Money for Marx and Shakespeare
People don't think of what money is. But people try to get money.
However money is used by complicated entities, men, in complicated situations of complicated society, at least as a possibility.
Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
...
The Power of Money
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.
“What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours!
And what we take while life is sweet,
Is that to be declared not ours?
“Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.”
Goethe: Faust (Mephistopheles)
Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:
“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?...
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.”
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent – the [...] [One word in the manuscript cannot be deciphered. – Ed.] chemical power of society.
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not – turns it, that is, into its contrary.To get money you have to do something. You have to act legally or work, or you have to act illegally or commit a crime. You have to do such a thing with good will or good intentions, or otherwise you will do such a thing with ill will or malice.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
If everybody acts legally or work with good will or good intentions to earn money, there will be no needs for communism.
And if all the people are just bad and so bad, no matter what they think about money, it will not make this world better.
The key is not money but our mind. It is so, since we can even abolish money following our philosophy or religion.
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Psa 10:3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
Psa 10:4 The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.