Letters from Tomis

An ongoing series of reflections on Marxist economics after reading What is Marxism: An Introduction into Marxist Theory by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. The thoughts, opinions, and any errors are mine alone.

Money. That most fetishized, worshipped, and yet utterly misunderstood artifact of human civilization. It jingles in the pockets of the vulgar, flutters like fragile promises in the ledgers of the powerful, and is mythologized by economists as the lubricant of trade and civilization. Yet, as Karl Marx, that grizzled diagnostician of capital’s hidden maladies, so keenly dissected, money is something far more insidious than mere paper or coin. It is the very incarnation of alienation and exploitation.

To the bourgeois economist, money is innocuously described as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account—the three commandments etched into the neoliberal stone tablets. To Marx, however, money is the mystical veil behind which the sordid reality of human labor is hidden and distorted. It is not just a neutral facilitator of commerce; it is a social relation, and, like all social relations in capitalism, it is soaked in blood and subjugation.

In Capital, Marx pulls back the curtain on this secular idol and exposes its metaphysical perversity. Money, he explains, is crystallized labor. It is the commodified expression of human toil, expropriated from the worker and transubstantiated into a universal equivalent. The carpenter builds the table; the baker bakes the bread; the tailor sews the coat. Yet all these labors, though qualitatively different, are reduced to quantitative sameness under the aegis of money. Herein lies the alienation: the worker’s labor, which should be an extension of creativity and self-realization, is severed from its origin and sold back to society in the cold, abstract form of exchange value.

Marx’s withering analysis goes deeper still. Money, in the capitalist mode of production, is not simply earned and spent. It becomes capital. It metamorphoses from a mere medium into a vampire that thrives by sucking surplus value from the living laborer. The formula is as elegant as it is brutal: M–C–M’. Money buys commodities (chiefly labor power) only to birth more money. The worker, producing more value than they are paid for, fuels the relentless engine of accumulation. The capitalist pockets the difference, expanding wealth at one pole and immiseration at the other. This is no innocent marketplace of buyers and sellers; this is systemic larceny, sanctified by the invisible hand and masked by the neutrality of currency.

Even more sinister is how money obscures social relations themselves. Under capitalism, people cease to relate to one another directly as human beings; instead, their interactions are mediated by things—commodities—and their ghostly twin, money. Marx called this commodity fetishism, but one might as well call it the original sin of modernity. We revere the token while forgetting the hands that forged it. We worship the market’s invisible mechanisms while ignoring the sweat and bone ground beneath its gears.

But perhaps the most caustic irony, which Hitchens would relish in unearthing, is that money’s tyranny is upheld by belief. It has no intrinsic value, no moral claim over us, save that which we collectively imbue it with. The devout Christian might scoff at pagan idolatry while clutching a wallet thick with paper relics; the pious Muslim might decry usury while navigating the derivatives market with surgical precision. The modern human is the most zealous of believers, for we worship that which enslaves us and crucifies our brethren.

In Marxist economics, money is not just a tool; it is the emblem of estrangement and the architect of inequality. It is how capital disguises its predation as freedom, how labor’s chains are gilded to resemble adornments. And yet, we persist, eyes wide shut, in genuflection before its altar.

Perhaps it is time to desecrate the shrine.