Since ancient times we have used money, as what is called a medium of exchange. Money has today a meaning, that basically reversed itself over time.
How money can bring people together
You might be surprised in this header, living in a time where money as seen so often as the root of all evil. However, try to position yourself into an ancient time where trade of goods was the way to acquire the basic needs for a living. Thus, the fisher would exchange fish with the bread of a baker, the baker then again can choose between trading part of the acquired fish or offering his bread to a carpenter, who would fix your the broken leg of his working table.
However, there is a basic set of needed conditions, that by coincidence need to be fulfilled in order for this trade to work: mutual preferences. For the fisher to make his trade with the baker, it is necessary that both sides are in need of the other side's product at that moment where the trade is done; let's say, the fisher doesn't need any bread at this moment, then the baker also will not be able to get any fish from him. And if the baker has nothing that needs to be fixed by the carpenter, there's no exchange to be made either. Here is the moment where money comes into play, making this trade not only dramatically easier, but also more fruitful in finding a personal connection with each other. By having one generally accepted trade-good, that everyone demands for, exchange doesn't need anymore mutual preferences. Thus the fisher, baker, carpenter, forester or whoever from any kind of job can now exchange with the other – the carpenter can do his services also for people not offering him food, the baker can come to the carpenter without the needing any product acquired elsewhere. Also time-wise, one can skip the step of going through a whole chain of trading different goods, just for the sake of acquiring the one good that a certain exchange partner is in need of at the moment.
From the ability of being able to exchange not only with people that are in need of a product that you can offer right now, one is able to trade with about anyone in your society. And therefore, money works as a connecting point within society: it is the most basic good to trade and exchange with everybody, and through money being able to trade with more and more different people is a way to connect people in a society from all kinds of angles. It creates a basic dependency that forms a binding joint between the people that all need to live together in one society, as a tool that can bring people together by the means of trade. A trade is a bonding action that would never happen if it wouldn't be a profit for both exchange partners. If it happens under oppressive circumstances, where one side profits more from it then the other, it isn't a trade anymore but exploitation or scam.
If we extend this thought on a larger scale, we can see that it works as a bond between countries as well, being also a catalyst for peacekeeping. Countries that are trading with each other, and that exchange goods through money, would suffer enormous losses through the cost of wars – since it would mean the complete breakdown of the trade, that was happening between the two sides fighting the war.
Money as a means of alienation
If we look at the text so far it seems questionable, why today we think of money more as a source of alienation between people than as a means for exchange and connecting with each other. There can be several reasons named for this, yet it seems all somewhat obscure.
First of all it seems that there is a sort of personal connection as to know from a good where it comes from, how you acquired it, and why it is in your hands right now. This seems to fail on all three accounts when we think of today's money: it seems to be some globally standardized abstract tool, that nobody has any relation with, it comes from the nothing, and goes into the nothing somewhere between paper, credit cards, and digital numbers that can be infinitely inflated and reproduced.
The second dimension, why money can even become a reason to oppress each other, may have to do with the enormous dimension of possibilities we admit to it. We see it as a mean to universally reach everything, and therefore the ultimate tool of power. Money rules the world so we see and think, and from oppression to murder we do everything to get it. This danger may come from the fact that money is the only thing in the world whose quality is being measured solely by it's quantity – at least today it is.
The third dimension, which may partially answer the question why we are not able to build up any kind of personal relation to it, is that the money-sums of today have an a non-material equivalent so abstract that it's hard to put any value on it all. With gold there was a material equivalent that is gone, with the market there is a non-material equivalent, that is the harder to grasp, the higher it's sums are. It is almost impossible to understand a value like one million Euro: We can use as a comparison how much hours we would have to work for it, yet it becomes diffuse when we think that in another country someone needs to work much less or more hours to get that far, with additionally the world market completely deflating and inflating it through millions of chained links untraceable for us. The higher the millions, the more difficult to have any meaningful comparison to it that helps you in understanding it's actual value.
With a value connected to it that is an entity we can all understand, money becomes more likely what it is supposed to be: a tool to trade and exchange among each other. If a future value for money that can make us understand what it is worth, is to be found, it will need to be something that equally everybody sees as valuable. Time may not be the replacement then due to it's egalitarian value; but it can serve as parallel alternative to make us understand easier what money is actually supposed to do.
Thanks to the text "Geld - Eine Analyse von Rahim Taghizadegan und Gregor Hochreiter" from this site where I nicked most of the information from, namely the first part.
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