Once wage goods become understood as abstract stores of potential activity, to be turned into free activity at some indeterminate future point, and once free activity is thought about in terms strongly mediated by the use power of owned commodity objects, the decision about whether to push for more free time, rather than higher real wages, loses much of its urgency. There is no longer the kind of trade-of envisaged by some economists, whereby as income increases, so does the relative value of leisure. That trade-of would result in a backward-bending supply curve for labor, which, as we saw in the last chapter, fails to describe the empirical pattern of work time, labor productivity, and wages over the course of the twentieth century.
To be clear, the argument here does not involve a functionalist claim that in order to secure quiescent workers and suficient aggregate demand, the capitalist system somehow induced in wage earners a tendency to think about usefulness primarily in terms of the properties of things (as opposed to thinking of it in terms of the conditions under which activities are possible). Rather, it posits a response on the part of wage earners, to make wage labor into a fair exchange by construing commodities as repositories of free activity. Given a state of afairs in which there is no alternative to wage labor, wage earners accommodate themselves to their situation by thinking about wage-labor exchange in terms that make it at least potentially fair. As noted, viewing commodities as indexical of free time rationalizes the institution of wage labor. It makes what used to be regarded as an illegitimate exchange of incommensurable substances (parts of a life for a wage) into an exchange of commensurable substances and, therefore, conceivably legitimate. The argument rests on the normative power of notions of fairness, under conditions in which there is no longer an easily imaginable practical alternative to wage labor. The concern with how to square the circle of a fair exchange of labor for a wage was, it is important to mention, present across the public sphere, and also in government bodies and business. There was a quite general tendency, once capitalism was established, to construe wage-labor exchange in terms that make it a potentially fair arrangement.
In sum, this efort to make work commensurable with its wage thus suggests a novel explanation for the demand side of capitalism’s characteristic expansionary dynamic. In the introduction I posed the question: Why has aggregate demand under capitalism tended to facilitate the drive toward capital valorization in the sphere of production? If capitalism is driven to expand, how is it that aggregate demand has, on the whole, enabled that expansion? Of course, it is not always the case that there is enough shortterm efective aggregate demand to forestall crisis, as was shown most dramatically in the 1930s. But why haven’t economic crises occurred more often than has been the case? Why are catastrophes like the Depression periodic rather than perennial features of capitalism in the era of mass industrial production? More precisely, why, under industrial capitalism, do markets tend to clear at rates that ensure that the economy remains stable enough to allow for the reproduction of capitalism? After all, production precedes consumption, and capitalists, when making decisions about investment and output, are therefore always taking something of a leap of faith into an uncertain future.
86
Time for Things