{"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":119,"pdf_page":127,"physical_index":127,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"079232e8111b0bdf0b591efd54a62428ec012f6f71246e6a97fad884c0bf6f14"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Moreover, despite the stereotypical representation of the consumer as female, it is not clear that women, in fact, did the lion’s share of household spending (as distinct from the activity of shopping). Women may have predominated in certain kinds of purchasing, for example, grocery shopping. But although provisioning corresponds to a certain stereotype of what it is to shop, there are obviously other ways for a household to spend its income, especially as that income increases. And, indeed, as general afluence rose over the course of the twentieth century, provisioning accounted for a smaller proportion of household expenditure. There is at least some evidence of a gendered division of household consumption, with women responsible for provisioning and men having more say in decisions about the acquisition of big-ticket consumer durables. Sociologist Mark Swiencicki has suggested that men’s role in early consumer culture has been overlooked and underestimated. He used the 1890 census of manufacturers to assess the relative size of male versus female consumption and found that male spending levels were twice as large as female levels (Swiencicki, 1998). Furthermore, decisions to increase total wage earnings, as opposed to reducing work time, would be made by those doing the waged work, in negotiations in the workplace. Although other household members would no doubt have had some input on the issue, norms concerning the conditions under which wage labor is fair would have exerted significant influence on that decision. In sum, while the gendered division of labor and consumption within the household potentially complicates the proposition that patterns of consumption, wages, and work time reflect changes in understandings of wage labor, it is certainly not inconsistent with it.\n\n2.5. What about the Rise of Disposable Products?\n\nIf mass consumption is about accumulating stores of use value, in order to justify wage labor, then why, in modern capitalist societies, is so much stuf thrown away? Is there not some tension between the extent to which commodities are regarded as disposable and the argument made earlier in this chapter, that people become attached (sometimes irrationally so) to the things they own because those things represent their labor? Surely things, once animated by the labor given in exchange for them, should be kept indefinitely?\n\nPart of the answer to this question might be as prosaic as limits on storage space. According to the commensuration theory, because wage labor is a perennial fact of life, the impetus to convert the wage into potential activity stored in commodities is ongoing. If storage space does not increase to accommodate ongoing accumulation, then consumers will eventually have to discard some of their accumulated goods. But that then raises the question of why storage capacity does not keep pace with accumulation. To some extent, of course, it has done so. As we saw in Chapter 3, the average size of homes in the United States increased substantially in the postwar period. However, the degree to which living and storage space can increase is ultimately limited by the fact that the supply of land is fixed. As increasing productivity reduces the price of consumer goods, the relative cost of land, and therefore of housing, increases. This implies that the rate of accumulation of goods, as real wages increase, will be higher than the rate at which homes can grow larger. That means that even if homes increase in size (as occurred in the United States), over time they will, nonetheless, tend to fill up with goods. Periodic culling of stuf then becomes necessary to prevent domestic life from becoming increasingly impinged on, and eventually crippled, by clutter.\n\nA Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration\n\n119","previous_page":118,"next_page":120}