The labour theory of value postulates that the concept of value can only be derrived from usefull human effort. Carl Marx wrote in Dass Kapital that we should try to imagine the economy as the sum product of all usefull labour performed in a society. The more effort something took to produce, the higher the value. Tools are taking into account as well. A tool that halves the effort needed to produce a commodity will also halve the value added to that commodity. It becomes much more complicated once factoring in the effort needed to construct tools and machines and learning the skills needed to utilize them. But the main idea remains the same: value correlates directly with human effort.

Wage labour under capitalism is the result of class division. We have the owner class who controlls the economy of the business because they own the means of production, and the worker class who provides the labour necesary to generate value.This is where dialectical materialism enters the picture. Under capitalism, the goal of enterprise is to generate a profit, or in other words, maintaining a numerical gap between the value flowing in and out of the company. This is done by ensuring that expenditures are lower than revenue, charging people more for the products than it cost you to aquire them. This process is often called exploitation. One can exploit customers by charging more than a product is worth. One can exploit resources by securing a monopoly over them and artificially raise the value of your commidities through scarcity. 

The most important method is one that dialectical materialism describes. The wage theory of value stipulates that in order to generate value, human labour must be expended. So when companies make a profit, they are exploiting the workers by offering wages that are lower than the value generated by their labour. This materialism is dialectic because there are opposing interests at play. The workers want to have higher wages, while their bosses want them to have lower wages. This is called a contradiction.
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