{"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":319,"pdf_page":327,"physical_index":327,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"db18b240d7119645023b30f25d4f6806e7e26d5e157d65180fc9c97424416a3a"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"109. Simmel [1904] 1957. See Campbell (1992) for an account of the place of neophilia in consumerism.\n\nc h a pt e r 10: c o n c lu s i o n\n\n1. By normativity I mean the “ought-ness” produced by norms—how people think they ought to proceed in order to follow a norm, and what criteria establish whether a course of action counts as satisfactorily following that norm.\n\n2. It is true that ad hoc decisions can always be made about what constitutes fair and reasonable exchange. Explicitly conventional systems of commensuration are, of course, certainly possible, and sociologists have charted the ways in which actors and institutions go about making things commensurable (Esperland and Stevens 1998). But to resort to pragmatic rules of thumb to provide a provisional solution to the problem of commensuration goes against the principle that exchange be objectively fair. The tension between any given conventional scheme for commensuration and the broad ideal that exchange should proceed according to some “natural” (that is, nonconventional and self-evident) and objective principle makes such schemes eminently contestable and therefore very unstable. That said, clearly ad hoc agreements about fair wage rates are possible, for a while at least—for example, the postwar convergence, discussed throughout this book, on a formula for determining wages, according to which wages should keep up with the cost of living while increasing (in real terms) in line with improvements in productivity. It is much less clear, for reasons briefly set out this conclusion, how individuals could arrive, even provisionally, at some objective sense of having been fairly compensated for their labor.\n\n3. While the focus on normativity also makes my account diferent in emphasis from orthodox Marxist political economy, at the same time the approach is quite compatible with Marxism. There are certainly historical conditions of a kind that Marxist analysis tends to focus on—a balance of class power, for example, and certain technical conditions in production—that form background conditions to the emergence of the peculiar forms of economic normativity of capitalism. And the idea of capitalism as involving perverse forms of normativity is similar in spirit to the kind of analysis given by the theorists of the Frankfurt School.\n\n4. Here I have in mind systems in which demand is anchored to ritual exchanges, expressing social relations of obligation and reciprocity. Feudal exchange would be one example and, also, from the classical anthropological literature, systems such as the potlach and Kula ring (Malinowski 1920; Mauss [1950] 1990; Polanyi 1957). In describing such economic systems as comparatively nondynamic, I do not mean that they are unchanging or unchangeable. Rather, economic action in such systems is, by comparison with capitalism, more immanently regulated by explicit, socially endorsed scripts. Those systems can, of course, change with time, yet do so in a way that is, in Polyanian terms, more fully embedded in, and therefore guided by, the social than is the case with capitalism.\n\n5. Unless wage labor itself withers away, replaced by fully automated production. Under those circumstances, it is possible to imagine a leisured population, subsisting on some sort of basic income.\n\nNotes to Pages 263–270\n\n319","previous_page":318,"next_page":320}