Is there an "ordinary wage"?

A look at one of Marx's least understood ideas.

Instead of providing the immediate context for this post I think I’ll just leap right in, because this is a point I suspect I’ll be making a lot in the future. So best to keep things simple.

One of the most important and least understood concepts in Marxist thought, in my view, is his theory of the ordinary wage. The ordinary wage is best understood as the lowest possible wage that a capitalist can get away with paying his workers. Some Marxists seem to think this wage is zero — that as capitalists try to slash their payroll in order to expand their wages, they’ll eventually try to get away with paying workers nothing at all. But this would be awfully short sighted, because even if it didn’t lead to revolution, it would deal a heavy blow to productivity as workers begin to starve, fall ill, and die.