{"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":259,"pdf_page":267,"physical_index":267,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"670b27dbdc52b45c2a8e3bb0c3f03d0a19c71710d548df1b9767f62afb6dfaea"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The stability of the postwar configuration thus reflected not just a balance of economic power but also a degree of consensus on a vision of what a just and fair economy looks like, the roots of which can be at least proximately traced back to the politics and institutional innovations of the New Deal period. There were two sides to the mid-century Fordist moral economy. On the production side, a linking of wages to increasing productivity; on the consumption side, the right to what was regarded as a “reasonable” (therefore fair) amount of use-value in the consumer commodities received in exchange for the wage. It is important to emphasize here that the picture of economic fairness as commensurate exchange of use values was, by the middle part of the century, not just a feature of a union-bound workerist mind-set, contained therefore within the labor movement narrowly conceived. Rather, it underpinned a very widely held opinion that work should be commensurately compensated—a view summed up in the maxim, “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” (which was adopted by the American Federation of Labor as its motto). The mid-century moral and political economy focused on the importance of purchasing power—the capacity of a wage to capture use values—as an evaluative category in economic life. A given amount of labor power is fairly exchanged when it is compensated by an amount of purchasing power deemed to be its equivalent. And the magnitude of the purchasing power of a wage is grounded in the use power (and, therefore, the notional use value) of the commodities it afords.\n\nThe high point of the politics of purchasing power came in the 1930s and 1940s. It was in those decades that increasing the purchasing power of the mass of the American population became an explicit political agenda, an active project of organized labor, the state, and significant parts of civil society, especially the consumer movement (which, roughly speaking, represented middle-class sentiment), working in concert. By the later 1940s, the alliance that had been forged between middle-class consumer advocates, the New Deal state, and labor unions had begun to fray somewhat. The interests of labor, seeking higher wages, diverged from those of the middle classes, which were more concerned about the inflation that had begun to increase after the removal of wartime price controls (Jacobs 2005). But the general concern with the buying power of the wage, and its centrality to a corporatist vision of capitalism, continued well into the postwar period. So, too, did the New Deal institutional framework designed to facilitate the maintenance and expansion of buying power—most importantly, collective bargaining arrangements supported by the state, and Keynesian macroeconomic policy. A concatenation of developments—the falling rate of profit, increased international competition, technological change in production, compounded by the oil shocks of the 1970s—led to the dissolution of the postwar corporatist compromise in the last quarter of the century.\n\nMoral Panic about Utility\n\n259","previous_page":258,"next_page":260}