{"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":284,"pdf_page":292,"physical_index":292,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"470371c2573e494b03552fc8d4b63a7e5a001eda7bc149cbfc524e1175985d1f"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"26. The other condition described by Aglietta was that the working classes be separated from the means of consumption. One of the structural imbalances in early industrial capitalism was that while a workforce was created by concentration of ownership of the means of production, households still created their own means of consumption. In order for the productive capacity of industry to be absorbed by commensurate levels of demand, domestic production of consumer goods for the use of the household had to be halted.\n\n27. Aglietta could argue that fewer hours would mean a further increase in the intensity of the labor process, in order to increase the rate of relative surplus value creation. But there are limits to the extent to which that is possible as production becomes increasingly capital intensive, and improvements in productivity increasingly come from technological change rather than more “sweating” of labor.\n\n28. “When the capitalist class is ‘too strong’ it shifts the income distribution in its favor, reducing the ratio of working-class consumption to national income and rendering the economy prone to crises of under-consumption or—in more contemporary Keynesian terms—a failure of aggregate demand” (Weisskopf, Bowles, and Gordon 1985, p. 226).\n\n29. This relative lack of attention to the question of the sources of demand, as opposed to the conditions under which given demand becomes efective, is odd given the importance attached by SSA and regulation theory to custom and habit as forming the environment within which the capitalist system functions. Surely the kind of contextual and embedded approach to the workings of the capitalist economy sought by these theorists should give an account of that which gives rise to a dynamic, materialist form of demand?\n\n30. Keynes took the propensity to consume to be a given. The argument of this book, however, is that we can explain the behavior that underpins the propensity to consume under industrial capitalism in a way that makes it endogenous to the cultural and social organization of capitalism—specifically, it can be explained as a consequence of the grounds on which wage labor became construable as a legitimate form of economic exchange.\n\n31. Piore and Sabel argue that the Depression only took hold in 1931, following a withdrawal of capital from investment. The importance of the initial financial crash of 1929 was more psychological than substantive.\n\n32. Piore and Sabel follow historian David Brody (1993) in arguing that welfare capitalism was instituted because big industrial capitalists realized that finding a market for their products depended on the expansion of efective demand. The most famous example of welfare capitalism in the 1920s was Henry Ford’s decision to pay his workers five dollars per day.\n\n33. Piore and Sabel’s account of the nature of these dificulties is the most perspicuous of these. On their account, Fordist mass production demanded very large fixed capital investments upfront, in order to get factories up and running. Given these large capital investments, in order for those factories to be profitable they needed to be run quite close to maximum capacity. The result of this was that the Fordist economy was very vulnerable to demand shocks.\n\n284\n\nNotes to Pages 23–27","previous_page":283,"next_page":285}