Thus, the use of the wage to accumulate potential free time congealed in wage goods provides wage earners with a general sense that labor can, when compensated by suficient real wage income, be fair. And the sense that it is possible for the exchange between labor and wage, if the ratio is right, to be objectively fair, then attenuates the categorical understanding of wage earners as subjects of exploitation. The exploitation associated with wage labor changes from being an essential feature of the institution, to one contingent on the amount of purchasing power received in the form of the wage.
To be sure, certain background conditions are required for this state of afairs to take hold. The most important of these is that wage labor should not be so onerous as to strike people as abject exploitation. If work hours are endlessly increasing, or if conditions of work are dangerous, then the ability to accumulate time-indexing objects would be unlikely to seem like adequate compensation. But in the context of working conditions that are not abject, the urge to commensurate labor with its wage produces an open-ended form of consumption, as wage earners are moved to accumulate commodities that signify free time as compensation for their ongoing loss of time and freedom through labor. This accumulative mode of consumption, as noted earlier, played a crucial role in maintaining what became a quite robust dynamic equilibrium under industrial capitalism for much of the twentieth century. Increasing productivity (and aggregate output) led to rising real income, which increased aggregate efective demand (thus absorbing output), which encouraged further investment in fixed capital, which in turn then led to further increases in productivity (and output). This dynamic characterized capitalism in the relatively stable form it took during its Golden Age or Fordist incarnation (Aglietta 2000; B oyer 1990; Piore and Sabel 1986; Mandel 1999).
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Time for Things