What does money do, to a person?
There is the idea of commodity fetishism, but I guess this is more to do with the economy than e.g. individual bourgeoisie.
Can anyone offer a brief overview of competing philosophical thinking on this topic?
What does money do, to a person?
There is the idea of commodity fetishism, but I guess this is more to do with the economy than e.g. individual bourgeoisie.
Can anyone offer a brief overview of competing philosophical thinking on this topic?
Commodity fetishism mystifies the real relations amongst people. This holds as true for the bourgeois as it does for the proletarian. While some mystification will be mistaking millions of suffering workers for a share portfolio, others will be more pertinent. Objects will stand in for emotional relations. For example, a dishwasher and servant will replace collective household reproductive activity, changing or stripping interpersonal interactions amongst a family. For example, instead of modifying his sexual relations a man will buy a car. For example, instead of inspecting her character and pleasure a woman will purchase a dream home.
It goes further, the very relationships of proletarian and bourgeois enslave real people into the position of being or managing social property. Hate your job and life? It may be that the commodity relationship is the intervening cause.
The problem with this is that it posits a “species-being,” an inhering human nature. (Cf: Althusser.). While a “scientific” “mature Marx” might overcome this, there’s no prediction regarding “happiness” available from such a position. Only the social distribution of power.
This answer only applies to money in value-form societies.