I had a random marxological thought or three that I figured I should type out: if you get deep into the weeds of Marx-nerdery you might at some point end up in an argument about the value of labor power, or in a conversation where people assume that labor power is a commodity like any other including that it is sold at its value. I think this is all questionable at best, as follows.

First, a bit of defining terms. Labor power means capacity to work - basically ability to do the stuff a job requires us to do. That is, we can all do a wide range of stuff, and a smaller range of that stuff is salable to employers. In paying us, employers buy our labor power. In taking a job for pay, we sell out labor power. Value is a bit fraught, weeds and rabbit holes abound so to speak. Briefly, value is the center of gravity around which prices orbit, defined by current costs of production. That is, in any given time and place, goods and services for sale costs some amount to provide. If they’re too high, people won’t buy them in sufficient quantity for the seller to stay in business (because the seller won’t have the money to keep providing them). If they’re too low, the seller might sell a lot but will still go under (ditto my last parenthetical).

Second, some qualifications/nuances/hand-waving. It’s important to note that for Marx the expectation is that value changes - the center of gravity moves - over time such that a lot of firms go out of business. Conditions of stability are relatively uncommon in Marx’s view, because there are systematically generated destabilizing forces. This is true in general for commodities and something analogous applies to labor power but it’s only analogous.

What I mean is that generally speaking Marx tends to write about commodities that were created specifically as commodities, and where the seller of the commodity relies on commodity sales as a major source of income. Say I make something for some reason other than to sell it. (For instance, I’m currently very slowly making a combination shavehorse and spoon mule in my garage partly because I hope it will enrich my fledgling hobby of handtool woodwork and partly because making it is me doing the hobby - it’s just kinda fun to build shit). Or say I make something to sell but it’s just a hobby and the selling is a way to partially reduce my costs, or the selling is me going ‘well if I give them away people won’t care about them.’ (For instance, I’ve made zines like this in the past and been in bands who made records. All of that’s a loss, moneywise.)

These latter instances are in effect created outside the market then inserted into the market externally. They’re not what Marx is talking about and, closely related, these are forms of social activity that are sidelined in capitalist society, capitalism being defined significantly by having a large proportion of the stuff that people need being produced specifically as a commodity. In those cases, the predominant forms of production, the good or service isn’t inserted into the market from the outside, the market is in an important sense already ‘in’ production: the need for salability influences what and how the goods and services are made. Very simply, people are made like spoon mules and zines - they’re not produced for sale, though there are some enhancements to labor power that are sometimes purchased as commodities (it seems to be the prevailing view that this is what higher education is for - in going to college you pay money to become more salable on the labor market - which in important respects makes ‘higher’ a misnomer).

Okay now the actual thoughts I wanted to jot down. Labor power isn’t produced as a commodity, it’s significantly produced external to the market (though there are of course costs, I mean external in terms of purposes), then inserted into the market. It becomes - we become - commodified but wasn’t/weren’t produced for the sake of commodification. Furthermore, in general (within the forms of production that prevail and subordinate the rest of social life) commodities in capitalism are produced specifically to be profitable, which doesn’t apply to my examples (spoon mule, zines) or to labor power. Producers can’t just break even, they have to profit and expand or they tend to get pushed out of business by competitors.

Part of what I mean to get at is that labor power is not a type of commodity that has a value set at a level that generally reproduces it or maintains its production, because a significant number of the ‘inputs’ involved in ‘producing’ labor power are significantly not for sale: a lot of what goes into making and raising and maintaining a person is not priced, hence not costed, hence not compensated. In a sense labor power is systematically underpriced. (There’s a massive and in my opinion fascinating theoretical literature on this.)

