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Money fundamentally acts as a measure of value. It represents work people have done. When you work you are paid money. You are more or less frugal depending on how much work you have been paid for and saved up and how easy it would be to make more money working.The commodities you buy all cost money because someone had to be paid to make them. If a commodity didn't take any labor to make it would be free. But commodities are constantly fluctuating in price as capitalists find cheaper ways to make commodities, better ways to exploit workers, etc. The supply of money is changing too- money itself is a commodity related to labor time. It has a supply and a demand. Money is also called upon to perform other social functions other than measure value: it lubricates exchange, it can become credit, etc. So money is needed to be much more flexible- to be sensitive to rapid economic changes. We say, though its fundamental role in society is a measure of value, its relationship to this value is a loose one as supply and demand force it to fluctuate above and below the equilibrium values of embodied labor time. We said that commodities appear heterogeneous until we see that they have a common substance: labor. But isn't labor heterogeneous? This question makes important the concept of "socially necessary labor time". Just as in a capitalist society the process of exchange and competition tends to bring prices to a general equilibrium so to the process of exchange and competition create a social average of how much labor it takes to complete a task. Remember- value is a concept that only makes sense from a macro level. In this way we say that exchange exerts a homogenizing influence on labor. This homogenizing influence is very strong in society. Capitalist want work to be standardized and reliable so that workers can be as productive as possible. Capitalists are constantly seeking ways to mechanize work in order to make it unskilled and uniform. This increases the potential supply of labor thus driving down wages. But how strong is this homogenizing influence? We still have a lot of skilled labor which fetches a much higher price than unskilled labor. We could dismiss this as supply and demand casting its usual distorting influence over the law of value. And we would be justified to some degree. But we also might say that the need for skilled labor in society is indeed a countervailing influence against the homogenizing influence of capitalism on the labor process. We might even say that capitalism has a tendency to deskill/ homogenize most work, while making other work highly skilled. Again, the homogenization of labor time (the "simplification" of labor) is not a quantifiable phenomena. We can observe it qualitatively as a tendency under capitalism, but there really isn't an objective way of measuring it. Thus the labor theory of value has two "problems": 1.value's relationship to price can't be quantified. 2. simplification of labor is not quantifiable. These two "problems" have caused debate. Is labor theory of value just a metaphysical concept? Well... no. The labor theory of value is proven by asking the questions: "what does it help us explain?" The law of value helps us explain all sorts of things that bourgeois economic theory- with its narrow focus on supply and demand and personal utility- can't. An analysis of economic issues using the labor theory of value starts to lead us in all sorts of directions not approached by any other theory. Pretty soon we find we have a much wider, systemic understanding of capitalism- and understanding that no other theory of exchange gives us. This broader, more profound understanding only comes about through a thorough investigation of all of the ways the law of value plays itself out in society. The labor theory of value is seeking to explain how the total economic product is produced and distributed. It is therefore a theory of social relations. It leads us to investigate the production of value BY workers FOR capitalists. This leads to an explanation of profit in the theory of exploitation. By investigating the way capitalists organize production in order to increase profits we come eventually to the theory of crisis. Along the way we learn about how wages are determined; what life is like as a worker, in and out of the workplace; the nature of capitalist competition, centralization and monopoly. This leads us to questions about the role of the state in maintaining capitalist accumulation and moderating crisis. We also start to learn about the way capitalism changes space through uneven geographical development, and time through its quest to shorten turnover times. In short, all of the social relations of society are laid bare before us, all because we asked "where does value come from?"