The Money Jew

It is telling that in his Comments on James Mill, Marx drew on the similarity between money as a medium of exchange and Christ as the mediator between humanity and God. A monetary medium attains power through an exchange relationship, just as Christ attains power over believers and their God. In his comments, Marx writes that this “mediator must become a veritable God, since the mediator is the real power over that with which he mediates me. His cult becomes an end in itself. Separated from this mediator, objects lose their worth. Thus they have value only in so far as they represent him, whereas it appeared at first that he had value only to the extent to which he represented them.”22

Interestingly, Marx returned to the force of the monetary medium in his 1844 Manuscripts, reframing its potency through sexual tropes. If money can be used to buy everything and appropriate all objects, it can become seen as “the object most worth possessing.” As Marx wrote: “Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man’s means of life.”23 He then elaborated on the reciprocal relationship between money and its owner:

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. The stronger the power of my money, the stronger am I.… I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money.… [Money] is the visible divinity.… It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.24

Recall that, in these manuscripts, Marx defined fetish as a material reification of magical qualities into the natural properties of corporeal objects. He came across this sort of phenomenon earlier in his readings, as recorded in the Bonn Notebooks. He carefully considered Catholic worship of saintly relics, condemned by Protestants either as fetishism or idolatry; the cult of Indian lingam, Roman Priapus, and the Greek phallus worship, categorized by Meiners, Böttiger, and Constant as fetishism, and by early Christians either as paganism or idolatry.