Beneath every price tag is a story.
Not just of what something costs—
but of what was once given to make it.
The hours. The hands. The hurt.
The repetition, the exhaustion, the invention.
The labor.
But in the marketplace, we rarely see that story.
We see only the price—calculated, labeled, stable enough to forget.
And this forgetting is not accidental.
It is structured.
Marx called it the transformation of labour values into prices of production—
a process by which the raw, pulsing labor that creates value
is converted into the cool, abstract numbers we call price.
It is here, in this transformation,
that we find one of the most haunting truths of capitalism:
the system depends on labor—but hides it.
It runs on sweat—but speaks only in symbols.
Labour Value: The Hidden Core
Marx believed that at its heart,
the value of any commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it.
Not the effort of one worker,
but the average time across a society
with its given tools, techniques, and productivity.
Labor is not just toil.
It is the source of value.
But the market does not reflect this directly.
Instead, what we encounter are prices—
numbers shaped not only by labor,
but by capital, competition, and the rate of profit across industries.
The system must conceal the origin
to function smoothly.
Because if prices truly revealed labor’s contribution,
questions would rise:
Why are the workers poor?
Why is profit treated as creation?
Why does the owner earn more by not working at all?
The Need for Transformation
But the concealment is not just ideological.
It’s structural.
Capitalism is not a collection of isolated producers.
It is a network—
interlinked industries, capital flowing across sectors,
each demanding not just returns, but returns that are equalized.
A shoe factory and a software firm may use different amounts of labor,
but if both require the same amount of capital investment,
the system expects them to yield the same rate of profit.
So to keep capital mobile—
to keep it investing, growing, expanding—
values must be transformed into prices of production.
Prices that allow for a general rate of profit
even if the labor inputs differ wildly.
In this transformation, the labor that created the object
is adjusted, balanced, flattened
so that capital can remain indifferent.
The Consequences of Concealment
This transformation is not a trick.
It’s a necessity—for capitalism.
But it comes at a cost—for the worker.
Because when prices are divorced from the labor they represent,
so too is accountability.
– The worker is paid for time, not for value created.
– The consumer pays a price, not knowing what that price hides.
– The capitalist reaps profit as if it were their own creation.
– And the system functions as though value just appears,
detached from human effort.
Alienation deepens.
The commodity becomes a ghost—
visible in the shop window,
but invisible in origin.
Seeing Through the Veil
To understand the transformation of values into prices
is to learn how capitalism masks its dependencies.
Not to moralize every transaction,
but to remember:
Every price carries a story.
Every object was once a process.
Every profit comes from someone’s subtraction.
And unless we remember that,
we will live inside an economy of amnesia—
where things matter more than people,
and price matters more than the process that birthed it.
Toward a More Honest Economy
This critique is not a call to burn the market.
It is a call to illuminate it.
To ask:
– What would pricing look like if it honored labor instead of hiding it?
– What would happen if wages reflected contribution, not position?
– How might an economy change if it saw the worker not as a cost,
but as the origin of value?
There is no simple formula.
But there is a direction:
From concealment to clarity.
From abstraction to acknowledgment.
From price to presence.
The transformation of labour values into prices of production is the quiet algebra of capitalism—
where human time becomes market data,
and hands are translated into symbols.
To name this process
is to begin seeing again.
Not just the cost.
But the human behind it.
And perhaps, in seeing,
we can begin to price differently,
value differently,
live differently.