The materialist disposition of wage earners—expressed in their assent to an arrangement in which increased productivity was realized as more real income rather than less work—thus made possible the stability of the system of mass production. We need not, however, follow the neo-Marxist Keynesian theorists of the regulation school—or classical Marxists, such as Ernest Mandel—in positing systemic mechanisms to explain how Fordist workers became mass consumers (Aglietta 2000; Mandel 1999).11 Nor, for that matter, need we follow the more cultural and psychoanalytic path taken by some theorists of the Frankfurt School, who saw mass consumer demand as being a result of desublimation caused by the capitalist culture industry (Marcuse 1964). Rather, the propensity to turn increased productivity into more commodities, as opposed to less work time, can be viewed as a response on the part of wage earners to the perturbing question of what underpins the legitimacy of wage labor—more specifically, to the question of what could possibly make wage-labor exchange objectively fair. Once wage earners accept that the wage in theory represents an exchange of commensurable substances, despite there being no conclusive, or even obvious, grounds on which to establish that a given wage is commensurate with the labor exchanged for it, there will be some impetus to convert wage rate increases (and higher productivity) into stuf—commodities—that can more readily be construed as equivalent to life activity sold as labor.
The behavior of wage earners in the sphere of consumption can, therefore, be made sense of in terms of an efort to resolve tensions underlying wage labor. These tensions were a result of the emergence of a loose consensus that working for a wage must at least potentially constitute a fair economic exchange, in the absence of any obvious objective definition of fairness—that is, one based on self-evident facts. The dificulty in arriving at a clear definition of fairness was in large part a result of the problem of the inalienability of labor and the incommensurability between labor and its wage. But wagelabor exchange, according to my argument, became plausibly fair in the context of an understanding of wage goods as reservoirs of potential free activity, and through a corresponding, accumulative mode of consumer behavior. If what wage earners get from a higher wage is a store of commodities that are at least notionally convertible into free time at some imaginable future point—in other words, something like a store of free activity—then an increase in real wages becomes qualitatively interchangeable with an increase in free time. For workers, spending the wage in order to accumulate stores of use value in efect retroactively rationalizes wage-labor exchange.
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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