Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages
In Chapter 4, I suggested that if consumer objects had been thought about in a more contextual, practice-centered fashion, then wage earners would have pushed harder for increasing productivity to be realized as more free time rather than focusing primarily on higher real income. I went on to argue that the apparent absence of strong consideration of the contextual conditions on commodity use makes more sense when seen in relation to the emergence of a particular understanding of wage labor. On this understanding, the wage relation is potentially fair, and therefore fundamentally legitimate, only insofar as it represents an exchange of commensurable substances. However, it is not at all obvious on what grounds the life activity sold as labor and the wage received in return, are commensurable. Indeed, as discussed in the last chapter, for much of the nineteenth century the popular criticism of wage labor was that it involves the sale of something that is essentially inalienable and for that reason has something in common with slavery. I suggested that the wage is rendered commensurable with labor by virtue of an interpretation of consumer commodities as congealed quantities of potential utility (use power), imagined as durations of free activity. As wage labor took on increasing legitimacy through this particular mechanism of commensurability, wage earners became primed to view the use value of commodity objects in a relatively decontextualized manner. Objects of consumption began to index durations of hypothetical free activity, with the question of the availability of time to actually realize their use value pushed into the background. Thus the availability of
SIX