{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":113,"pdf_page":121,"physical_index":121,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5ca6426715886b0dc28c8510c78462618c70bdc0c4c14af6f10d5c71c4a7213c"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"2.2. Doesn’t Converting Increased Productivity into Actual Free Time Work Better as Wage-Labor Commensuration Than Projecting Time onto Things and Then Accumulating Them?\n\nIf wage labor indeed represents lost free activity (an opportunity cost in forgone leisure, as economists would have it), and if this lost free activity is compensated for by the free activity indexed by commodity objects, why not just directly exchange increasing productivity for more actual free time rather than time in the fetish form of things? To put it simply, if products equal time, why not just go directly for time? Just why is there an apparent bias in favor of higher wages over more free time? If an adequate response can’t be provided to this question from the perspective of the commensuration theory, then the theory is open to the charge that it merely redescribes our puzzle rather than ofering a constructive solution to it.\n\nThere are a number of possible responses to this point. First, the theory minimally entails indiference between free time and increased real wages rather than a definite preference for the latter over the former. Given that businesses will tend to have a preference for turning higher productivity into increased output, because of competitive pressures and, in the case of industry, big fixed capital investments, the indiference of labor between the two possibilities will, by default, lead to the former outcome. Unless labor actively pushes for reduced work time, firms will usually use productivity improvements to try to expand their market share by cutting prices and increasing output rather than cutting overall costs at constant output.\n\nSecond, as I noted in my discussion of renting goods, the accumulation of commodities works more efectively as compensation for labor than does the reduction of work time, because it creates the illusion that existential constraints on free activity, which are ultimately set by the horizon of human finitude, can be overcome. The hypothetical activity facilitated by a commodity object is unconstrained by real limitations of time and energy. In acquiring commodities, therefore, the worker can acquire a kind of virtual surplus of free time, because wage goods can contain more potential activity than the time given up in exchange for them. This surplus of hypothetical activity time is, in theory, unbounded. By contrast, increases in productivity can only be exchanged for a definite, and quite limited, increment of actual free time—the amount by which the length of work time is reduced while keeping wage income unchanged. At the limit, where labor time is reduced to zero (as in a fully robotic economy), the free time ex-workers have is just determined by the natural duration of a human life. However, by accumulating the potential activity alienated in objects, this absolute, existential limit on free time is seemingly transcended.\n\nA Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration\n\n113","previous_page":112,"next_page":114}