Hualian en su etapa emo

so the answer to this one is kinda just ‘they don’t, really’. communists are generally (in principle) opposed to the wage-form entirely. the marxist definition of a wage is 'the price of the commodity called labour-power’. that is:

Their commodity, labour-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. […] The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labour-power.

— Karl Marx, Wage Labour & Capital

alright, let’s back up a bit. what does any of that mean? well, labour-power is a marxist concept that distinguishes 'labour’ (that is, work, which is qualitative–work is done for a particular purpose, you labour to achieve something) vs. labour-power (that is, potential labour which is sold and therefore quantified–enumerated in hours or in finished products, the purpose of which is to receive compensation). unlike labour, labour-power is a commodity–which is to say, as well as a use value (it fulfils some kind of need or desire) it has an exchange value (it is exchanged for other commodities).

so 'wages’ are the price of labour-power. what exists here to 'oppose’, exactly? well, it’s the very act of buying and selling labour-power, because labour-power is worth more than its price! that is, unlike every other sort of commodity, it is productive–when you purchase labour-power, that labour-power generates for you more value than you paid for it (e.g., when a starbucks barista is paid $10 an hour for a five-hour shift, they produce far more than $50 in profit by making and selling coffee). this is the fundamental economic engine of capitalist exploitation

however, the answer to this exploitation is not so much that 'workers deserve the full product of their labour’, as you put it. one of the fundamental injustices of capitalism is that for the eight hours (or more!) of the day that one spends labouring, you have no control over your life or your work. you are selling this time of your life to somebody else–they have quite literally bought these hours from you. you are not spending them doing what you are doing, but spending them making money so that you can survive–you’re alienated from the actual actions you take and product you produce, which become fungible and irrelevant.

in a communist (i.e. classless society), this sale of labour would no longer take place. you would not work to make money (that is, at a price, which is to say, for a wage)–your life would be your own and you would work to accomplish that which you are working towards. builders would not build houses so that they could get paid, but so that there would be houses for people to live in.

“alright, but that’s pretty far-off, right?” yep! the abolition of the wage is not by any means a short-term or immediate goal. so do revolutionary socialist states in a transitional economy support total wage equality? nope. and it’s not because of any bourgeois guff about some jobs being 'more important’ than others–it’s certainly not because of 'supply and demand’, which is not a natural law but simply a law of the functioning of a labour market.

to understand why not every job would be compensated equally under socialism, let’s take a look at how prices emerge. sure, every commodity’s price is influenced by supply and demand. the more people are competing to buy it, the more necessary it is that each buyer outbids the others and so the higher the price. likewise, the more people are competing to sell it, the more necessary it is that each seller finds a means of of undercutting the other and so the lower the price.

but hold on–higher in relation to what? lower in relation to what? if supply & demand led to a potato costing $600, you’d probably say 'that’s a fucking ridiculously high price for a potato’–but why? 'high’ and 'low’ are relative terms–supply and demand can drive prices 'up’ or 'down’ but they must be driven 'from’ something. and that’s simple–the basic price of a commodity is the cost of producing it. you expect a potato to be significantly less than $600 because it costs significantly less than that to grow one (1) potato.

what does that mean for wages (remember, they’re just the price of labour-power)? the cost of producing labour-power (the potential to work) is, to be blunt, the cost of keeping the worker in question alive, able to have and raise children, and in a condition to work. now that last point is quite important–because there are some jobs that can be done by anybody with a warm body, and there are others that can only be done with years and years of training. you can get anyone off the street and get them to wait tables, even if they’ll obviously not be as good as somebody who’s done the job for a long time. you can’t do the same with nuclear physicists or plumbers.

so–even in absence of the capitalist labour market (the competition betwen employers to buy labour and the competition between workers to sell it) the cost of producing labour-power is going to vary across jobs. it costs more to produce an hour of a doctor’s labour than it does a waiter’s, not because the doctor is more worthy or important a profession, but because that hour of labour is prefigured by years of medical school.

tldr: under communism, there will be no wages. under socialism, wages will vary according to their cost of production (and not according to prestige, or supply and demand) so long as some sort of exchange-economy is still maintained.