If, therefore, wage earners are encouraged to exchange their labor (by way of spending the wage) for functionally redundant product features, such as the latest model year’s styling on an automobile, then that labor is, in efect, not being suficiently (that is, commensurately) compensated.108 In replacing a perfectly good commodity with a new version that difers only aesthetically from the one it replaces, wage earning consumers are efectively exchanging labor for a characteristic of an object that adds no substantive, functional (therefore commensurable) value. So they are exchanging the use value of their labor, abstracted in the wage, for an essentially insubstantial return. This interpretation of the objection to style obsolescence would explain why there was a strong current of opinion in society that consumers were duped and defrauded by the practice.
Of course, none of this is to say that there were not countervailing psychological motivations and cultural forces in play. If concerns about status, neophilia, and the dialectics of fashion (as, for example, theorized by Simmel), were not also powerful influences on consumer behavior, then the whole strategy of style obsolescence would not have become successful in the first place.109 However, the strong reaction against the success of the strategy suggests that it ran in some tension with the normative framework underpinning the consensus that wage labor is a potentially objectively fair exchange of commensurable substances. Thus, even the very distinction between style and material obsolescence expresses the fear that, when proper commensuration is sabotaged, the free activity lost to labor is unrecoverable.
In this chapter, and in the four that precede it, I examined various developments in US history that fit with the theory of mass consumption as wage-labor commensuration. The set of developments I considered is by no means exhaustive. The development of chain stores and the transformation of retail, for example, could be interpreted in a similar fashion (Rosenberg 2017). The empirical analysis of those chapters could also be supplemented by a much more detailed historical ethnography of attitudes toward the connection between work and consumption, along the lines of the brief account given in Chapter 5. But, as mentioned in the introduction, the point of the historical analysis is not to develop a comprehensive picture of one context but rather to serve as a heuristic, to “flesh out,” the argument and think through the theory in a historically grounded fashion. The objective was to construct through historical analysis a quite general explanation for the relation between mass production and mass consumption under industrial capitalism. The next chapter, which concludes the book, comprises a summation of the argument and some ruminations on the general character of economic normativity under advanced industrial capitalism.
Moral Panic about Utility
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