The propensity to increase consumption rather than reduce work time is, however, not a fact of nature. Nor, at the same time, is it plausible that it appeared in 1945 ex nihilo. In this book, I explain the dynamic consumer demand that underpinned the postwar period of stable expansion of industrial capitalism as a consequence of a set of social, cultural, and institutional developments that took place roughly over the first half of the century. The most important of these—to some degree underlying all the others—was the increasing extent to which wage labor became construed as a potentially fair form of economic exchange, based on the commensurability of labor and its wage. Seeing wage labor as a potentially fair exchange of commensurable substances, afected how use value was perceived in goods and activities, imparting unto consumer commodities the characteristics of the free activity given up (through work) in exchange for the wage. The balance established between mass production and mass consumption under advanced industrial capitalism was thus made possible by the ways in which the normative ground on which wage-labor exchange became legitimate was linked to the meaning of consumer commodities.
- Possible Explanations
In order to clear the ground for this alternative, exchange-focused account of mass consumption, in this section I briefly consider the main currents of social scientific thought about consumption and assess the degree to which they might ofer a satisfactory solution to the questions under consideration: Why, under conditions of afluence, does consumer accumulation nonetheless continue unabated? Why has increasing productivity tended to be used to that end rather than to reduce work time? The currents of theory considered are neoclassical economics, behavioral economics (an increasingly influential heterodox current within economics), status theories, Marxian theories, and cultural approaches.
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Time for Things