{"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":82,"pdf_page":90,"physical_index":90,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5be6839b88fe25cad986f39dcefac93d02c9fa81f54fbf9556075d133a0dc95e"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Despite the increasing acceptance of wage-labor exchange, however, it was (and indeed remains) quite unclear on what basis the life activity given up as labor could ever be clearly commensurable with the wage. For the wage is a quantitative abstraction, while the activity of labor is qualitative. If labor activity and the wage are diferent in kind, therefore not obviously commensurable, on what principled grounds can they stand in a particular ratio to one another? You simply can’t have a meaningful ratio between magnitudes of diferent kinds.8 To be sure, the ratio of labor time to, for example, the amount of money needed to buy a car can be described—such that one car might equal two thousand hours of work. But describing the ratio at which things happen to exchange, at a given point in time and space, is not the same thing as establishing an objective principle of exchange, according to which a particular ratio is the correct—that is, fair—one. For an exchange to be objectively fair, some shared characteristic has to be attributed to the exchanged substances—something like utility, socially averaged labor time, or some other measure of value.\n\nMoreover, for wage labor to be a fair exchange of commensurable substances, labor must be an alienable commodity—separable from the subject. But it is not obvious how that could be so. Indeed, a great deal of skepticism has been expressed about the proposition that labor is alienable, both in the early period of capitalism, and by thinkers such as Karl Polanyi, who argued that labor (along with money and land) can only ever be a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi 1957). Although within capitalism, labor is de facto sold for a wage, it cannot easily be thought of as alienable, because labor is, as Marx put it, just life activity and is in that sense at one with the person. The nineteenthcentury labor leader George McNeil put the point pithily: “He who sells his labor sells himself” (Stanley 1998, p. 88).\n\nBut if labor is neither obviously alienable nor self-evidently commensurable with the wage, what could a “fair wage” possibly mean? Of course, one concept of fairness in wage-labor exchange is that similar work should be similarly compensated.9 But that norm does not make labor per se commensurable with the wage. It gives criteria for making judgements about who is being unfairly compensated within a reference group but does not establish whether the wages of a given group are fair relative to the work done for them. The question of whether a given wage is fair compensation for the work exchanged for it under capitalism has thus remained (and perhaps must ever remain) unresolved, an ongoing subject of debate. Finding a way to think about and represent wage labor in terms that make it into a potentially fair economic exchange became, then, a project imbued with a great deal of normative force, for workers, for the state, and for business.\n\n82\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":81,"next_page":83}