Money, the Alienated Power of Humanity
Money, the Alienated Power of Humanity

Author(s): Mihail Rarita
Subject(s): Political Philosophy, Special Branches of Philosophy
Published by: Editura Lumen, Asociatia Lumen
Keywords: Karl Marx; capitalism; alienation; the power of money; derealization of mankind;
Summary/Abstract: From a chronological point of view, the original discourse of Marx on money has been marked, first of all, by the ethical tradition that considers money as a source of corruption in human relations, and connects directly to individual vices such as the greed for money and selfishness. Thus, in the Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx adopted the principle of Moses Hess regarding the support to the critical issues of alienation over a certain conception of money (the distorted representation of human activity, an agent of corruption of social life and responsible for a reversal of the normal order of life). In this article, we argue that through Marx's philosophical criticism of money in his third manuscript, through his report on two literature references, he tries to prove the abstraction power specific to money. I have developed this thesis by studying in three times the way in which money generates a triple abstraction-alienation: the abstraction and alienation of the object, the alienation-abstraction of the subject, and the alienation-abstraction of the generic humankind in its entirety.

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