The tendency for wages to be spent on wage goods at levels of income above subsistence makes sense, however, if labor (C) is exchanged for a wage (M), which wage earners then seek to turn into a form capable of justifying the initial outlay of time and efort represented by work and so, with this end in mind, transform the wage into consumer commodities (C). If we suspend for a moment Marx’s abstract holism, and take capital to be the set of individual capitalists and labor to be the set of individual workers and assume, furthermore, that under fully developed industrial capitalism the two groups at least to some degree live within a common normative framework, then the diference between the two in the propensity to spend (as opposed to saving / investing) reflects the diference in the identity of the revenues flowing to each. Wage earners exchange labor (C) for a wage (M), which, in order to make it roughly equivalent to the time and efort given as work, they convert into activity-indexing consumer commodities (C). Capitalists, on the other hand, feel no equivalent compulsion to convert the returns to their capital into commodities meant for final consumption and so are more likely to reinvest that income.
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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