Money has corrupted us. We no longer understand what it's worth

Money has corrupted us. We no longer understand what it's worth

It's time we made money do what we want, rather than letting it diminish and degrade us

The house across the street has just gone on sale for £850,000. A bog-standard, late-Victorian, ex-council terrace house in the rough part of Islington, with a yard billed as a garden, costs as much as a street in Middlesbrough or Stoke.

When Marx wrote, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, that money "is the visible divinity" involving "the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal overturning and confounding of things: it makes brothers of impossibilities", he wasn't predicting how the north London property market would heat up in 2013, but he was unwittingly prescient. What has happened to our moral and social values? Could they be more detached from monetary values? Or, hideously, are they accurately expressed by what money can buy?

Our task in 2014 is to stop this madness, get a grip on money, put a chokehold on Marx's visible divinity and make it do our bidding rather than what it's been doing for the past year: confounding, diminishing and degrading us. It'll be an unequal struggle: in this contest with the divine, we'll be like Jacob wrestling the ange

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