1 Notes on Marx, Money and Commodities For Philosophy 166 In “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society” section of the 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx condemns money and envisages a society that transcends relations involving money. He says this society would be superior. Money is just a conventional device that facilitates exchange. So Marx’s real target must be exchange, perhaps specifically the wide exchange of goods and services that occurs in a market economy. What’s wrong with market exchange? The text suggests various possibilities. 1. Marx writes, money involves “ the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal overturning and confounding of things: it makes brothers of impossibilities.” Further down on same page: “That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able 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.” Same page: “Money is the alienated ability of mankind.” In other words, the limits of my natural powers and capabilities are extended through exchange. Why is this bad? Some examples: I am ugly, but with money I am able to purchase sexual services, or perhaps even acquire what is sometimes called a “trophy wife [or husband]”. I am lame, but with money I can hire a taxi, or purchase crutches, and in this way the natural tendency of my lameness to impede my physical mobility is partly overcome. No doubt it would be nice if I were not lame, but suppose my lameness is incurable. One might hold it is unequivocally better that via market exchange or otherwise I can purchase goods that will offset my physical bodily deficiencies and enhance my natural powers. At the end of the passage, page 105, Marx writes, “Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person. . . . . .Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life.” A clue that something might be wrong here emerges if we try to extend Marx’s list: in a decent society you can exchange barbering services only for barbering services, corn for corn, back rubs for back rubs. Why is simple reciprocal barter superior in any way to broader exchange, say of my back rubs for your corn or barbering services (or for money, which then enables me to purchase any of a wide variety of goods and services and extend my natural powers up to the limit of what my money will buy)? Marx appears to be appealing to the idea of a natural aristocracy, in which people are born with better and worse traits, and nothing is done artificially to augment traits or equalize people’s capacities. Rather society is arranged so that those with a poor endowment of traits are enabled to do what they are equipped by nature to do without social aid—namely, not much. Society is also arranged so that those lucky enough to bon with very desirable traits (and to have them augmented by the “natural” good luck or bad luck of having parents or guardians who are willing and able to raise you so that your traits develop into talents and skills to a greater or lesser extent, as it may be) are enabled to do what they are equipped to do by nature without social aid. In this society those with a poor endowment of traits do worse and those with a better endowment of2 traits do better. For example, people are born naturally able to run fast or slow, and social arrangements do not tamper with this natural distribution but just give people access to running tracks, so naturally fast and slow can race and the naturally fast will win. And the same holds for all traits. The society is a natural aristocracy. Rousseau at one point in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Part 2, suggests a similar ideal. This ideal seems to belong to feudalism. Shakespeare exhibits loyalty to it in the passages Marx quotes. But why does Marx go along with this? One might think Marx should be the fierce enemy of sheer bad luck beyond one’s power to control being the determiner of a person’s prospects for living a good life. But whether one is a natural aristocrat depends largely on the good or bad luck or being born into a rich poor family, or of being born with a better or a worse natural endowment of proto-traits, or of having competent and dedicated or incompetent and lax parents. (Marx later abandons any loyalty to the natural aristocracy ideal; see the Critique of the Gotha Program, p. 530, toward the bottom of the page in the Marx-Engels Reader.) 2. Marx in some passages appears to object to unlimited market exchange—a society where everything and anything is for sale. P. 102: “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.” In the recommended reading, a chapter from Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer takes up this suggestion. He suggests we in fact don’t allow everything to be bought and sold: we prohibit some exchanges. He provides a list of blocked exchanges. The list is heterogeneous. a. Some of these blocked exchanges seem to involve goods whose nature is such that they logically cannot be transferred, so the idea of transfer by sale makes no sense. “He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward,” Marx writes (p.105). I am either brave or not, that depends on how I am disposed to behave in dangerous situations; I cannot purchase bravery. Perhaps there is a problem of fraudulent misrepresentation—I might buy a bravery medal and wear it as though I had earned it. The problem here is fraud not exchange. Also, love and friendship, as commonly understood, are not things that could be bought and sold—whatever one purchased, it could not be love or friendship, though conceivably could be the occasion that somehow triggers development of love or friendship. However, there is no point to forbidding what is impossible. b. Some items on Walzer’s list are goods such that we create for a purpose, which sale would subvert. If the idea of voting is to