Marx on Money

Marx’s Capital is a treasury of literary allusions. The quotation below is from Chapter 3 “Money” (part 3) Everyman’s Library (page 112)

As the circulation of commodities extends, the power of money increases, of money which is an absolutely social form of wealth, ever ready for use. Columbus, in a letter from Jamaica penned in 1503, says “Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls a way into paradise!” Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, whether a commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation is the great retort into which everything is thrown, and out of which everything is recovered as crystallised money. Not even the bones of the saints are able to withstand this alchemy; and still less able to withstand it are more delicate things, sacrosanct things which are outside the commercial traffic of men.

Henry III, most Christian king of France, robbed monasteries of their relics in order to turn these into money. We know what part the despoiling of the temple of Delphi by the Phocians played in Greek history. Among the ancients, the god of commodities had his dwelling in the temple. Temples were “sacred banks”. The Phocians, preeminently a trading people, looked upon money as the transmuted form of all things. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins who, at the feast of the goddess of love, gave themselves to strangers, should offer up to the goddess the pieces of money they received.

Just as all the qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money on its side, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions.

“Gold! Yellow, glittering, precious gold! . . .
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.”

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, sc iii.