For Marxist monetary theory, and much more besides, an excellent vantage point can be adopted through Oscar Wilde’s famous quip that “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” For the economist, this signifies that price – as the monetary value of something – has the remarkable property of reducing everything (on the market at least) to a single dimension, at the expense of revealing nothing else about what is being bought and sold. Of course, it is money that oils the wheels of commerce. It places any single commodity into that one-dimensional price relationship with all others – for one-dimensioning of the economy and economics in light of Marcuse, see Fine (2017c).
Many economists, cynics or otherwise, see this property of money extremely favourably since its one-dimensioning potentially serves to coordinate exchange relations in a highly functional way. In the extremes of neoliberal thought, whether through the monetarism of Milton Friedman or the Austrianism of Friedrich von Hayek, monetary relations benevolently facilitate individuals in their interactions with one another, signalling what things are worth to them and either grinding out an efficient equilibrium (Friedman) or inspiring
— source themoneyquestion.org | Ben Fine | Aug 17, 2020