The materialist aspirations underlying the preoccupation with “getting ahead” are consistent with the theory developed in this book. As we saw in Chapter 3, by the 1950s, work hours per week had become fairly stable—yearon-year, they were dropping little, if at all. At the same time real wages and spending were steadily increasing, with a good proportion of the spending directed toward consumer durables. What “getting ahead” via commodity accumulation might have meant for wage workers in that context was improving the ratio between subjection to labor and ownership of goods that represented the opposite of labor. If goods roughly translate into congealed free activity time, then, as workers acquire more of them, the amount of free time stored in their accumulated wage goods increases relative to the time given up as work. “Getting ahead,” seen this way, means accumulating an ever-greater surplus of potential use power, stored in wage goods, over the ongoing loss of time to work. Even at low levels of income, this kind of accumulation could seemingly progressively diminish the diference between the loss of time to work and the activity time represented by the goods aforded by the wage.
Chinoy and the Lynds describe worlds within which the accumulation of consumer commodities justifies, or at least rationalizes, otherwise alienating work. For Chinoy’s autoworkers, the accumulation of commodities, to a significant extent, defines what it is to “get ahead.” This would suggest that the exchange of labor for a wage had become acceptable by virtue of the increasing purchasing power of that wage. As long as the purchasing power of the wage allowed workers feel that they were making “progress” by increasing the quantity and improving the quality of the commodities they own, the underlying exchange was at least arguably legitimate and potentially fair. This certainly does not mean that work was enjoyable. There is, as noted, plenty of evidence of alienation among workers in Chinoy’s and in the Lynds’ ethnographies. Yet the attitude of wage workers in both cases is one of resignation. Wage labor, by comparison with earlier periods, had become a quasi-naturalized “fact of life,” one that was tolerable to the extent that it allowed for material “progress,” by way of commodity acquisition. This is in stark contrast to the attitudes to wage labor described by labor historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—which, as described earlier in this chapter, called into question the very legitimacy of wage labor as an institution. The data on nineteenth-century wage earners analyzed by Dora Costa suggest that “getting ahead,” for them, meant using increases in wages to progressively reduce the temporal duration of their subjection to work (Dora Costa 2000a). It seems likely that what those earlier wage earners had sought to “get ahead” of was a capitalist system that would extract as much labor power from them, and therefore as much of their time and energy, as possible.
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
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