I think it's more right to say that currency is the result of people's coping with surplus. Surplus is not the same as inequity, right? Any interdependent economic system creates local surplus and shortage which exchange then evens out and this is a positive process. People can't be personally autarchic and thus their best bet is to learn to provide for and depend on others.
But I think money actually does cause inequity in and of itself. In that money represents power in the marketplace it is a super-good for which people will trade things of value at unprofitable terms (for the most part). After all, people at the gambling tables and in line for the Lotto will willingly trade real money for the illusory promise of more money even when that promise is offered with the mathematical certainty of a per-dollar loss.
You write:
> Actually if you read them most of the Marxists had fairly clear ideas about
> possibilities for economic organization and "finance," so to speak. They
> would have been mistaken, though, to plan for a revolution that was due to
> break out in several different places and times. The bourgeoisie did not
> plan a financial structure to their society per se; it emerged dialectically
> out of fluctuating social realities. You can't just play god and make up an
> economic system and then switch it into 'on' mode by breathing in your nose.
> Sure, you can theorize as the Marxists did based on socio-historical
> realities, but it has to emerge out of cr! itical practice.
I would love for you to refer me to these clear ideas because I admit I don't know them. I also admit that my Marxist reading has not been what it should.
To me it seems that Marxists have followed a model of sort of Economic Bonapartism - mainly in that it was started by, well, Bonaparte - where rather than revolutionizing the financial apparatuses of republican and liberal-democratic capitalism, they simply took possession of them and tried to bend them to political-military aims by slapping crippling and artificial controls on them. While creating a huge, unitary creditor that was only answerable politically freed a lot of capital initially, the combination of cutting off the flow of market information and the pressure to continue expansive monetary policy inevitably led to terrible distortions.
Worse than that in a way, Marxist systems lost the virtuous cycle of trust-building that capital markets represent. The Marxist financial systems simply insisted on obedience and trust naturally eroded.
boddi