"Of course no act of labor (save one) immediately counts as socially necessary labor time in this society; it is only through the exchange of its product that an act of labor proves itself to have been socially necessary, to have had a place in social labor. For that to be accomplished, each commodity then has to request an exchange with the money commodity which always already incarnates value. Marx tries to explain this polarization between commodities and money in a dizzying, dialectical exposition."
...or sometimes in pregnant, crystalline poetic form: "Money is the pimp between man and the object of his desire."
This is from an early essay on money from the 48 manuscripts. When I used to be an English prof, I used to take every opportunity to teach Marx. Once, in a Shakespeare class (in which we read "Timon of Athens"), I also taught this essay because Marx quotes from Timon in the essay and because the play is about $$. Class went pretty well; it's a damn good essay and it's short.
After class, everyone left except for one student who remained sitting at his desk as if in shock. I asked him what was the matter and he told me that the previous semester he had taken a class on Marx, but that this money essay was the first thing he had read that was actually written by Marx. It turned out that NONE of the reading in his Marx class was written by Marx and he was stunned because his professor had excused this by explaining that Marx was too hard for undergraduates. Oh, well.
Joanna B.