Roger seems to be talking a different language. Do working people have some other source of income from which they meet their needs than wages? There is benefits, but this is really negligible.
Roger talks as if the value of labour power were some ideal standard with no bearing upon real life. He talks as if it were "a number created by analysts". Who knows what he is talking about. Marx's view is that the value of labour power is a real and objective magnitude.
The workers' subsist on a basket of commodities that they purchase with their wages. What's to object to in that? That they don't subsist? They do. That they do not purchase commodities? They do. That they do not purchase these commodities with the wage? They do.
Roger asks where workers go to pick up these wages - as though he had never been paid a wage. Usually mine have been paid into a bank account, though some smaller employers have had me call into the boss's office to pick them up.
Immiseration is a possibility. To some sections of the community, it has happened. But unless you are living on another planet from me, it has not been the norm in the West.
It is rare for wages to fall below the value of labour power as an average. But the value of labour power has been systematically reduced throughout the post war period.
The mistake that you seem to be making is the one that Prudhon made as Marx criticised him. Prudhon thought that the workers were being ripped off by trickery. Marx said, no, the point is that even where workers get the right price for the job, exploitation takes place, because exploitation is not an exception, it is the norm.
Or put methodologically, value of labour power is an analytic not a normative category.
In message <37C5B4F7.9D674069 at igc.org>, Roger Odisio <rodisio at igc.org>
writes
>Jim heartfield sez: Labour's income is its
>>social subsistence consumption basket.
>
>This is the heart of the matter. The social subsistence consumption basket is
>an estimate of what it costs to reproduce labor in a particular social
>setting. It's a number created by analysts. It includes, for example,
>besides food, shelter, etc., the cost of education and the development of the
>individual.
>
>Jim, you think this is "labor's income" as if these estimates were factor
>payments (where do workers go to collect this "income"?). And therefore the
>whole discussion of the possibility of immiseration makes no sense? So this
>is why you have been saying over and over (you characterize it again as the
>only point you were making) that rising living standards mean there has been
>no immiseration. And why you claim I have been saying income is going up and
>down at the same time!
>
>Amazing. Thanks for clearing this up.
>
>Wages are labor's income, Jim, and their deviation from estimates of
>consumption needs is what creates the possibility of immiseration, among
>other things.
>
>Roger
>
>
-- Jim heartfield