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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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1.1. Explains the Rough Coincidence of the Rise of

Consumer Society and the Acceptance of Wage Labor

On the most general, macrohistorical level, the theory suggests an explanation for the rough coincidence between, on the one hand, a set of large-scale changes that marked the rise of consumer society and, on the other, growing acceptance of wage labor as a fundamentally legitimate institution, by virtue of its potential to be objectively fair. The set of changes includes the increasing force of the income efect and the ebbing of the substitution efect (as increases in hourly wages were used to increase household consumption rather than decrease work time), the ascent of the modern brand, the development of new forms of credit, the consumer durables revolution, the rise to prominence, in culture and politics, of the figure of the consumer, and the growing importance in politics of the concept of purchasing power. This set of developments unfolded, in the United States, roughly between the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the middle years of the twentieth century, and coincided with the ascent of wage labor as a legitimate form of exchange (Strasser 2004; Glickman 1997, 2009; L. Cohen 2003; Olney 1991). It seems unlikely that changes in consumption and changes in wage labor were unrelated, and yet the nature of the connection is unclear.

The obvious account of how they might be connected is that as living standards improved, allowing for the development of the mass consumer economy, the trade of labor for a wage simply became more tolerable. However, a condition can be tolerable without being thought of as being legitimate. Think, for example, of a very well-treated slave. So, improvements in living standards alone do not explain why wage labor increasingly came to be regarded as legitimate, potentially fair, and even in the nature of things. Furthermore, living standards understood in broad terms, as overall well-being, rather than narrowly, as per capita income, can improve along diferent dimensions. Increasing real income can improve well-being, but so, too, can decreasing subjection to work at constant levels of real income, especially under conditions of afluence, with widespread access to basic goods. The consumer economy was, as we have seen, characterized by a push for higher income, rather than working fewer hours at the same income. Potential increases in free time were sacrificed in order to secure increasing real income. This pattern suggests a materialistic bias in the uses to which improvements in labor productivity were put, one not easy to explain in utility maximizing terms.

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The rough coincidence in timing between the rise of consumer society and the growing legitimacy of wage labor, however, would follow as a matter of course if mass consumption was driven by wage-labor commensuration. Wage labor gained legitimacy as consumer products increasingly came to represent decontextualized repositories of utility, indexing hypothetical free activities. At the same time, the emergence of standardized consumer goods (and indeed many of the other practices and institutions associated with the consumer society) at least in part reflected demand for a kind of product that could make the exchange between their labor and its wage commensurable and, indeed, potentially fair. Mass consumption and the growing legitimacy of wage labor were, then, mutually reinforcing developments. The various cultural and institutional forms associated with consumer society developed in reaction to the contradictions underlying wage labor exchange and, at the same time, provided a means by which those contradictions could be, if not resolved, then at least indefinitely deferred.16

1.2. Provides an Explanation for Materialist Consumerism

The theory of consumption as commensuration arguably gives some account of the materialism that seems to be an intrinsic part of industrial capitalism. Materialist consumerism—the felt urgency, compulsion even, to spend earnings on things—makes more sense if the point of spending is to fill a deficit (of free life activity) incurred through waged labor and made up for through commodity accumulation. Since commodities are more commensurable with labor than is money, turning a wage into things makes the exchange of work for a wage more palatable.

By contrast, the theoretical account of the materialism underpinning consumer society given by Colin Campbell, the author of the most important work of historical sociology on the topic, places much emphasis on the role of fantasy and expectation in the pursuit of commodities. Campbell (1987) attributes the modern propensity to fantasize and daydream to the development in the nineteenth century of the imaginative faculties, which were stimulated by the emergence of the novel and associated cultural forms. For Campbell, consumerism was (and is) driven by the desire of consumers to enter into a pleasurable state of imaginative anticipation, in which they become transfixed by fantasies about the practices and identities they associate with commodities they are considering acquiring but have not yet acquired. Once those commodities have been acquired by consumers, however, they become just mundane stuf, subject to prosaic existential constraints, and this produces a rude awakening, bursting the bubble of imaginative anticipation. In response, consumers seek out new objects of desire, in order to enter once more into a dream-like state of anticipation. Thus, demand becomes dynamic and restless, as consumers constantly search out new objects about which to fantasize, and yet are never satisfied once those objects are possessed.

