Moreover, because life activity and dead things are qualitatively distinct, the problem of making them commensurable remains ultimately intractable. Wage earners try to fill an ongoing deficit of freedom incurred by work by accumulating commodities that are, in themselves, just things, and so cannot possibly work as commensurate compensation. The norm by virtue of which work and wage goods are rendered commensurable is therefore inherently vague, entailing a kind of pseudocommensurability, based on only a rough sense of goods as denoting possible activity power.14 The vagueness of wagelabor commensuration has three dimensions: (1) the indeterminate quantity of wage goods required to commensurate a given amount of labor; (2) the uncertainty about whether goods will actually eventually be turned into free activity, such that the commensuration is consummated; and (3) the underlying incommensurability of things and life activity. This vagueness makes the project of accumulating wage goods, in order to achieve commensuration between labor and its wage, indefinite and interminable. Thus, the pursuit of commensuration gives consumption under capitalism the same irrational, open-ended, dynamic character as the capitalist system of production.
If the commensuration theory of consumption is correct, then modern industrial capitalism, especially during its Golden Age, between the Second World War and the 1970s, was made possible by a combination of mass industrial production, organized around various forms of Fordist enterprise, the emergence of a moral economy that secured widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the wage form on the basis of the commensurability of work and consumer commodities, and the development of a consumer economy that presented wage goods in a way that made them seem plausibly commensurable with work.15 Had mass production developed in the absence of the latter two developments, the demand-side problems generated by mass production, identified by analysts such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel (1986), would have ensued. The high and stable levels of aggregate efective demand required in order for industries based on very large fixed-capital investments (the kind of enterprise characteristic of mass production) to be profitable would not have been forthcoming. The positive feedback loop between increasing returns to scale in production and increasing aggregate demand would consequently have ground to a halt.
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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