When Money Surpassed Property in Importance
making Marx’s analysis, developed when that transition was just getting underway, rather out of date
In “The Unnecessariness of Marxism” I wrote, “Money has thus replaced property as the most necessary economic object. . . . The transition from bondage slavery, in which laborers are property, and serfdom, in which laborers are bound to property, to wage slavery, in which people are paid to be used as machines (or draft animals), for large-scale employment was integral to that historical shift.” This article is an expansion on that position.
People might see “wage slavery” as an ideological term, but it is not. To be employed by any entity, for any purpose, for any amount of time, is to be used as a machine — or a draft animal. Some people are employed as machines that can think. Some wage slaves are, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., fabulously well-compensated — yet some bondage slaves did become wealthy and even politically powerful. In bondage slavery people are forced into that position physically. In wage slavery the need for money forces people into that position.
Wage slavery depends, we can see, on the presence of a money-based economy. The economy is the process of producing/acquiring goods/services. The more people depend on acquisition, as opposed to producing for themselves what they need, the more people are forced to work for money to acquire what they need.
During most of the several thousand years of civilization the economy was always based on property. Bondage slaves were property. Property in the form of land and equipment was needed for people to be able produce goods, whether for themselves or to sell (there being little in the way of a service economy in those days). Serfs were legally bound to remain on the property on which they were born. Slaves/serfs were integral to any large-scale production. (The few cities that existed in Europe’s feudal era were called ‘free cities’; other than being born into one of the scattering of ’freeholders’ of small plots of land — basically, subsistence farmers — only in a city was it possible to be born a free person, someone not bound to some person’s property.) Historically, there was very little in the way of monetary wealth other than the richest merchants. Most rich people, including monarchs, were primarily rich in property.
The emergence of nation-states with a central government enabled the transition to a monetary economy. They could create money based on the economic might of the nation itself — or at least its potential for taxation. The invention of the ‘central bank’ enhanced that process. Those two entities became a partnership that could create previously inconceivable levels of debt. Debt creates money. Initially, money created that way was used to wage wars of conquest and in, public/private partnerships, to acquire colonies and to exploit the globe for gold and silver for the state and slaves for the colonialists. That exploded the number of super-wealthy people. At the same time, technological innovation also exploded, creating the means to mass-produce (and economically transport) the basic goods that people need — and could acquire with money obtained through wages earned in the economy.
All of that symbiotically produced the globally pervasive money-based economy that exists in the world today. With that economy came wage slavery and the economic primacy of money over property.