{"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":318,"pdf_page":326,"physical_index":326,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d7d13a3dfab16eb2143f44ca122580891902a23a371bd6b1baa7973960717e2a"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"99. “Business Bulletin: A Special Background Report on Trends in Industry and Finance,” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 1974, p. 1.\n\n100. Jerry M. Flint, “Styling Changes in Autos Wane,” New York Times, August 26, 1969, p. 1.\n\n101. “Detroit in Uphill Fight with Small Car Imports,” Washington Post, November 27, 1969, p. H7.\n\n102. Jaklich Allen, “Advertising Marketing: Auto Makers Selling ‘Steak,’” Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1970, p. C7.\n\n103. Some, for example Robert Brenner (2006), stress the role of increasing competition. Others, such as Andrew Glyn (2006), give a more class-based explanation.\n\n104. The argument is as follows. The cost of job loss was low in the postwar period because under conditions of near full employment, workers could be reasonably assured that should they choose to leave their jobs, other options would be readily available. This meant that labor had a strong bargaining position, and the result was increasing real wages. From the point of view of capital, this was acceptable and sustainable if productivity rates continued to increase suficiently. But for a complex and still somewhat opaque set of reasons, in the 1960s productivity began to slow down. Between this slowdown and ongoing wage demands, profits were squeezed. In response, the stable collective bargaining arrangements began to come under attack, resulting, for example, in the political sidelining of the National Labor Relations Board in the early 1970s. For extensive discussion see Marglin and Schor (1991) and Glyn (2006). Note that Glyn presents data that suggest a similar historical pattern across the advanced industrial capitalist world.\n\n105. As we have seen, it also became displaced by the new environmentalism (which largely agreed with neoliberalism that the locus of economic action is the consumer yet disagreed that she necessarily knows best and so focused on the project of consciousnessraising), and by the increasingly prevalent current of opinion that obsolescence is a natural corollary of technological progress.\n\n106. In this sense, the concern about the erosion of use value is continuous with postwar concerns about inflation, which also threatened the value of the real wage. Jacobs (2005) notes how fear of inflation became a very significant political concern in the postwar era (which was in fact not a period of very high inflation by the standards of the century).\n\n107. To give a brief review, the hypothesis is that that mass consumption, particularly in the Golden Age of industrial capitalism, is to a significant extent motivated by and rationalized in terms of the commensuration of labor and its wage. The wage is commensurable with labor only insofar as it gets turned into a set of commodities the use value of which is seen as roughly equivalent to the free time and energy sacrificed as work. Since labor itself is some duration of life activity used by the employer, it is properly compensated by something equivalent to it—by wage goods that index a duration of free life activity. When construed as repositories of durations of potential free activity, commodities thus serve as rough equivalents to the activity sold as labor. The accumulation of commodities then to some degree negates the loss of life to work.\n\n108. Where “function” is a temporal concept—that which bestows some notional quantity of use or, in the case of time-saving devices, saves some quantity of time.\n\n318\n\nNotes to Pages 255–263","previous_page":317,"next_page":319}