: In defense of the whole idea of money I do think it's a neccessary invention. The way I see it, money is like a concrete time-delayed favour. If you lend someone a hand, at your own cost, then if they said, "Thanks, I'll repay the favour sometime." It would be difficult to remember exactly how much you owe, and it would be easy for people to pretend that they are owed more than they actually are. By giving someone an actual piece of paper, it's like saying that you acknowledge the debt, so that one dollar/pound/franc etc becomes equivalent to one favour. Even if you aren't repayed by that person specifically, you know that what you've done will be rewarded eventually.What you've pointed out, Stu, is the way we're socialized into accepting money, through the idea of a system of external rewards. The "childhood" versions of this idea are worth studying too, since it is through the IMPOSITION of a system of external rewards by AUTHORITY-FIGURES that we learn to accept the idea of a system of external rewards in the first place. Say, for instance, this notion of getting some sort of reward (like a gold sticker, for instance) for doing a good job on your schoolwork. Was the gold sticker the main reason you did schoolwork, or was there some sort of intrinsic reward to the schoolwork itself? Could schoolwork be made so interesting that children could be motivated to do it without some sort of external reward?
Similarly, it is through the imposition of a money system by an imposed authority figure that money has value at all. Money is accepted because of the guarantees of the sovereign authority of a government (there's your authority figure), and when the government can't make good on its guarantees, money is "devalued." Without government authority, people are free to reject money as having value. So governments, our authority-figure for life, impose money systems upon us. Being free from government would mean, among other things, being free from money.
Here it's important to keep thinking about what money's role is, in a money-using society, and what it does for different people within the fabric of that larger society. Money, in the quantities it is allotted, rewards the capitalist with political power, and money rewards the worker with survival. In this respect, money solidifies the status system of a society, and defines the bigger and smaller "fish" in the social "pond."
Money also provides a system for the distribution of human-made products within a society at large. Money, in this regard, creates a system of distribution based on exchange, because money is generally regarded by human beings (who have to be socialized to accept it as such) as a SOCIAL SYMBOL of WEALTH IN GENERAL.
Money makes a larger variety of exchanges possible than would be possible under an exchange system without money, because money shares the concept of "debt" ("I did something for you, therefore you owe me one") among society in general rather than among just the individual creditors and debtors. If you pay me a certain amount of money for something I did for you, I can exchange that money for anything, with anyone, rather than merely with you for something you've got. Therefore, your debt to me (for what I did for you) can be repaid by anyone, and not just you, because of money.
The question a communist might be asking in this regard is whether, instead of distributing things through money, and incurring the problems that come from this concept of "debt," we could be sharing them outright, since "communism" comes from a Latin word that means "sharing." (Comrad Zeus, who thinks it means "equalism" among other things, might be enlightened by Karl Marx's CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAMME, where an entirely different definition is offered.)
What would make a society based on "sharing" possible?
: However money does have it's down side. It encourages hoarding. If you are rich, that translates as being owed lots of favours, and it becomes easier to make more money. Thus the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The next question after this one should be, "why do the poor put up with this? Do they all hope to become rich capitalists?"
None.
