This article examines the methodological statute of the transformation of values into prices. It resumes the evolution of dialectics, which became method with Plato, assumed the form of a system of necessary demonstrations which stem from the unconditioned principles reached through the synagogue with Aristotle and the logic of the Absolute Spirit with Hegel. Inverting the Hegelian reasoning, Marx conceives dialectics as the logic of objective reality that is reproduced by reason. In The Capital, Marx shows how in the unfolding of the commodity - point of departure of the exposition (Darstellung) of capitalism - it necessarily emerges the transformation process, as the moment of the essence's blossoming (the abstract labor) in the domain of the phenomenon. With the prices of production, the rational explanation of effective reality (Wirklichtkeit) is complete, conceived as emergence of the essence at the level of the phenomenon, encompassing the sphere of accidentality, inescapable in every empiric science.
Transformation problem; Labor value; Production prices; Dialectics; Essence and phenomenon