By the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of purchasing power, against the background of mass consumption, had come to provide grounds for the legitimacy of wage labor, which for much of the nineteenth century had been a subject of considerable controversy. As long as wage labor was conceived of as entailing a loss for the worker that was incapable of being compensated, an irrevocable diminishing of her humanity, it remained a deeply questionable practice. The legitimacy of wage labor was secured to the degree that it came to be thought of as, in theory, capable of being commensurately compensated by a suficient quantity of consumer goods. The fact that the development of the institutional, cultural, and social forms associated with consumer society coincided with the gradual acceptance of wage labor as a legitimate form of exchange was, as noted in the previous chapter, not coincidental.
What is not clear, however, is how exactly consumption could make what had previously seemed tantamount to a form of slavery or bondage into something fair and acceptable. At least part of the answer to this question is that consumer commodities became reframed as increasingly standardized quantities of use power—free time and activity frozen in the form of commodities. This change was both reflected in and facilitated by the emergence of a new kind of product, as mass-produced, standardized modern consumer durables became available.
- The Meaning of Consumption in the Shadow of Wage Work—Some Evidence from Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Research
I characterized the theoretical argument made in the last chapter as an abduction—a conjecture that posits a state of afairs to account for a surprising empirical pattern. The existence of that state of afairs would remove the grounds on which the pattern strikes us as surprising. If the point of consumption is to achieve commensurate compensation for labor, then the tendency for consumption to increase with increases in productivity would follow naturally, as a matter of course. But are there more direct indications that mass consumption was motivated to a significant extent by wage-labor commensuration? What evidence do we have about attitudes toward the connection between work, wage, and consumption among wage earners in the period that saw the emergence of welfare capitalism and the purchasing power paradigm—the period roughly spanning the 1920s to the 1950s?
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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