roachboy

nonsense. there are problems with the op argument in my opinion, but that's not one of them. there have been a host of social mechanisms for determining things like status that have not involved capitalist-style money=the medium through which all social relations are expressed. think about aristocratic societies for example. they're not so distant from the present--status was a matter of bloodline, which in turn opened onto sets of material possibilities that were not at all oriented around a bourgeois relation to money. quite the contrary in many cases. so for example in pre-revolutionary france, status was a matter of birth, land=holding the primary mechanism for wealth generation and the rationality concerning money was predicated on it being something to be spent, optimally in ways that reflected back onto one's social position. this was directly contrary to bourgeois modes of establishing social position and particularly to bourgeois relations to money.
you can read myriad books on this.

that money was present does not mean that the relations to and around money were anything like those which are dominant under contemporary capitalism.

capitalist rationality is relatively new and it is deeply problematic. it can and should be relativized, and looking into even quite recent history will do that.

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__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite