But what would a diferent arrangement look like—one in which attitudes to consumption and work time are no longer influenced by an imperative to make labor and its wage commensurable, and therefore potentially commensurate? What would need to be in place for patterns of work, free time, and consumption to be more attuned to human welfare? Part of the answer surely has to do with making consumption and work matters of explicit public deliberation, about alternatives that are very often incommensurable. What is required is the cultivation of a thoroughly conversational and contextual approach to the ends toward which economic activity ought to be directed. A dialogic procedure, focused on the concrete realities of everyday life, would stand in for isolated individual introspection, or an abstract quest for the objective ground of value (by virtue of which all things can be made commensurable), as the method for deciding questions about economic value. Public deliberation about economic value would bring to the fore the communal practices that make up a form of life—practices that provide a horizon or condition of possibility for the very coherence of norms and therefore for meaningful action of any sort (Wittgenstein 1953).7 To make usefulness and utility matters of public deliberation would thus bring them within a social frame of reference. Within this frame of reference, the conditions under which practices actually take place, including constraints of time and energy, could be brought to bear more systematically on thinking about the human consequences of commodity production and consumption.
Making consumption, work, and use value thoroughly explicit, public matters would therefore involve a kind of reembedding of the economy in political and social life. It would, more specifically, involve resolving questions about economic value through a democratic politics comprehensively extended to the economic sphere. How choices are made between incommensurable alternatives, and how economic priorities should be established, would then emerge contingently from an ongoing conversation about the nature of the good life—a conversation grounded in collective experience and knowledge. Utility, instead of being a rarefied abstraction—“a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity,” as the prominent economist Joan Robinson (1962) put it—or being reified in decontextualized material objects, would be substantively defined through public deliberation. Usefulness and utility would thus no longer be phantasms in the mind of abstracted individuals or fetishized properties of commodities. They would be concrete and contextual, assuming their natural form as emergent features in the social life of communities. The result of this regrounding of utility would be to make possible the state of afairs Keynes optimistically envisioned for the future during the dark early years of the Depression.
Conclusion
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