money (1975)

This took the form of a badly printed pound note, and was distributed in the mid-70s. A bit simplistic, but…

And this bit of graffiti is from the same time (mid-70s):

added 22/4/13 this from the 80s group “The Pleasure Tendency”:

(this is a detournement of the government campaign against heroin use – the word “heroin” substituted for “money” throughout)

“The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being.”

“The need for exchange [of commodities] and for the transformation of the product into a pure exchange value progresses in step with the division of labour, i.e. with the increasingly social character of production. But as the latter grows, so grows the power of money, i.e. the exchange relation establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the producers. What originally appeared as a means to promote production becomes a relation alien to the producers. As the producers become more dependent on exchange, exchange appears to become more independent of them, and the gap between the product as product and the product as exchange value appears to widen. Money does not create these antitheses and contradictions; it is, rather, the development of these contradictions and antitheses which creates the seemingly transcendental power of money.” – Marx, Grundrisse

 
Hits as of 10/8/17:  1282