In Marxian economics, the proposition “value equals labor time” corresponds to the

 In Marxian economics, the proposition “value equals labor time” corresponds to the Newtonian notion of absolute space and absolute time—a worldview grounded in the belief that all phenomena can be measured by a single universal standard. In this classical framework, labor was assumed to determine the value of every commodity, reducing social motion to one absolute scale. In contrast, Nobuo Okishio’s theory did not deny value itself but revealed that the appearance of value depends on the “coordinate system” of the economic structure. For Okishio, value and profit are not substances of labor but results of “structural equivalence” within the network of input–output relations. This move parallels Einstein’s general relativity, which redefined gravity as the curvature of spacetime; Okishio effectively transformed Marx’s mechanics into a kind of geometry. Thus, value only appears to equal labor time because it is observed within a specific structural frame—value can be defined only through positional relationships inside the system. In today’s information and financial economies, observation itself alters value, making it probabilistic and dynamic—a function of observation. Hence, economic theory, like physics, has evolved from Newtonian absolutes to Einsteinian structural relativity, and finally to quantum observation dependence: a long history of how value appears to us.