The Meaning of Money

In the Marxian Labor Theory of Value, money functions in transactions as a stand-in for another, real transaction between two entities. One monetary amount, the price, defined through the formula C’ = (c + v) + s, is then met with an equivalent monetary amount, describing, in indirect lineage, the same amount of labor as the final C’ set as the price. The same occurs in gold standard currencies, where money on both ends stand in for a real transaction of true value. In these models, and to a fully abstracted sense in fiat currency, money functions as language, through the way its meaning is constructed. Money’s meaning is always absent, declared in some way by another. Each number affixed to the variables in Marx’s language is fixed in some way by money in a closed loop, with the guarantee of money’s value being backed by something having value by the pure virtue of it being worth money. Money therefore is always absent, just as firm meaning is in language, its meaning created by something elsewhere in an endless chain.

Twice has the same event occurred. In 1928 and in 2018, Wall Street and Silicon Valley respectively, were questioned over their audacity by a confused and out of touch Congress, pressing them on predetermined narratives against an industry rapidly spiraling out of their control. In the former, gambling, the latter, censorship, in both, the elderly state apparatus reacted with confusion, channeled into aggression, raging against the rapidly escaping movements of the counter-states in question. In both, the entities questioned were the newest wealth-holders in the nation, pseudo-states, vertical institutions that grew up rapidly in order to ensure and spread out tentacular lines of communication. In the 1920s, Wall Street’s familial dynasties grew in size in order to begin the long movement continuing today of American currency as the ultimate backbone of international finance, in the latter, HTTP-based websites emerged to take advantage of the brand new telecommunications technology. For Wall Street, this was the beginning of a saga currently being repeated with Silicon Valley. As the US Dollar has become the currency backing the entire planet, the state-like familial institutions set up to set this into motion were outdated, first by pan-atlantic technocratic groups such as the IMF, World Bank, and United Nations, and later by new ideas of corporate structure pioneered in the 1980s, when dynastic structures dissolved into complex instruments and occult corporate entities. This was the child eating the parents, the communicative liquids of the American Dollar returning to dissolve the vertical structures that birthed it, the air dissolving the solid that birthed it as it eclipsed the original vision of its creators.

An individual in possession of wealth is not in possession of wealth, but in control of it. Money operates as communication, one of the most effective, with greater quantities equating to more powerful speech. When a transaction occurs, money’s only role is to give the will of one side a voice sufficiently powerful to move whatever it wants to move. Money is is not an object, but a force, a tool of power and control.