In a way, I prefer the world we live in, where everything is about money, because it is more legible to me than the world where everything is still about power but in other, more obscured ways (vague "social status," being friends with the right people, obedience to the state or to your employer or to your master, etc). These things still matter very much in today's world, but we also have money, and money is the proxy for all of them. Money can buy any of it, even when people try to prevent that from being the case-- nearly any status can be purchased.
In the moneyless world, survival rests entirely on being able to navigate social systems well. Imagine living with a group of hunter-gatherer early humans 100,000 years ago. Whether you have access to enough food to survive and shelter from the cold-- and further things like friendships, a sexual partner, or whatever material goods people valued-- all depend on how other people see you in a bunch of complex ways. You must figure out how to be accepted by society, and the extent to which you succeed is the quality of life you are given. There is a single path.
Money, because it can be obtained through many different means, allows success through means other than the pursuit of status-- and I don't just mean "high status," I also mean "not-expelled-from-the-group" basic status. You do not have to prove your value to a single narrow group of people who you may not understand and who may dislike you for reasons out of your control and from whom you only get vague feedback. You can prove your value to any of a whole mass of different people/businesses/the government/etc in many different ways, and there is numerical evidence of your success or failure at it.
