{"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":9,"pdf_page":17,"physical_index":17,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"895da9e9defcc0a4a78be95a2ed111afae0995ebda641efedddb5e123d0c0ed6"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"In sum, the objective of this book is to construct a compelling, historically grounded theory to account for a quite general pattern in industrial capitalism. The advantage of specifying the theoretical argument on a general level is that by doing so it becomes suficiently perspicuous and context-independent to be easily transposable to other settings. Fleshing the argument out through analysis of the United States makes the basic theoretical argument more concrete while providing some evidence for it in at least one case.\n\nA Note on Use of Terminology:\n\nUse Value, Use Power, Utility\n\nNotions of use and usefulness are central to the argument of this book. Three terms are used to refer to diferent dimensions of usefulness: utility, use value, and use power. Use value and utility are common in economics and political economy, and there is a good deal of overlap between their meaning in those fields and how the terms are used in this book. Nonetheless, my deployment of the terms is in some ways idiosyncratic, so a brief account of how they are used is in order. Use power is an addition to the array of concepts that deal with usefulness, so it needs defining.\n\nUtility: I use utility to mean the actual satisfaction realized by some state or activity. I take utility to be somewhat vague—a rough sense of how satisfying things are rather than a precise metric for satisfaction. I would not want to claim that utility is merely an idea—at some basic level, it has roots in real human needs and desires. But as society becomes more afluent, those needs and desires become more complex, and indeed often contradictory, which makes utility an increasingly dificult and elusive concept.\n\nUse power: By use power I mean the capacity of an object to facilitate some useful activity. For example, the use power of a bicycle is its capacity to make possible the useful activity of cycling. Use power is determined by the material properties of the object as well as its symbolic associations and is conditional on the opportunities an individual has for making use of that object under specific conditions of life. For instance, the use power of a bicycle, qua resource for cycling, in the setting of a raft drifting in the middle of an ocean, is pretty much zero. However, even if the context is felicitous and the product entirely functional, that does not mean that the use power of an object will actually be put to use. The use power of an object is just the potential it ofers its user to undertake some useful activity. The idea is analogous to Marx’s concept of labor power. Labor power is the productive capacity workers have, which they exchange for their wage. Whether or not that capacity is made use of is contingent on various factors, primarily how efective capitalists are in extracting labor from workers during the working day. Use power is the useful activity-generating capacity workers get when they use their wages to acquire wage goods. Whether or not that capacity will be made use of depends on various contextual factors, such as the availability of time, energy, and complementary resources. The final thing that should be noted is that the use power of most objects gets depleted with use over time, because of material wear and tear. Commodity objects have a useful life—a duration of time-in-use before they become worn out and are no longer useful.\n\nIntroduction\n\n9","previous_page":8,"next_page":10}