The theory of mass consumption as wage labor commensuration argued for in this book fills that lacuna. According to the theory, the tendency of aggregate demand to keep pace with increasing output is a consequence of the moral economy underpinning the legitimacy of wage labor itself. The propensity to consume that facilitated the expansion of output under industrial capitalism reflected an urge to make the wage into something commensurable with labor. However, there is an ambiguity underlying the efort to make work commensurable with the wage through the hypothetical free time indexed by wage goods. Although free time objectified in wage goods seems qualitatively equivalent to life activity spent working, the equivalence between the two clearly does not yield a precise equation, such that n commodities = x hours of indexed free activity = x hours of work. While accumulating commodity goods might present itself as the best, or at least the most natural, way to make the wage commensurate with work, the efort to achieve commensuration is not guided by a clear and definite point at which the two are self-evidently equivalent, and a given amount of work has consequently been adequately compensated. This is because those goods can only even approximately work as commensurate compensation when they are put to use in activities, yet it is very often unclear to what degree that will be possible.
As has been noted, there are powerful constraints—such as limitations on time, energy and access to public goods—on the extent to which wage workers can actually convert accumulated commodities into free activities. These constraints, and the tensions they produce, occasionally lead to disenchantment with wage funded consumer accumulation, expressed in antimaterialistic social movements and ideologies. An alternative, and more common, response, however, is simply to move on to diferent products, in the belief that the problem is not constraints on free time but rather that the set of commodities the consumer happens to own at a particular time is not quite right and so needs to be changed. One efect of the dificulty of establishing just when commensuration between labor and its wage has been achieved is therefore to make consumers receptive to the flow of new products coming onto the consumer marketplace.
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Time for Things