Anyone who has read Marx and Lenin knows that wages are just money for food. They have nothing to do with your performance, the region you live in, or your occupation. Your wages are only just enough for you to live on.

How should we understand this statement? We need to examine it on two levels.

1 For a feudal society to become a capitalist society, two conditions must be met. First, the commodity economy must flourish: buying things with money must become commonplace, replacing barter and self-sufficiency. Second, wage employment must become widespread. Wage employment means that you pay me and I do the work: my labor power becomes a commodity. Its spread means that most people live on wages.

For someone to willingly live on wages, two conditions must be met: personal freedom and possession of nothing. If you lack even personal freedom and depend on a slave owner, landlord, parent, or husband, how can you control your own labor power? If you already have food and clothing and can support yourself, why would you work for someone else?

Thus, many things that emerging capitalist countries did, intentionally or otherwise, created these two conditions and developed capitalism. Advocating human rights and gender equality and emancipating serfs gave workers greater personal freedom; the enclosure movement, for example, confiscated peasants' land so that they could earn money only by taking jobs.

Today's workers face the same situation. On the one hand, we face few restrictions on our personal freedom and can freely control our own bodies; landlords and slave owners are far removed from our lives. On the other, we have little savings and really cannot cover our daily expenses without working.

That is the first level. To sum it up: “If I don't work, what am I supposed to eat—dirt?”

2 As a commodity, labor power naturally has both value and price. Value determines price, while price fluctuates around value under the influence of market supply and demand.

Then what determines value?

Value is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. The value of labor power is equivalent to the value of the means of subsistence necessary to produce, develop, maintain, and reproduce that labor power.

Simply put, the value of labor power has three components. First, maintaining your own life, including food, clothing, housing, and everyday necessities. Second, maintaining your family's life, chiefly your children's food, clothing, housing, and necessities. Third, the cost of educating that labor power, which is why the value of skilled labor is always somewhat higher. Value determines price, so your wages broadly contain these three components too.

As you can see, Beijing has high wages, but food, housing, and commuting are expensive. The cost of living in your hometown is low, but wages just will not rise. Wherever you are, wages are only just enough to live on.

You can also see that your wages are low, so life is austere: you can only cook for yourself or order takeout every day. You live frugally but still cannot save anything. Your friends at big tech companies earn somewhat more, but they drink coffee, go to the movies, and eat out. Their spending is high, and they still cannot save anything. Whatever your occupation, wages are only just enough for your way of life.

That is the second level. To sum it up: “Wages really are just money for food.”

You probably have plenty of questions. That is fine; I will answer them one by one.

Question: Wages are just money for food? Eating is not the only thing we do. Your statement is not rigorous at all.

Answer: I am using a vivid expression. “Money for food” means money that is only just enough to live on, leaving nothing to save. It does not mean an Engel coefficient of 100%.

Question: I accept that, under the same conditions, different regions work out much the same. But what about different industries? A few years ago civil engineering paid well; now computer science pays well!

Answer: That is because deciding which majors Chinese universities offer and how many students each admits involves cumbersome procedures. Add the four years it takes to train a university student, and their response to market demand is very slow, creating a structural mismatch between the supply of graduates and the market's demand for talent. When civil engineering was booming a few years ago, the supply of talent could not keep up, so graduates were in short supply and wages were high. Later, the industry no longer needed so many people, graduates became oversupplied, and wages fell. This is the effect of market supply and demand, but universities' slow response makes the cycle rather long.

Question: Why are programmers paid so much?

Answer: Because programmers will be laid off at 35, their wages in these few years must include their food money for the rest of their lives, making the annual average higher. The same applies to heavy manual labor: it generally pays somewhat more because people cannot do it when they are older. Prostitutes also earn a lot because business starts going downhill in their thirties. Overseas assignments pay more too, both because of the risks and because they cannot be done forever. These high wages cannot last.

Question: You are denying the value of striving! In the same profession, or even the same position, if I compete hard enough, work more overtime, and take more side jobs, my income will definitely be higher! How do you explain that?

Answer: First, I am merely introducing what Marxism regards as a social law. Laws operate independently of individual will; this involves no judgment or emotion, much less any denial of the value of striving.

Second, the value of labor power takes shape through millions of actual transactions in the market. If wages are unreasonable, employees change jobs, employers dismiss them, or the two sides negotiate raises or cuts through various forms of bargaining. In the end, wages settle within a reasonable range. That is the law at work.

Third, suppose everyone normally works eight hours but you insist on working twelve. That comes at a cost: your body cannot take it. The extra money you make now will be spent on medical bills later. This, too, is a cost of labor power, “food money” in the broad sense, and nothing to feel smug about.

Question: Everything you have said is wrong and does not fit reality. I know someone who did such and such.

Answer: The real world is complex and ever-changing. What matters is identifying the principal contradiction and finding the underlying law. What I have described is the law governing the value of labor power that Marx derived from a vast collection of material, only explained more plainly. Read the original if you are interested. Your examples are individual cases. Of course, individual cases require concrete analysis of concrete problems, but they involve so many factors that we may struggle to understand them immediately. For now, there may be no need to understand every detail either.

Question: But…

Answering before you finish: All right, no more questions. These questions are not actually what matters. What matters is: now that we know this, what should we do?

I have six suggestions, representing six paths through life, for your consideration. They become progressively harder to pursue from top to bottom, but none is inherently better or worse, and choosing one does not mean following it to the bitter end.

1 The ordinary person's path. Close this article, cover your ears, and forget what you just read. As long as you do not overthink things, you can live a satisfying life. In fact, most people muddle through, and a lifetime passes before they know it.

2 The wise person's path. Face reality and adjust your outlook. Happiness can be entirely unrelated to wealth or status. Lower your expectations, cherish what you have, and discover beauty in everyday life, and you can live a fulfilling life too. Although people in our country work hard, at least it is safe. Taken to its fullest extent, this is the path of true eminent monks and recluses, people like Tao Yuanming.

3 The champion competitor's path. Compete through differentiation. We cannot change the social laws operating at the macro level, but we can use them to make advantageous moves at the micro level. Choose a good major or a lucrative job, for instance, and always be ready to move to a better position. Or work in a big city while spending and living in a small one. Or simply emigrate to a country or region with better labor conditions. Most people with a few ideas of their own currently choose this path.

4 The entrepreneur's path. In other words, become a boss. If you cannot beat them, join them. After accumulating some money and experience, start your own business. Success opens up more possibilities. But this path carries risks whose consequences you must bear yourself. If the business goes badly, you may even end up in debt.

5 The rebel's path. In other words, organize a workers' movement. This is the answer Marx and Engels gave, and the answer that most directly addresses the root of the problem. At the basic level, struggle for better treatment for workers; at the advanced level, make a revolution; ultimately, establish a new social system that no longer distributes social wealth according to capitalist logic. But in the past, this path has reached, at most, the advanced stage. No one can give a satisfactory answer as to how the new social system should work. Even Mao Zedong failed, and I think we ordinary people are even less capable of it. As long as you can still get by, I suggest avoiding this path.

6 The rebirth path. At this point, the children of the rich and grandchildren of revolutionary officials reading this will smile knowingly: being born into the right family is actually the optimal solution. Other friends interested in choosing this path should not lose heart. If it does not work out in this life, there is always the next!