1885 || money reduces everything to a need for more money

Make Your Damn Bed · Oct 23, 2026 · 10m

"Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot." - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

"The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance…