{"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":127,"pdf_page":135,"physical_index":135,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5651d7487732827f4f47d6e48b68a4c644dd2e6d08727821ab97d71e181da2e3"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The increasing normative force of the idea of objectively fair economic exchange set up a tension in wage labor. Wage labor had by the later nineteenth century become, to a large extent, simply a fact of life. Perhaps it was acknowledgment of that de facto situation that led to the growing influence of the politics of purchasing power, which accepted the broad parameters of the capitalist system, yet sought better terms of exchange between labor and capital. The legitimacy of wage labor hinged on the degree to which labor was regarded as alienable, and wages were seen as commensurable with work. But seeing labor as an alienable thing, commensurable with the wage given in exchange for it, was in tension with customary understandings of work. Moreover, as emphasized in the last chapter, it was entirely unclear how labor—the activity of a person—could be alienable or in what terms it could be seen as commensurable with a wage and, therefore, what criterion should determine a fair exchange of labor for a wage. So while the general idea that wage labor can be fairly compensated had taken root by the late nineteenth century, there remained, in part as a result of the persistence of older understandings of work, deep conceptual problems with putting that idea into practice. In the next section, I briefly consider how these tensions were worked out in the case of the United States.\n\n2. A Brief Note on the History of the Legitimacy of Wage Labor in the United States\n\nThe story of the ascent of wage labor is not just about its spread as economic practice but also about its growing acceptance—the increasing tendency for it to be taken for granted, a quasi-naturalized institution. There is broad consensus among American labor historians, and indeed historians of other parts of the capitalist world, that wage labor in the early period of capitalism was regarded with a great deal of suspicion and that its legitimacy was, at best, questionable.9 In antebellum America, the economic dependence entailed by being a waged laborer was seen as undermining the condition of individual autonomy that, according to the Republican ideology that held sway at the time, was a prerequisite for virtuous citizenship. During the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Sean Wilentz (1984), the American labor movement was more or less united in holding that labor is not a marketable commodity and so should not be treated as such. Eric Foner (1995) has similarly drawn attention to the degree to which antebellum America was marked by widespread hostility to wage labor, even as the ideology of “free labor” became increasingly influential. Foner argues that, as wage labor increasingly became the dominant economic relationship, “the ideal of the autonomous small producer reemerged . . . as a full-fledged critique of early capitalism and its inexorable transformation of free labor into a commodity” (p. xvii).\n\nEconomic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background\n\n127","previous_page":126,"next_page":128}