Less optimistically than Marx, the democratic left today mostly thinks of money as a necessary evil. This nasty material has to be used to make markets function and it has to be accumulated. But it should be reined back as far as possible: the state should confiscate the maximum amount of numbers that it can and place them safely under the control of predictable verbal orders and regulations.
But could it be that in its implicit advocacy of words over numbers the left has all too readily embraced a capitalist notion of the nature of money? This notion assumes that money is necessarily a commodity – whether valid or illusory, as it was for Marx – and that the pursuit of wealth consists in piling the stuff up as high as possible….