I've finally done it! I finally got through Chapter 1! What a ride.

Edit:

My thoughts after completing this chapter:

While not a historical “origins of money” it is an excellent logical argument as to WHY money arises within a society based on commodity exchange. I've been in the middle of conversations with libs/conservatives about “returning to a barter system” and this just eviscerates that whole train of thinking right at the root. At some point, the act of equating all these commodities with each other will eventually unearth the universal equivalent commodity within that market. This process is driven by the likely desire to simplify this process of exchange and make the exchange more efficient and easier to measure and track. What collection of people would, in their right minds, want to engage in a market where its principal method of exchange is the same process as the “I traded a paperclip for a house” guy?

It also illuminated the Gold Standard in a way that not only allowed me to understand why the Gold Standard came into existence, but also why liberal economics needed it to die. Transitioning the US$ to the universal equivalent commodity gives more control over its supply and nearly decouples it from labor as a source of value. This is my highly uneducated take, anyway. My only thinking in this regard is that the act of printing dollars (baring significant modifications to the physical dollar itself) is a nearly automated task. In comparison to the acquisition of gold from the earth, it might as well be manifested by magic.

There is an interesting trend line post Gold Standard where national debt seems to never deflate, and even liberal thinkers on this topic seem to agree it is related to the ease of the dollars' production. Often, I suspect, they miss the forest for the trees, in regard to why the Gold Standard truly prevented that type of economic intervention. That being the labor required for its extraction. Likewise, the growing movement of dedollarization has parallels to the rejection of the Bretton Woods system by some nations that eventually resulted in the dismantling of the Gold Standard in 1971 by Nixon. It would seem that once a given society has dominant control over the universal equivalent commodity within a global economic system, it erodes the social bonds that forged that universal commodity to begin with. The fascinating bit, to me, is you can then see the dollar transition into a pure fetishized form as it is decoupled from gold.

But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

The dollar, a simple amalgamation of fibers and inks, printed in seconds at an industrial scale, runs away with nearly all, if not more, of the value originating from gold. It is propelled through the economy, powered purely by faith. Faith imparted on society by the daily sermons of its acolytes, a desperate ritual akin to a dog frantically attempting to keep a balloon in the air.

The dual nature of the commodity, how it is both something material and social in its existence, was very revealing. While it is something I feel I naturally understood, it was not something, I had ever given serious thought. As a mundane comparison, it's akin to learning how parallax movement or forward or reverse zooming was accomplished pre-digital animation at Walt Disney: Several pains of glass, each with a painted segment of the backdrop on it, affixed to rails that allowed each to be moved independently and then recorded into a single flat frame, its 3-dimensional nature obscured and transposed into a 2-dimensional reality that serves as your point of view. It isn't until you see the process in its true dimensionality that you can fully grasp how it works. This dual nature also exposes the potential reality where, a society with different goals and structures, operates purely on use-values. Something Marx makes a few winks and nods to throughout the chapter, and eventually explores more intentionally near the end.

It reveals that the only real concern of an individual seeking an object is of its usefulness to himself, and that how the exchange of that object happens defines all exchanges and, ultimately, how society is structured. It dissolves the notion that the kind of commodity exchanges we participate in daily are “natural”, meaning, it shows how it is not part of nature or the nature of people both past or present.

I might edit this with more to say later.