ABSTRACT
This article critically examines Marxist discussions on how the value of labor power and its trend are determined. Unlike the most resonant approaches, which explain this determination by class struggle, it is argued that value of labor power is given by the corresponding value of the commodities that each worker needs to consume so as to reproduce the specific attributes that capital requires in each production process. In this way, it is proposed that value of labor power is determined like the value of all other commodities. In turn, in contrast to the approaches that suggest the existence of a uniform tendency to reduce the value of the labor power by the production of relative surplus value, it is argued that this process is carried out by imposing strong differentiations in the type of productive attributes of workers and, therefore, profound differences in the trends of values of their work forces.
KEYWORDS: Labor power; Value; Trend