{"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":295,"pdf_page":303,"physical_index":303,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d1a21cb8f2500a484214c90a561db927aa4dc11c4636e9938624f632f024d765"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"6. In addition, if a set of diferent goods and services is ofered by one party, the contents of that set must be aggregated, and for that to be possible they must be made commensurable.\n\n7. This is not to say that the objective conception of fairness is not in a very general sense itself also conventional—the proposition that fairness obtains where there is an equal exchange of commensurable substances is clearly not self-evidently true but rather amounts to a normative claim. But the convention of objectively fair exchange—according to which fairness is a function of the objective properties of the sets of things being exchanged—is neutral with regard to the social identities of exchanging parties in a way that is not the case in the example of economic exchanges between feudal lord and various dependents. In feudal exchange, for instance, the dependent is fairly treated where the lord does what is expected of him according to custom, given their respective social identities.\n\n8. This is a basic Euclidian mathematical principle.\n\n9. The economic consequences of that notion of fair pay have been explored by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen (Akerlof and Yellen 1990).\n\n10. I use the term wage earners (as opposed to the more loaded word workers) to mean, quite literally, all those who exchange labor for a wage. This includes service workers and middle-class salaried workers in addition to members of the traditional working class.\n\n11. Mandel’s account of the roots of mass consumption is that the commodification of working-class culture deprived communities of the capacity to spend free time in cultivated ways. Traditional practices and pastimes were replaced by a very passive and object-oriented style of consumption, well-suited to the needs of advanced industrial capitalism. Yet it is not clear, if indeed Mandel’s account is correct, why working-class communities should have proven so pliable. As discussed in Chapter 2, M. Aglietta (2000) gives a diferent account of how consumption norms and mass production are connected. He follows Marx in arguing that after limits were placed on the length of the working week, constraining the accumulation of absolute surplus value, businesses intensified the labor process in order to extract relative surplus value. This intensification of work then made greater demands on workers, who consequently had to consume more in order to reproduce their capacity to provide labor power. The rather reductive assumption in Aglietta’s model is that consumption is driven by the need to reproduce the capacity to labor. In efect this takes consumption to be equivalent to the actual realization of use value. However, it is dificult to make sense of the pattern sketched in the last chapter with that very limited account of consumption. Nor, indeed, does Aglietta explain why labor acquiesced in fixing the working week at around forty hours rather than fighting for further increases in productivity to be used to cut working time, at constant levels of intensity of the labor process, and at constant real wages.\n\nNotes to Pages 81–85\n\n295","previous_page":294,"next_page":296}