I’ve just run across a particularly pithy summary of the classic critique of monetized economies in favour of a labour-oriented approach to economics:
One particularly prominent strand in Western discourse, which goes back to Aristotle, is the general condemnation of money and trade in the light of an ideal of household self-sufficiency and production for use. The argument goes something like this. Like other animals, man is naturally self-sufficient and his wants are finite. Trade can only be natural in so far as it is oriented towards the restoration of such self-sufficiency. Just as in nature there may be too much here and not enough there, so it is with households which will then be forced to exchange on the basis of mutual need. ‘Interchange of this kind is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making; it keeps to its original purpose – to re-establish nature’s own equilibrium of self-sufficiency’ (Aristotle 1962: 42). Profit-oriented exchange is, however, unnatural; and is destructive of the bonds between households. Prices should therefore be fixed, and goods and services remunerated in accordance with the status of those who pro-vided them. Money as a tool intended only to facilitate exchange is naturally barren, and, of all the ways of getting wealth, lending at interest – where money is made to yield a ‘crop’ or litter’ – is ‘the most contrary to nature’ (Aristotle 1962: 46).
“Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange” from Jonathan Parry And Maurice Bloch eds., Money and the morality of exchange (1989: CUP), p. 2.
I should also mention for those of you who won’t go on to read the whole book that this is not the author’s position, merely a very helpful summary of one in a spectrum of many options.