Marx also argues that, insofar as capitalist class society is intrinsically a very contradictory system it contains many conflicting and competing forces the masking of its true characteristics becomes an integral feature of how it actually operates. Buyers and sellers compete with other buyers and sellers. Businesses cannot practically do so without confidentiality and secrecy. Workers compete for job opportunities and access to resources. Capitalists and workers compete for their share of the new wealth that is produced, and nations compete with other nations. The masks are therefore not optional, but necessary, and the more one is able to know about others, the more subtle, ingenious and sophisticated the masks become.

One of the centerpieces of Marx's critique of political economy is that the juridical labour contract between the worker and his capitalist employer obscures the true economic relationship, which is (according to Marx) that the workers do not sell their labor, but their labor power, making possible a profitable difference between what they are paid and the new value they create for the owners of capital (a form of economic exploitation). Thus, the very foundation of capitalist wealth creation involves as Marx says explicitly a "mask". More generally, Marx argues that transactions in the capitalist economy are often far from transparent they appear different from what they really are. This is discovered, only when one probes the total context in which they occur. Hence Marx writes:

"Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn into apologetics in a doctrinaire way the ideas of the agents who are trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that, precisely within the estranged form of appearance of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions occur and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and that these relationships appear all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner interconnection remains hidden to it, even though these relationships are comprehensible to the popular mind"

This implies another level of masking, because the economic character masks are then straightforwardly ("vulgarly") equated with authentic behaviour. The effect in this case is, that the theory of "how the economy works" masks how it actually works, by conflating its surface appearance with its real nature. Its generalities seem to explain it, but in reality they do not. The theory is therefore (ultimately) arbitrary. Either things are studied in isolation from the total context in which they occur, or generalizations are formed which leave essential bits out. Such distortion can certainly be ideologically useful to justify an economic system, position or policy as a good thing, but it can become a hindrance to understanding.