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.
I see how I have miscommunicated. I never meant that labor-power is literally power in the physics sense in my original post (that got me banned). I only meant that the relationship between labor-power and labor is analogous to the difference between the horse-power of an engine and the energy it outputs. Labor-power is the capacity to do labor at some rate.
Is that still a bad analogy though? Perhaps since labor is social, the labor-power of a single individual might not be well defined
Whether or not the analogy is sound, it seems to be problematic pedagogically because of the easy conflation among the two distinct senses of power used. It also can cause confusion between constant capital, e.g. the cost of an engine, and variable capital, meaning labor power, measured in e.g. cost per worker-hour.