’t anything.
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
Why will people do things for you in exchange for money?
I’ve read a lot of that book. I know about the power theory of money. But the very concept of money is about power changing hands. A person who receives money now has power over someone else. Exploitation occurs when that exchanged power is less than the power the laborer put in. But there’s no way money can exist as power in a purely top down command economy. In that case, power takes a different form, like direct police action. Money as power can only exist when it can be exchanged for goods and services. That’s its gimmick as a medium of power. Other power mediums have other gimmicks.
And under that gimmick, capitalists actually do have a dialectical relationship to workers, and therefore to their means of living, their means of social reproduction, their environment. That’s Marxism.
So all money is power, but not all power is money.