Am I going crazy or something? Because I distinctly remember reading somewhere that the labor-power of a human, their capacity to perform labor is the economic analogue of the horse-power of an engine, it's ability to do work.
I also remember reading somewhere that Marx modeled the concept of labor-power after it's thermodynamic counterpart (hence the name, labor-power)
Now I've been searching for a source from Marx's own writings, and although the way marx treats labor-power is entirely analogous to how one might treat an engine with the capacity to do work, I haven't yet found an explicit comparison in his writings. Reading through chapters of capital is taking some time ...
So my question to the comrades here is, am I hallucinating this connection between political economy and thermodynamics, or is it real (and where in marx's writings should I look).
For additional context: I was banned from a certain place for using this analogy (oddly harsh punishment perhaps). I don't really care about being unbanned, but I do want to know if I was wrong.
That’s a bad analogy. Horsepower is a unit of power in the physics sense, just as the watt is. Labor power isn’t using “power” in that sense. In fact, the engine is what increased human labor power in the industrial revolution, because humans could use them for physical power instead of their own bodies or horses or windmills or water wheels.
Just as power is the ability to transfer/transform energy per unit time, I was using labor-power in the sense of being able to produce labor per unit time.
This seems confusing to me, since increasing the amount of labor-power implies a greater ability to generate surplus value/profit, and yet the increases in productivity of production cause the rate of profit to fall. From chapter 8 of capital:
I don't think that section of Capital is discussing the rate of profit, but rather the labour value of a given product. The labour value falls as productivity increases, but since capitalist market prices are abstracted from labour value this has at least initially little effect on exchange value and thus surplus value.