Use value: By use value I mean the value ascribed to commodities by virtue of the notional use power, or useful activity-generating potential, with which they are endowed (at times I also use the term in its more traditional Marxian sense). The diference between utility and use value is that utility is actual satisfaction, while use value is attached to the envisioned capacity of a commodity to facilitate useful activities. For a given person, the use value of a commodity depends on assessments about the extent to which its use power can be converted into actual activities, as well as the person’s preferences. The use value of an object can be said to have been realized only through actual use, with the limits of use set by the use power of the object. As with utility, the use value of a commodity is not amenable to precise measurement but rather is a matter of rough judgment, an approximate sense of things. Indeed, precisely because diferent use values are qualitatively distinct, it is unclear on what basis they can be compared quantitatively.
Plan of the Book
The plan of the book follows the abductive structure of its argument. The first part of the book describes the general pattern under advanced capitalism of stagnating work time and relentlessly increasing consumption, and introduces a theory which, I suggest, ofers a good explanation for the pattern. Chapters 2 and 3 explore what is puzzling about the peculiar combination of economic growth, consumption, and work time under advanced capitalism, especially in its American incarnation. In Chapter 2, I discuss the issue on a quite abstract level and consider possible explanations from diferent parts of the social sciences. In Chapter 3, in order to make things more empirically concrete, I analyze patterns of productivity, wages, work time, and consumption in the United States between the later nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Chapter 4 introduces a diferent kind of explanation for the puzzling pattern I identify, one based on the normativity governing exchange and, specifically, on the problem of commensuration in the exchange of labor for a wage. I set out the advantages of this exchange-based explanation for the pattern of time use, work, and consumption under capitalism over other possible explanations. The first part of the book concludes with a consideration of various objections that could be raised against this wage-labor commensuration theory of mass consumption.
10
Time for Things