Money as constituent of value

The ideal introversive substance and the ideal extroversive form of value in Capital.This paper discusses Marx’s views on money as set out in Capital I, Part One (Chapter 3), in relation to his analysis of the commodity in the same part of that work (Chapter 1).For Marx the ideal immanent (or introversive) substance of the value of commodities is ‘abstract labour’ (sic). Marx posits ‘time’ of abstract labour as the ‘immanent measure’ of value; however, this is a notion at a high level of abstrac­tion. It does not provide a measure in the usual sense of measur­ing. (We could measure time of heterogeneous concrete labour, but this is not what Marx is getting at.) The notion of value thus posited is what I call the simple-abstract notion of value (of Chapter 1). This simple notion is complemented by the ideal extroversive form of the value of commodities: money (Chapter 3). It is only henceforth that ‘value’ has been fully constituted. Consequently ‘abstract labour’ disappears from Marx’s vocabulary. Money establishes the actual commensuration – the homogene­ity – of commodities and it is the only one actual ideal measure of value (adopting a particular standard). The introversive substance and the extroversive form of value are inseparable – value cannot be concretely measured without money.
This interpretation relies on a dialectical interpretation of Marx’s frequent use in Chapter 3 of the German text of the term Veräußerung (and other terms with the same root of äußer), which I translate by extroversive as opposed to the introversive or immanent of Chapter 1. In the English text of Chapter 3 the continuity of the term disappears due to a variety of substitutes.