{"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":40,"pdf_page":48,"physical_index":48,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5aa8247130cc2e7ed79df6c2810b6038be05eba684256b22162c10fe176bcf17"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"2.2.4. Marxisms\n\nAn alternative current of theory, very much associated with Marxism, seeks to explain accumulative consumerism as an efect of the power of advertising, in particular, and of the “culture industry” more generally, to inculcate subjects with false needs via psychological mechanisms such as desublimation (Ewen 1976; Adorno and Horkheimer 1976; Marcuse 1964).52 Given the onslaught of marketing in modern consumer societies, this explanation has some intuitive appeal. However, although it might seem plausible that marketing has some aggregate efect on general patterns of demand, studies suggest that the power of advertising to stimulate novel demand is questionable (Schudson 1986, Nelson 1975).53 The efect of advertising seems mostly to be to redistribute given demand within a market rather than to generate new demand.54 Moreover, construing mass consumption as simply a result of the ideological production of false needs, predominantly by way of advertising, presupposes that people are passive receptacles for marketing messages—“advertising dopes,” as it were. Such a picture of the consumer is both empirically unwarranted and anthropologically suspect. At the very least, the success of marketing messages in penetrating popular consciousness should be interpreted not just as a sign of the influence of the culture industry but also as indicating something about the socioeconomic context (as well as the prevailing interpretation of that context) in which those messages are received.\n\nOf course, the argument that the bias toward increasing consumption, as opposed to increasing free time, under advanced industrial capitalism is puzzling assumes that workers have a choice in the matter—that they could have chosen to convert productivity gains into more time (at a constant rate of consumption) rather than higher wages. But workers might well have little choice in the matter, if the compact of higher wages rather than more free time in exchange for increasing productivity is forced on them by capital (Schor 1991). If workers are compelled to take a higher wage rather than being given the option of a shorter working week, it seems reasonable that they would then spend the wage they receive. What good, after all, is an unspent wage? From this perspective, the bias toward consumption would simply reflect the preference of business for a stable work regime, including a regular working week, in conjunction with the fact that capital generally has more bargaining power than labor.55 If this is correct, then turning improved productivity into increasing real wages, in order to fund more consumption, as opposed to using it to reduce work, is just a matter of wage earners making the best of conditions not of their own choosing.\n\n40\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":39,"next_page":41}