United States was caveat emptor, meaning that the consumer was responsible for ascertaining whether products would perform in a satisfactory manner (Hamilton 1931). So the growing influence of the principle that consumers have a strong moral entitlement to “fair” quantities of use value from the goods they purchased has to have a more historically proximate explanation.
I would suggest that the explanation has to do with the grounds on which wage labor became acceptable as a legitimate form of exchange. In the context of the moral economy of wage-labor exchange, consumers were seen as being entitled to fair quantities of use value in the commodities they acquired. The assumption was that consumers deserve decent products in exchange for their hard-earned wages. Reflecting this moral imperative, the state was increasingly viewed as responsible for ensuring fair exchange in the consumer marketplace. The right of consumers to high-quality, functional goods was a natural extension of the right of wage earners to fair levels of compensation. On the one hand, commodities, viewed as stores of potential free activity, made the wage—the purchasing power of which was measured in quantities of these commodities—more easily commensurable with labor. At the same time, the urge, on the part of wage earners and capitalists alike, to make wage labor thinkable as a potentially fair exchange of equivalent substances contributed to a tendency for commodities to be represented so as to facilitate this—that is, as standard quantities of potential utility. The sense of consumer entitlement that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century has then much to do with the increasing influence of the idea of wage labor as a fair form of exchange that was outlined in the last chapter. Wage labor became legitimate insofar as the purchasing power of the wage became stable and quantifiable, such that it could represent a capacity to capture a set of use values potentially suficient to compensate workers for their loss of free life activity to labor. Standardized products, which were promoted on the basis of their predictable qualities, and the quantity, transparency, and robustness of their useful powers, provided a means by which purchasing power became more easily imaginable, and in this way provided a kind of material-cultural substrate for the legitimacy of wage labor in the era of mass production.
The remainder of this chapter consists of a general discussion of standardization, primarily as it became manifested in the sphere of consumption. The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First it sets up the context in which the more particular features of standardization that I go on to analyze— the development of brands, commercial warranties, the emergence of the implied warranty, and consumer product testing—should be interpreted. Second it draws attention to the fact that standardization, especially where it concerned commodities meant for final consumption, was understood in moral as well as technical terms. As noted, the moral dimension of standardization has to do with the increasing sense that consumers deserve clear and fair quantities of use value from the commodities they received in exchange for their earnings. In making this argument, I draw extensively on the discussions that took place about standardization in the first three decades of the twentieth century while also analyzing institutional developments accompanying the shift to standardized goods. Following this general account of standardization, Chapters 7 and 8 go on to examine certain aspects of standardization in more detail. These include the rapid expansion of brands as signs of standardized consumer products, the emergence of the standardized commercial warranty, and the regulation of standardized products by way of consumer product testing.
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