The transmuted form of the value or price of labor-power. The remuneration paid to the worker by the capitalist for the purchase of his labor-power manifests itself as the value or price of labor, in fact, it is the value or price of labor-power. In terms of phenomenon, in a capitalist enterprise, the capitalist buys the labor-power of workers and pays them a certain amount of money, i.e., wages, according to the labor-time or the quantity produced. This creates the illusion that working one day gets the wages for one day and producing one product gets the wages for one product. Wages appear to be the value or price of the labor the worker is paid for, and all his labor appears to be renumerated. This illusory form is caused by the capitalist relations of production themselves, which conceal the boundaries between necessary labor and surplus-labor, between paid and unpaid labor. In fact, what workers sell is labor-power rather than labor, and labor is not a commodity; the wage paid by the capitalist to the worker is in fact the value or price of his labor-power. As Marx said, wages are not what they appear to be – namely, the value, or price, of labor – but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor-power…
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