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This dialectic of desire and disappointment certainly captures some dimensions of consumerism. Yet Campbell’s theory fails to account for why fantasy and hedonic expectation should fix on things as foci for imagined activities rather than the activities themselves—and why the focus should be on activities that require things rather than those that do not. For it is certainly possible to fantasize about pleasurable activities without at the same time thinking about commodities. People can ponder a ramble in nature or a swim or imagine a philosophical conversation, gossip, a flirtation, stargazing, a story, and so on—activities that demand time more than the possession of things. Moreover, even if we take a focus on things as given, Campbell’s theory provides no explanation for why consumers actually acquire things, as opposed to simply bringing them to mind as objects of contemplation.17 If, after the historical development of the imaginative faculties, what people want from commodities is to use them as foci for daydreams, seeking to remain suspended in an anticipatory state, why should they choose, once in such a state, to exit it by actually acquiring products? Why not instead become perennial browsers, connoisseurs of advertisements, experts in the art of pleasurably perusing catalogs and product descriptions? If materialistic acquisition always ends in disappointment, why doesn’t that fact sink in, prompting people to stop short of acquisition of products and instead endlessly fantasize about them?

The failure to explain materialism itself is a significant lacuna in Campbell’s theory, one that is filled by the commensuration theory. In Campbell’s terms, object-mediated fantasies work better at achieving a desired state of anticipation than fantasizing about actual activities, because thinking directly about engaging in some practice is more likely to raise the issue of the time constraints that characterize concrete human lives. Having to confront those constraints is likely to take consumers out of their state of pleasurable contemplation. By contrast, when the fantasy is mediated by an object of consumption, attention tends to be taken up by the properties of the object, making the issue of time constraints less salient. For example, if people fantasize about a particular model of bicycle, they will tend to dwell on the powers with which that bicycle is endowed—in the case of a mountain bike, for example, perhaps its capacity to absorb shock efectively thereby enabling them to cycle in rugged and exciting places. Focusing on the activity-enabling material powers of the product—on the things they in theory could do with it—keeps in abeyance the disenchanting question of whether they actually have time to use the bike.

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1.3. Accounts for the Diferent Uses of Wage Income versus Investment Income

The theory of consumption as wage-labor commensuration entails that the identity of money—primarily whether it counts as wages or something else (e.g., interest payments)—has implications for how money gets used. This basic idea accords with work in economic sociology on the nature of money as a social institution. Economic sociologists and anthropologists have observed that money is not entirely fungible but rather has a social biography that determines its action in the world. The very general idea that the way in which money is acquired afects attitudes toward it, and consequently influences how it gets used, has a good deal of empirical support in the tradition of research stemming from Viviana Zelizer’s (1989, 1995) work on “special monies.” Money, according to Zelizer, is not a neutral medium or empty abstraction but, rather, has an identity or aura, bestowed on it as a consequence of its provenance. For example, windfalls are regarded diferently from wage earnings, while money gifts fall into still another category. The particular identity of money determines its use, and that identity is primarily a matter of the manner in which money is obtained. Where money comes from—how it is acquired—then influences whether and how it gets spent. For example, windfalls of cash, or money gifts, will tend to be spent in a more frivolous way than hard-earned wages (Zelizer 1994).

If Zelizer is right, and the provenance of money indeed determines its meaning, and consequently the uses to which it is put, then wage earnings will be treated diferently from other kinds of earnings—those derived from investment, as a result of an inheritance, gambling winnings, and so on. Consonant with Zelizer’s argument, the theory of consumption as wage labor commensuration posits that money received as wages is marked by its identity as compensation for labor, and that this identity influences what gets done with that money.

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According to the commensuration theory, because a wage is money earned in exchange for work, the identity of money in wage form is ultimately tied to the labor given in exchange for it. When kept in the simple money form, as savings, the wage is just a number—not yet equivalent to the work given for it. In order to be reasonably construed as compensation, the wage must be converted into commodities—things endowed with use value (by virtue of their use powers), which facilitate various kinds of imagined or actual activity.

Because of the imperative to establish equivalence between work and its wage, so that the two can conceivably exchange at fair rates, money earned in exchange for labor time will be more likely to be spent on commodities and less likely to be saved or otherwise invested, than money acquired by other means. Conversely, the commensuration hypothesis entails that investment income will be more likely to be saved (reinvested) than wage income. This is because the return to ownership of capital is not an exchange for the labor of the capitalist but rather a kind of rent or, alternatively, as Austrian school economists would have it, compensation for delayed consumption. Either way, money as returns to capital is at least one step removed from labor, and so the issue of commensuration does not come into the picture. Income derived from ownership of capital would, therefore, according to the theory, be less likely to be turned into consumption of goods and services and more likely to be reinvested. There is at least some empirical evidence that points in this direction. As we saw in Chapter 3, in the United States, the marginal propensity to spend increasing increments of wage income was, over the course of the twentieth century, close to unity—in other words, as people’s wages went up, almost all of the increase was used to fund consumption. And an empirical study by Lawrence Summers and Christopher Carroll (1987) indicates that the marginal propensity to save capital gains from stock market investments has, likewise, been close to unity.

Interpreting this in Marxian terms, wage-labor commensuration suggests an explanation for why, at levels of wage income above subsistence, the circuit of capital for labor is C-M-C, whereas for capital it is M-C-M´ (Marx ([1867] 1981).18 Where wages are pegged to bare physical subsistence, C-M-C is not optional for labor, because there is simply no room for saving / investment. But once workers receive higher than subsistence levels of wages, some part of the wage could, in theory at least, be invested. This point holds even if definitions of subsistence are historically variable, because what is at issue is what gets done with the increases in income that follow improvements in productivity— whether they are spent or saved. Although Marx says that with the development of the forces of production, human beings come to discover new needs, there is no reason to expect the definition of material subsistence to automatically change as productivity and real income per hour changes. A newly discovered need, after all, could be a need for more free time. Indeed, the fact that material expectations do tend to get ratcheted ever upward is quite puzzling.19 After all, freeing up more time allows for at least as much in the way of the discovering new needs as does increasing material output and consumption. As noted in the previous chapter, with more time, people can experiment with new practices and activities, develop new skills (or become more expert at old ones), make new friends, deepen older friendships, and so on. Following an increase in labor productivity, turned into higher hourly wages, wage earners could stick at established levels of consumption and reduce their work hours or save more. Yet, as we have seen, during the twentieth century, across the industrial capitalist world, at least up until the 1980s, real income increased with productivity, and spending levels tended to rise in line with increasing income.

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The tendency for wages to be spent on wage goods at levels of income above subsistence makes sense, however, if labor (C) is exchanged for a wage (M), which wage earners then seek to turn into a form capable of justifying the initial outlay of time and efort represented by work and so, with this end in mind, transform the wage into consumer commodities (C). If we suspend for a moment Marx’s abstract holism, and take capital to be the set of individual capitalists and labor to be the set of individual workers and assume, furthermore, that under fully developed industrial capitalism the two groups at least to some degree live within a common normative framework, then the diference between the two in the propensity to spend (as opposed to saving / investing) reflects the diference in the identity of the revenues flowing to each. Wage earners exchange labor (C) for a wage (M), which, in order to make it roughly equivalent to the time and efort given as work, they convert into activity-indexing consumer commodities (C). Capitalists, on the other hand, feel no equivalent compulsion to convert the returns to their capital into commodities meant for final consumption and so are more likely to reinvest that income.

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Of course, interpreting the diferent uses of wage income and investment income as support for the commensuration theory of consumption involves a lot of suppositions. A particular problem is that investment income tends to be added at higher increments of the total income that an individual receives. The diference in how income from investment and wage income is spent might, therefore, simply reflect the marginal decline in the utility of spending as income increases.20 That would be in line with what Keynes (1936) and other economists assume about the general propensity to consume. Still, Zelizer’s research on how the uses of money are constrained by its social identity is broadly consistent with the idea that money earned in exchange for labor time will tend to be used to buy goods and services that index free activity, while money earned through investments is more likely to be reinvested.

One piece of suggestive evidence, already touched on in Chapter 3, is the surprisingly low rate of consumption of retirees in the United States. Retirees receive most of their income from either investments or social security payments and yet do not have high overall levels of income, at least compared to middle-aged wage earners (Deaton 1992). According to economic theory, retirees should be spending down their savings, while the middle-aged, who are in the phase of life when earnings are highest, should be saving. Because income is typically higher in middle than in old age, saving when middle aged is relatively less painful—so we might expect people in that stage of life to save more than when they are old. In fact, the data show that older people are more likely to save if they possibly can, while high-earning middle-aged people tend to spend all their income (Deaton 1992). The argument could be made that older people are reticent to spend their savings because they want to leave money for their children. But then we would expect higher-earning middle-aged persons to, likewise, be saving for their progeny, for a significant proportion of them face the prospect of their children needing substantial funds for things like college and down payments for cars, homes, and so on.

Perhaps this odd pattern of saving and spending across the life course is best explained by the diference between the sources of income for workers and retirees. Part of the reason why retirees spend less than middle aged people (who should, according to the theory, be saving) might be that their incomes are not construed as wage earnings. In the absence of a compulsion to spend in order to make money wages commensurate with the work given in exchange for them, maybe the urge to spend simply recedes. On this understanding, for retirees saving is not a positively directed, intentional activity but rather just the default consequence of their distance from wage labor exchange (more on this below, in section 1.7).

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1.4. Explains Why the Market for Rented Goods Is Relatively Small

The commensuration theory also works well to explain why renting commodities, as opposed to buying them, is much less common than might be expected. There are good reasons to think that, under conditions in which output and real wages are increasing, but free time is not, it makes sense for consumers to rent products rather than buy them. Renting durables enables a more eficient use of resources, while also allowing consumers to change their product sets without incurring the transaction costs and loss of value through depreciation involved in selling old ones. Indeed, in recent years, a body of thought has emerged that imagines a more rational and environmentally responsible version of capitalism, partly on the basis of moving away from ownership and toward renting. This argument features prominently, for example, in Natural Capitalism, an influential book that sets out a manifesto for a progressive and sustainable form of capitalism (Hawken, Josin, and Josin 1999). A society-wide shift from owning objects to renting them would greatly reduce the direct cost of satisfying a given amount of demand, because output of useful products could be more closely linked to actual patterns of use. “Just-in-time” production could be precisely adjusted to meet the demand for “just-in-time” consumption, significantly reducing waste and ineficiency. Universal renting of durables would also reduce the negative externalities produced by meeting that demand. If, for example, cars were rented rather than individually owned, then far fewer cars would be required to satisfy the social demand for transportation. This decline in demand would then lead to fewer cars being produced, and that would result in less pollution.21 In addition, mass renting of durables would help with the logistics of waste management, as rental companies are better able to eficiently recycle or dispose of obsolescent goods than are consumers.

Apart from the benefits of eficient satisfaction of social demand and waste reduction for society, renting products also ofers clear advantages to individual consumers. By anchoring cost to actual use, renting circumvents the additional costs incurred by ownership. In renting an asset, consumers pay for the service they need from a given object and no more. This facilitates a lean and eficient style of consumption, in which what gets purchased is an actual duration of use, rather than a store of potential utility, some portion of which will probably never get realized. Renting goods also saves consumers time and money in repairs and maintenance; saves space, since it prevents the accumulation of unnecessary clutter; and reduces the amount of money the consumer has sunk in assets, thereby increasing their financial flexibility. Consumers who rent products, as opposed to purchasing them, also have the flexibility to satisfy a greater variety of tastes and quickly adjust to changes in their needs or desires. Moreover, since, under capitalism, the rate of obsolescence has steadily increased over time, renting products provides an easier and more afordable way to continually upgrade to the latest product model. Being able to easily change products, by renting new ones, ofers particular advantages for the consumer of status goods and those used to construct identity. This is because renting status goods allows for a flexible approach to consumption, enabling consumers to rapidly change product sets in response to changes in fashion, and facilitating chameleon-like product code-switching between diferent sociocultural contexts. For example, the renting consumer could bring a Bentley to the Ritz for tea, a Hummer to a rap concert, a VW bus to a weekend Woodstock nostalgia event, and so on.22 In addition, whether a product being used by a consumer to display status is actually owned or just rented is not a public fact. By strategically renting high-status items for public events, the benefits of displaying them can be obtained without having to purchase them.

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There are then good reasons to expect that the rental market should be larger than the market for owning consumer goods outright, yet most consumer goods are purchased to be owned rather than rented. Why then is the market for rented consumer durables not more developed than is the case under capitalism?23 Consider, for example, the preference for homeownership in the United States, a long-standing feature of the US economy. In the last chapter, I noted that the popularity of homeownership in the United States does not make much sense from a strictly economic point of view. High geographical mobility, a result of a far-flung and very dynamic national job market, would seem to favor renting over homeownership.24 Despite this, the demand for homeownership is, and has been for many decades, very strong.

It is not clear that an explanation for the relatively undeveloped market for rented durables can be found on the business side. In theory at least, there is no reason why a company renting out consumer durables should not be profitable.25 Indeed the advantages of the renting model are made clear by the degree to which firms choose to lease capital equipment such as cars, photocopiers, and computers, as opposed to purchasing them. If the rental market for consumer goods is less well developed than might be expected, this seems to be a result of insuficient demand rather than inherent problems with the underlying business model.

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If, however, consumption is to a significant degree driven by wage labor commensuration, then the bias in favor of owning becomes less puzzling. The preference for ownership over renting makes sense if the point of earning more money is precisely to enable the accumulation of a store of use value, one that can realize enough free activity to make up for the time lost to work. Indeed, the goods accumulated by wage earners can index an amount of potential use time greater than the actual leisure time available to them. The ongoing accumulation of commodities, insofar as they represent a reservoir of potential free activity to be undertaken in the indeterminate future, makes wage-labor seem at least potentially fair, and therefore more palatable. The use value of rented items, by contrast, cannot function so easily as commensurate compensation for work, because their use is limited to the period of time for which they are rented. This means that their use value is much more obviously constrained by the amount of real time available in which to use them. The explicit temporal anchoring of rented items thus means that their usefulness must be thought about in realistic rather than in hypothetical terms and cannot be construed as extending indefinitely into the future. Of course, consumers could choose to rent durables indefinitely and so have access to them as a store of use power. But doing so would draw attention to the diference between the amount of time the items are being rented for (twenty-four hours, seven days a week) and the amount of time available to make use of them (considerably less than that). Moreover, renting goods in an ongoing manner, as reserves of use power, to be kept on hand, like a retainer, to provide services as and when needed, incurs a very visible ongoing cost—as time passes, the cost of renting goods inexorably rises. Purchasing a good to own, by contrast, involves a one-time outlay (or, in the case of buying on credit, a commitment to make a finite number of payments), after which all of the potential use power of the object can be held in reserve without further payments. This makes it easier to defer the question of whether the object is likely to see enough use to justify its expense. Although an object might not be being made use of in the present, the possibility always remains that it will eventually, at some point in the future, get suficient use to justify the labor given in exchange for it—and, once the item has been purchased, the costs entailed by waiting for that point to arrive are not very visible.

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