The insistent emphasis on the material characteristics of the standardized consumer product entailed a narrowing of the meaning of use value to the physical properties of commodities. In directing attention to the material substrate of use value, standardization displaced use from the concrete social context of actual practice and, as it were, placed it in the things themselves. The pressing questions became; how functional, durable, and reliable are consumer commodities, and how many can be commanded by a given wage? The utility of commodities thus became unhinged from the total ecology of practice within which objects actually become useful. Once use value became primarily a property of things—while things became reserves of utility, stores of potential activity—wage labor was much easier to imagine as an exchange of commensurable substances and hence as potentially fair. Wage labor, which had become a necessary fact of life under capitalism, one imposed largely through economic coercion, was thereby turned into a conceivably legitimate institution. Thus, the reframing of commodities as standard quantities of use value relieved some of the central tensions in labor under capitalism and facilitated the incorporation of previously recalcitrant wage earners into the capitalist growth machine.
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Time for Things