Political Memes

Unfortunately, not quite. The general argument applied in favor of the Black Death raising living standards (and it is a compelling argument, mind, and one that I agree with) is that the Black Death caused a contraction in the labor and food supply and a glut in land availability. Read: so many of The Poors(tm) who actually worked the land died that the remaining ones were valuable and had considerable negotiating power, especially in regards to the land that was left.

As great as it would be if the above commenter was correct in that broader sense, history is often... shitty.

That being said, the above commenter isn't wholly incorrect either - the Black Death, by giving the common people of Europe more negotiating power, did disrupt traditional entrenched hierarchies, which allowed greater class mobility.

Next I'll claim that people live in houses made of literal human and animal shit don't do so out of choice, and that high mortality rates from issues solvable by application of labor (rather than a lack of resources or technology/knowledge) aren't a rational decision made from The Poors(tm) in the medieval period partying half the year away with the consent of their local (and trusting) lords, unlike us modern puritans kept down by the man.

If memory serves, Marx suggested that the 16th-17th century AD was a 'golden age' of the proletariat compared to the 18th and mid-19th century AD context he was writing in, wherein the negotiating power of the urban workers was at an all-time high compared to the negotiating power of their employers.

While modernity would offer some examples of successes from labor solidarity that outstrip it, and Marx's own access to modern archeological and historical analysis was limited, there is likely to be a fair bit of truth there. I remember reading an argument in support of a low-triple-digit number of working days needed, in terms of sheer wages and prices, during the Black Plague for a single agricultural laborer to support himself. I have my own long list of gripes with that analysis - that number only covered the 'subsistence basket' which excluded many goods and services which were not generally purchased even by laborers in the pre-modern day, but were nonetheless necessary; and by the authors' own analysis, was not enough to support even a single child - but it's much more defensible.

That being said, the claim in its original form comes in respect, explicitly, to the 14th century AD English peasantry, and from a legitimate scholar in the 1990s. I'm of the opinion that the legitimate scholar in question should have fucking known better, and the same with the smattering of scholars who today attempt to hold to a position that fucking no one who has spent a day on a farm in their lives (much less in a pre-market economy with both low circulation of 'convenience' consumer goods and low labor mobility and availability) would consider realistic for half a fucking moment; but there's no reading of evidence like a motivated one, and the claim came as part of a critique of capitalism.