{"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":266,"pdf_page":274,"physical_index":274,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a5aedd8ff2943f96c713dd3977a220897b4a670733c211aad7607fc53b70e3b9"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"of convention, so that an exchange is fair just because it accords with some norm or custom. Rather, the notion of an objectively fair exchange entails that fairness is grounded in facts about the substances being exchanged. I suggested that the idea that labor can be commensurately compensated by its wage leads to a tendency for usefulness to be construed in quite abstract, yet at the same time also narrowly materialistic terms, as a function of the properties of wage goods. This is because the only way for labor to seem commensurate with its wage is for wage goods to become qualitatively equivalent to the labor that is given (and, therefore, free activity that is given up) in exchange for them. In efect, wage goods come to represent quantities of free activity, roughly measured by the duration of useful activity those goods, in theory, could facilitate. The legitimacy accorded to the exchange of labor for a wage thus both depends on, and in turn encourages, the ongoing accumulation by wage earners of stores of potential activity, reified in the form of wage goods. For by accumulating consumer commodities, wage earners accumulate a store of hypothetical “activity power” that, as such, is roughly equivalent in kind to the free activity given up through selling their labor power. The notional equivalence established between increasingly standardized consumer commodities and standardized labor was an essential part of what I described as the Fordist moral economy, which contributed to the stabilization of advanced industrial economies in the middle decades of the twentieth century.\n\nWhile the notional equivalence between standardized consumer commodities and standardized labor makes sense of the work-time regime in advanced industrial capitalism, the open-endedness of consumer demand might nonetheless remain puzzling. For the commensurability between wage and labor by virtue of the activity power of commodities would not in itself preclude the possibility of reaching the state of satiation predicted by Keynes (thus ending the dynamic form of demand manifested in mass consumption). Considering this directs attention to the criteriological uncertainty of wage labor commensuration, which was discussed in Chapter 4. The criteria defining fair exchange of wage for labor are deeply ambiguous, because there are in fact no objective grounds on which to establish just when a given amount of labor has been commensurately compensated (if there were, then it would be much easier to resolve disagreements about how much a given amount of work should be paid). Even where wages are turned into goods that represent hypothetical free activity, thus establishing a notional equivalence between labor and its wage (the free activity indexed by wage goods being equivalent to the free activity given up in order to work), the exchange of work for commodities remains fundamentally problematic. This is because work and commodities— activity and things—are ultimately diferent in kind and have no obvious natural common measure. Indeed, as noted earlier in the book, it is not even clear how labor could be an alienable commodity in the first place. The norm of objectively fair exchange, thus, in practice, lacks criteria of satisfaction— criteria by virtue of which a fair exchange can be judged to have self-evidently occurred (or not). The imperative to obtain “fair” compensation for work (a wage able to command a quantity of wage goods that is, in some sense, objectively equivalent to the labor given in exchange for it) demands something that is impossible to accomplish—an equal exchange ungrounded by common measure, therefore without an obvious criterion for determining parity between the exchanged substances. The lack of inherent common measure between work and its wage means that any commensurability between the two can only be a pseudocommensurability.\n\n266\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":null,"next_page":267}