As that old bugaboo, Karl Marx, famously observed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: "The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities - the divine power of money - lies in its character as men's estranged, alienated and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. "... "Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras - essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual - into real powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes."