What I even more want to get at though is that it’s important to distinguish labor power and actual working class people here. First off, capitalists will generally tend to pay enough for labor power that they can continue to find it available in labor markets, though I rush to qualify this. A lot of what capitalists ‘generally tend’ to do is stuff that some, and in some cases, many, actually existing capitalists fail to do over and over again, then shit gets absurd and fucked up, and eventually capitalists start to do that stuff again. For a while. Then some of them stop doing that stuff and they profit by doing so, so more of them stop doing that stuff. Then shit gets absurd and fucked up and... over and over and over. In important respects that is the heart of Marx’s project, it’s a theory of capitalism as a society with inexorable tendencies to get absurd and fucked up (the system is a death machine!) So, the general tendency to pay enough for labor power exists in the long term and/but often takes the form in the short to medium term of not doing so, followed by brief periods of catching up/consequences landing on powerful actors such that they course correct. To put it another way, capitalism is a ‘fuck around and find out’ society - there are systematic tendencies to encourage fucking around for a long while followed by briefly finding out, over and over. This is all to say that there is no security or comfort for actual working class people - people who live particular lives in the short term - to be found in the system’s general long term tendency to pay enough to secure the availability of labor power on the labor market.
Second, what is secured in the long term is specifically what I just said: the availability of labor power on the labor market. That is not at all the same thing as the life - let alone the dignified, humane treatment - of the actually existing working class. The actually existing working class, the proletariat, supplies labor power on the labor market for capitalists. That’s how proletarian life is reproduced: proletarian lives are subordinated and secondary to capital in this society. And the reproduction of the proletariat as population always includes the reproduction and maintenance/survival of both some individual actually existing people, and the reproduction of the condition of being proletarian: having a price tag on the stuff needed to have an okayish life, such that it’s necessary to get enough money to pay for it. Reproducing that condition has baked into it a great deal of killing - social murder, as I’m always banging on about here. That is, the reproduction of the working class isn’t really a social priority. The social priority is capitalist profit, and the serving or meeting of that priority only partially serves the reproduction of the working class. And, furthermore the limited form/degree of reproducing the working class as sellers of labor power has baked into it a great deal of killing actual working people.

To put it another way, from the cruel and evil implicit logic of the system (one periodically embraced by the ghouls the system produces - the pieces of shit who float to the top of this fucking septic tank of a society) the working class tends to in the long term to be systematically oversupplied: the system will tend to need, say, 90% of the working class, with the other 10% being surplus to requirements. That’s an overly arid, abstract, amoral way to put a very bloody and immoral reality. I’ll stress as well that according to the implied logic of the system (ditto my last parenthetical!) the oversupplying of the working class is a feature, not a bug, because the 90% really doesn’t want to be part of the unnecessary 10%. And none of this is stable: it’s not a fixed 90/10 split, the split shifts up and down (to, say, 95/5 and 80/20 and back), and where one is located - in the 90 (or 95 or 80) or in the 10 (or 5 or 20) - is not fixed either. It’s historically pretty common for individuals and groups to find themselves suddenly dumped in the scrap heap. (When’s the last time you went to a blacksmith? A wagon wheel maker? A video store?)

Lastly, maybe, in selling our labor power we need to get paid a certain amount to stay in the lifestyle we’re in. If we’re underpaid, we’re downwardly mobile. (By the way ‘lifestyle’ and ‘downwardly mobile’ aren’t ugly and morally charged enough for these realities. Our words should generally be angrier and more morally charged - this shit is fucked and we should be furious about it. Some marxists have hang ups about moral language and morality’s importance. Skill issue.) In general, to speak of ‘the value of labor power’ is to speak of the line below which people are underpaid such that they become downwardly mobile, and the line moves over time. Part of Marx’s point is that this condition of being underpaid not at all uncommon but if anything is a recurring tendency in capitalism. Wherever the line currently is for working class people in any time and place, there will be pressures to push people’s pay below it. In the present a major form of that pressure is rising costs of living - by the way, that we live in a society where ‘cost of living’ is a reasonable phrase, that living has costs and that’s normal, is a deep and bloodsoaked barbarism - plus relatively flat wages and rising unemployment. Falling under the line is one source of social murder as downward mobility tends to mean deprivation as well as scrambling to meet some needs at the expense of others. The threat of all of this is also a source of social murder as people scramble at the expense of some needs as I said. Other harms of social murder - injuries, illness, etc - are additional sources, as need-meeting tends to be expensive and unmet meet need tends to be injurious. Feedback loop/downward spiral, kinda thing.