Perhaps part of the explanation is that cars seemed uniquely to represent freedom and that exercising agency is what “living”—as opposed to the getting of a living, by working—means. The Lynds draw attention to a line in an automobile advertisement, “Hit the Trail to Better Times,” suggesting that this slogan indicates that the car was powerfully symbolic of agency, expressed in peoples’ capacity to transform their life circumstances (1929, p. 256). This was (and still is) very much in line with the tendency for car advertisements never just to show automobiles doing quotidian things but rather to depict vehicles driven on endless open roads through dramatic landscapes, headed to destinations that could change at the whim of the person behind the wheel. Cars represented the antithesis of work, converting the wage into a thing with an almost mythical association with freedom. The automobile was thus well suited to serve as compensation for work, a counterbalance to the loss of freedom represented by having to sell labor for a wage. However, that interpretation leads back to the same question: Why exactly did automobiles have that kind of symbolic force?
One possible answer lies in the way in which the automobile could, more than any other commodity, function as a kind of extension of the worker’s embodied will. The pleasure in driving was the sense of expanded agency, the capacity for the will to transcend the limitations of the body. The deficit of agency experienced in wage work—the diminishing of the will that followed the subordination of the body to capital—perhaps seemed compensated for by the extended powers acquired through the ownership of cars. If that is right, then automobiles did not just index the status associated with the money required to buy them, but also a kind of augmented individual agency, facilitated by their technical capacities. In this sense, the motor-car pointed to itself as much as to its owner, its power and panache working as a potent symbol of freedom and transcendence. The workers of Middletown drove primarily not for instrumental purposes but just for the sheer joy of it—for the sense of empowerment imparted by driving. The pleasure of possessing a car was, however, not just realized in the moment, during the activity of driving, but derived also from “pride of ownership”—from the feeling of possessing an object endowed with the powers that cars are endowed with. In owning a motor car, workers possessed a store of use power, of hypothetical possibility, of a kind that extended their natural capabilities in a fashion that, to some extent, made up for their diminishment at work.21 Car ownership in this way worked supremely well as commensurable compensation for the loss of free activity represented by wage work.
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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