The rough coincidence in timing between the rise of consumer society and the growing legitimacy of wage labor, however, would follow as a matter of course if mass consumption was driven by wage-labor commensuration. Wage labor gained legitimacy as consumer products increasingly came to represent decontextualized repositories of utility, indexing hypothetical free activities. At the same time, the emergence of standardized consumer goods (and indeed many of the other practices and institutions associated with the consumer society) at least in part reflected demand for a kind of product that could make the exchange between their labor and its wage commensurable and, indeed, potentially fair. Mass consumption and the growing legitimacy of wage labor were, then, mutually reinforcing developments. The various cultural and institutional forms associated with consumer society developed in reaction to the contradictions underlying wage labor exchange and, at the same time, provided a means by which those contradictions could be, if not resolved, then at least indefinitely deferred.16
1.2. Provides an Explanation for Materialist Consumerism
The theory of consumption as commensuration arguably gives some account of the materialism that seems to be an intrinsic part of industrial capitalism. Materialist consumerism—the felt urgency, compulsion even, to spend earnings on things—makes more sense if the point of spending is to fill a deficit (of free life activity) incurred through waged labor and made up for through commodity accumulation. Since commodities are more commensurable with labor than is money, turning a wage into things makes the exchange of work for a wage more palatable.
By contrast, the theoretical account of the materialism underpinning consumer society given by Colin Campbell, the author of the most important work of historical sociology on the topic, places much emphasis on the role of fantasy and expectation in the pursuit of commodities. Campbell (1987) attributes the modern propensity to fantasize and daydream to the development in the nineteenth century of the imaginative faculties, which were stimulated by the emergence of the novel and associated cultural forms. For Campbell, consumerism was (and is) driven by the desire of consumers to enter into a pleasurable state of imaginative anticipation, in which they become transfixed by fantasies about the practices and identities they associate with commodities they are considering acquiring but have not yet acquired. Once those commodities have been acquired by consumers, however, they become just mundane stuf, subject to prosaic existential constraints, and this produces a rude awakening, bursting the bubble of imaginative anticipation. In response, consumers seek out new objects of desire, in order to enter once more into a dream-like state of anticipation. Thus, demand becomes dynamic and restless, as consumers constantly search out new objects about which to fantasize, and yet are never satisfied once those objects are possessed.
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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