Marx was like a big, grumpy, woolly dog who had been expelled from his own country of Germany, who had a Wittgensteinian sense of his own genius and wealthy patron with a kind face called Friedrich Engels. Engels was raised in Calvinist family which ran cotton mills in both Germany and England. And well worth wondering whether Nietzsche himself enjoyed that same sense of Wittgensteinian self worth when weeks before his final collapse into madness he flaunted his own accomplishments by finishing his Ecce Homo, his account of how a man becomes who he is, that's been described as his final testament, a good read if you like hearing someone put a tongue in his cheek and tell you how super fantastic and wonderfully superior he is compared to everyone else. Marx's Commodity Fetishism began back in the 1840's with his understanding of money as Gold. Gold was a commodity that had a clearly measurable value that could be used as a medium of circulation for the exchange of commodities, such as sausages, pork pies, Morris Minors, such things weren't gold but could be measured and valued in terms of their weight in gold. Metal coins, copper, silver, florins, Groats, Doubloons, served the same purpose, but as mediums of exchange a person had to trust the coins value and over time, the actual coin itself lost value to wear and tear. As a commodity, the value of the original genuine Gold or genuine silver was of course subject to supply and demand, but nonetheless there was an inclination to store a non-perishable, reliable exchange of value in vaults, under the bed and what have you, where it might be available for a rainy day. Paper Money, no matter how dressed up and fancy it was, kind of took the shine off metal as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Marx chose to describe paper money - and other mediums of exchange not supported by the market value of the commodity it was made of - as a "functional substitute" or a "symbolic representation" of a metal money. This whole symbol thing rather got Marx's goat, because he wanted us to live in a materialist dialectic, he wanted us to have a materialist understanding of our world, not made up of fluff, false images, wishy-washy and other libtard shrugs from people like Kant, the appalling errors that snowflake Hegel had produced and all of German Idealism represented. And of course being a product of German Idealism, Marx was big on the value of "Critique." You point out flaws, if a man's naked and tries to persuade you he's not, the right thing to do was kick him in the shin and call him a dumbass. Marx believed in the gold standard. Yes, he was a Golden Calf man, he didn't trust the random ideas on tablets from some weirdo on a mountaintop. Then, soon after the Russian Revolution, Lenin with his Bannon-esque dreams of empire and extremist convictions dismissing Trotsky's Romney-esque objections, who for the sake of the Lord and a New Golden Age, proceeded to bankrupt farmers by squatting on the Kulaks in an attempt to forcibly collectivize agriculture with an increasingly vigorous enforcement of the food tax of 1919 which was part of a political and civil eradication of un-collectivized working farmers, which promulgated a famine lasting from 1921 to 1923 that killed 200,000 Ukrainians. Meanwhile the materialists of The Frankfurt School, safe for a while in Frankfurt, in the Wiemar Republic of Germany, looked on aghast and troubled by Bolshevik-Marxist-Leninist basic understanding of us people, their fanatical trust in the mechanics of a theory that supported the bubble of their circle jerk of mutual admiration, but at least they were bold enough to realize their failure to grasp what power did to us, to realize how we people operated as wild creatures in the world of our own making, and yes indeed we had a lot to learn from watching Chimpanzees. It must have been rough for the Frankfurt School. But they didn't give up, they returned to traditional habits of critique, kicking their own shins and calling themselves dumbass, they widened the reach of their circle to include the work of neurologist and psychiatrist such as Freud and Jung. Under this influence one of the areas they explored was how the "Culture Industry" - the monetizing of propaganda - could manipulate individuals and as a result maintain power for the chosen by putting an end to any notion of a concrete, real and material social freedom. Instead the "Culture Industry" perverted the real, including the idea of freedom, and replaced the real with basically unsupported and meaningless symbolic understandings that not even a Chimpanzee would fall for. In 1883, when Marx died at the age of 64 he had 250 pounds sterling in his probate account. (Translates to 26000 UK sterling as of October 2025. Or 35,000 US dollars as of October 2025)
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