Is Money an Illusory Reality?

Abstract

The relevance of the topic is related to the fact that after the complete abandon­ment of real values in the 1970s of the main means of international settlements – the US dollar – there is a growing feeling that money increasingly represents an illusory reality. The article begins with an analysis of the illusions associated with Marx’s analysis of exchange in the form of purchase and sale of material goods in an industrial-type market economy, including his doctrine of commod­ity and monetary fetishism. Arguments are given in favor of the fact that the sub­stance of the value of the exchanged goods is the life of people as a whole, and not the part of it that is spent on the labor of their production. It is shown that the exchange of good necessary for human reproduction has been an attribute of the life of the Homo Sapiens species since the prohibition of incest within the totem became the cultural norm already under the primitive nomadic life­style. The exchange of genetic material between blood communities of different totems is described and analyzed in Marx’s terminology. In addition, a distinc­tion is introduced between mutual alienation “horizontally” in the exchange rela­tions between economic entities and mutual indifference “vertically” in the re­lations between the life of the species as a whole and the life of subjects in successive generations. It is noted that the transition from an appropriating economy to a producing one leads to a threat to the existence of the species as a whole as a result of the indifference of existing subjects to the interests of fu­ture generations. In connection with the actualization of this global threat, the use of money as a local tool for coordinating economic decisions is being discussed.