As noted earlier in the book, the focus on norms (those concerning commensurability, commensuration, fairness, and utility) in my account brings it close to Weber’s approach to capitalism. For Weber also saw a normative imperative as lying at the root of modern industrial capitalism. But while Weber provides a coherent account of the origins of the normative framework that motivated capitalist production, he pays much less attention to the normative dimension of the mode of consumption that is required for the material expansion of capitalism (and for the realization of profit against the background of rising productivity).6 As noted throughout the book, the conditions of possibility for the inexorable expansion of the industrial economy include not just the instrumental pursuit of profit by capitalists but also ever-increasing consumer demand. And the dynamism of consumer demand, which is so crucial to industrial capitalism, rests on peculiar aspects of capitalism’s normative structure—namely, the notion of the possibility of objective commensuration between wage and work, and the privacy of the criterion that determines whether or not consumers have ultimately made the two commensurate through their particular spending decisions. These features make the normativity around wage-labor exchange, economic value, and consumption indeterminate, with the efect of encouraging behavioral tendencies that in the aggregate produce a mass consumption capable of absorbing the output of capitalist mass production. This form of consumption represents, in Marxian terms, the endless pursuit not of “exchange value” but of a peculiarly decontextualized form of “use value,” contained in commodities, yet disconnected from actual activity, hence often unrealized. If, as Marx argues, capital pursues fetishized exchange value, then labor, in a mirror image, pursues a fetishized form of use value—a merely indexical use value, signified by dead things rather than animated through activity. The normative indeterminateness of wage-labor commensuration and consumption thus contributes to capitalism’s expansionary tendency, which is impervious to considerations about what its consequences are for human welfare. Once consumption, like production, is untethered in this way, the growth machine can then grind inexorably onward—at least until some ultimate limit in nature is reached.
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Time for Things