A simple analogy can be found, again, in the example of Robinson Crusoe. Robinson, works for 10 hours a day and creates new value to this amount. Of this, he works for 5 hours producing basic consumption goods to ensure his own subsistence. That can be considered the equivalent of his wages. The total “price” of all the things he produces during the day is what he gives up to produce them, i.e. 10 hours of his labour. In the remaining 5 hours of the day, he produces other items, which we can label as luxuries. This is his surplus labour, and the product his surplus product. It is the equivalent of profit. If, he decides to spend not 5, but 6 hours producing wage goods, then this is the same as if his wages have risen. Does this change the total amount of value he produces in a day, or the price of that production? No, it remains 10 hours of his labour. It is just that, now, of his total production, and new value created, 60% goes to wages, and only 40% to profit.
The equivalent in terms of inflation, for him, would be if the metric in which this new value created changed. Suppose that his watch began to run much faster, so that in an hour, it read as though two hours had passed. Now, it would appear that instead of spending 5 hours producing his wages, and 5 hours producing profits, all of his output had doubled in price. It would appear that the cost of his wages had risen to 10 hours of labour, and the same for his profits, even though, in reality, nothing had actually changed, other than the metric in which these values are measured. That is exactly what occurs with inflation, whereby, the metric in which values are measured, indirectly, the money commodity, standard of prices, or money tokens, are devalued.
Marx spells that out.
“The values of necessaries, and consequently the value of labour, might remain the same, but a change might occur in their money prices, consequent upon a previous change in the value of money. By the discovery of more fertile mines and so forth, two ounces of gold might, for example, cost no more labour to produce than one ounce did before. The value of gold would then be depreciated by one half, or fifty per cent. As the values of all other commodities would then be expressed in twice their former money prices, so also the same with the value of labour. Twelve hours of labour, formerly expressed in six shillings, would now be expressed in twelve shillings. If the working man's wages should remain three shillings, instead of rising to six shillings, the money price of his labour would only be equal to half the value of his labour, and his standard of life would fearfully deteriorate. This would also happen in a greater or lesser degree if his wages should rise, but not proportionately to the fall in the value of gold. In such a case nothing would have been changed, either in the productive powers of labour, or in supply and demand, or in values.
Nothing would have changed except the money names of those values. To say that in such a case the workman ought not to insist upon a proportionate rise of wages, is to say that he must be content to be paid with names, instead of with things. All past history proves that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs, the capitalists are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the workman. A very large school of political economists assert that, consequent upon the new discoveries of gold lands, the better working of silver mines, and the cheaper supply of quicksilver, the value of precious metals has again depreciated. This would explain the general and simultaneous attempts on the Continent at a rise of wages.”
(Value, Price and Profit, Chapter 13)
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