> “What, man! confound it, hands and feet
> And head and backside, all are yours!
> And what we take while life is sweet,
> Is that to be declared not ours?
>
> Six stallions, say, I can afford,
> Is not their strength my property?
> I tear along, a sporting lord,
> As if their legs belonged to me.”
>
> Goethe: Faust (Mephistopheles)
>
>
> Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:
>
> “Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
> No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
> Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
> Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
> ... Why, this
> Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
> Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
> This yellow slave
> Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
>
> Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
> And give them title, knee and approbation
> With senators on the bench: This is it
> That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
>
> She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
> Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
> To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
> Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
> Among the rout of nations.”
>
> And also later:
>
> “O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
> ‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
> Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
> Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
>
> Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
> That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!
> That solder’st close impossibilities,
> And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,
>
> To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
> Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
> Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
> May have the world in empire!”
>
> Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To
> understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage
> from Goethe.
>
> That which is for me through the medium of money — that for which I
> can pay (i.e., which money can buy) — that am I myself, the possessor
> of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my
> power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s — properties and
> essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means
> determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself
> the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect
> of ugliness — its deterrent power — is nullified by money. I,
> according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money
> furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad,
> dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its
> possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.
> Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am
> therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain
> of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides,
> he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over
> the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to
> money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all
> human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my
> incapacities into their contrary?
>
> If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me,
> connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds?
> Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the
> universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as
> well as the real binding agent — the [. . .] chemical power of
> society.
>
> Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
>
> 1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and
> natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding
> and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
>
> 2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
>
> The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the
> fraternisation of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies
> in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing
> species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
>
> That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my
> individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of
> money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in
> itself it is not — turns it, that is, into its contrary.
> Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human
> one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc.
> If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated
> person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must
> be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people.
> Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific
> expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real
> individual life. If you love without evoking love in return — that is,
> if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through
> a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make
> yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
Ted