{"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":24,"pdf_page":32,"physical_index":32,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"be36c484a9d219a227056b1d57f2134b42fcb672ed83cd44b164203d430452c2"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"In a spirit similar to the regulation theorists, members of the US school of radical political economy have envisaged particular “social structures of accumulation” as securing suficient aggregate demand in the Fordist era (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982). According to these theorists, the liberal regime of accumulation that preceded the Fordist era enabled capitalists to change the distribution of income in their favor, which resulted in insuficient aggregate demand resulting in overcapacity. In response, a set of institutions developed, the purpose of which was to ensure a more even distribution of purchasing power. The SSA approach allows for more contingency than does regulation theory, giving an important role for institutional and cultural developments that are exogenous to the logic of capitalist production. Yet both SSA theory and regulation theory share a tendency to take the sources of aggregate demand as more or less given. The underlying assumption is that once the right set of supporting institutions was set up, the virtuous cycle of increasing productivity, higher real incomes, and increasing aggregate demand, which defined capitalism during its Golden Age, simply fell into place—and continued until thwarted by structural contradictions located primarily in the sphere of production. The question of why labor came to accept a compact in which wage income increased while work time remained relatively constant is not given much consideration. The demand for goods over free time is left unexamined, with the distribution of purchasing power being the only variable adduced to explain the coordination of aggregate demand with mass production. For example, Thomas Weisskopf, Samuel Bowles, and David Gordon, prominent theorists working within the SSA tradition, argue that underconsumption (inadequate aggregate demand) is caused by the excessive power of capital over labor, which enables capitalists to drive down real wages (Wiesskopf et al. 1985).28 On this view, it is real wage levels that determine whether the demand-side cogs of industrial capitalism are suficiently well oiled for the growth machine to grind on. For capitalism to be stable, the power of capital to suppress the wages of labor must therefore be circumscribed by things like state-sponsored collective bargaining rights and minimum wages. The implicit supposition is that aggregate demand, when backed by suficiently high wage rates, will rise to levels capable of absorbing aggregate output.29 Yet the fact that this has tended to happen depends on a pervasive materialism, expressed in a tendency for increasing productivity and higher wage rates to be turned into commodities rather than free time. The conditions that give rise to this materialism, which channels productivity improvements into higher demand, are not given much consideration by the regulation and SSA schools. Despite their sophistication, both the regulation and SSA approaches assume that once appropriate distributive and regulative measures are in place, demand and supply will fall into equilibrium or, at least, will be suficiently aligned to facilitate the ongoing accumulation of surplus value.\n\n24\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":23,"next_page":25}