2.1. Why Does Commensuration Mean That
the Wage Must be Spent?
One objection to the theory could be directed at the argument that a wage needs to be spent on commodities to make it commensurable with labor— and that, consequently, workers feel compelled to convert their earnings into goods. The counterargument is that a money wage can efectively evoke a basket of potential goods even without actually being spent and so has the same power to index free activities as actually owning commodities. If this is right, then the commensuration theory gives us no reason to suppose that spending a wage will be preferred to saving it, and it therefore fails to account for the trends described in the Chapter 3. The theory would then sufer from an explanatory lacuna similar to the one I attributed to Colin Campbell’s (1987) argument.
One reason for the insuficiency of the unspent money wage to work as compensation is that the status of money is uncertain. Money is evanescent, mercurial, clearly conventional, and fundamentally unstable. Worries about the uncertain status of money are reflected in disquiet about inflation, even where real wages remain unchanged or increase, and in the associated impulse to try to ground value in commodities such as gold or material assets like real estate. Indeed, I would suggest that the impulse to make value concrete, by embedding it in things, is in part animated by underlying anxieties about converting the wage into something suficiently “real” that it can approximate labor. For wage earners, the disquieting thing about nominal inflation (where real wages keep up with prices) is that something of substance—labor and time—has been given, yet what is received in exchange—some amount of money—is unpredictable and perhaps illusory.
Moreover, as noted earlier in this chapter, the nominal wage is too abstract to function adequately as compensation for work. In buying commodities, by contrast, people come to own the set of use values embedded in them, which is far more concrete than owning a quantity of money. Possession of money in relation to use values is, as noted earlier, a second-order form of possession, in the sense that to possess money is to possess a potential to acquire potential use values. As such, money wages are removed from the concrete labor given as work. The exchange of labor for the wage is incomplete until the wage is itself spent on things that have use value.37 However, this point raises a second, perhaps more fundamental objection to the theory.
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Time for Things