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

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A final thought is that perhaps it is significant that disposable items tend to be artifacts categorized as necessities rather than those that are associated with free activity. Clearly blowing a nose, shaving, or changing a diaper are not activities that work well to signify the negation of work. Leisure time is a residual, left over after subtracting time spent in wage work, domestic labor, and physical upkeep. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the rather mundane objects that comprise the set of disposable products can denote free activity as efectively as durable objects of discretionary consumption. Perhaps, then, the demand for disposable items is strongest for those goods that do not index free activity but rather are associated with tending to bodily functions and basic household maintenance. That might be why the market for disposable items, like that for rented goods, remains smaller than we might think should be the case under industrial capitalism. The size and shape of the market for disposable products is, however, broadly consistent with what we would expect to be the case if the commensuration theory was true. Time eficient, disposable consumption prevails, for the most part, in parts of the consumer market in which products are sold that do not denote free activity.

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Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background

The account set out in the last chapter, according to which modern mass consumption is at least partly explained by the imperative to make commensurate work and its wage, involved a number of broad historical assertions about wage labor. I claimed that wage labor has not always commonly been regarded as being legitimate—and, more specifically, that it has not always been thought about as an exchange of commensurable substances, such that it could be seen as at least potentially fair. It was only after a protracted period of debate and political and industrial struggle that the institution of wage labor came to be broadly accepted. I argued that the legitimacy of wage labor was secured as it became increasingly plausible to construe it as involving an exchange of commensurable substances and that this, in turn, became possible to the extent that wage goods were reframed as congealed stores of free activity. I also suggested that the background to the emergence of those grounds for the legitimacy of wage labor was the rise to prominence of the category of objective economic fairness.

In this chapter, I give some empirical support to these broad claims, focusing once more on the case of the United States. I begin by drawing on work in historical semantics to elaborate on the thoughts presented at the beginning of the last chapter about the historicity of notions about objective economic fairness. Following this, I embark on brief forays into historiographical and ethnographic analysis. The historiographical section presents an abbreviated overview of the history of the labor question in America. The point of this is to substantiate the assertion that wage labor in the United States went from being a highly questionable institution to a fundamentally legitimate one. Having given a historical sketch of the wage labor background, I go on to consider some evidence from social research conducted in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century that provides some clues about how wage workers regarded the relation between work and consumption. This research provides some support for the contention that accumulative consumption reflected an efort to make the wage commensurate with work, under a certain understanding of the commensurability of wage goods and labor.

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1. The Historicity of Economic Fairness: A Note on the Historical Semantics of “Fair”

There are reasons to think that the notion that economic fairness entails an exchange of commensurable substances of roughly equal value is peculiarly modern and that, given the timing of its emergence, this idea of fairness might well have been connected to the rise of wage labor.1 Although there were markets before the emergence of capitalism, they were quite circumscribed, and labor markets in particular were limited in extent. Wage labor consequently had a relatively marginal place in the economy. Before the rise to dominance of market capitalism, the basis of the legitimacy of economic exchange was not that the substances changing hands were commensurable and of equal magnitude.2 Rather, the exchange of goods and services (often between patrons and clients) in precapitalist contexts typically expressed normative obligations and expectations attached to the social identity and status of the parties involved in the transaction.3 A minimal condition (although certainly not a suficient one) on those kinds of exchanges being legitimate was that the parties comport themselves in accordance with norms attached to their respective social positions and that the terms of the exchange conform to customary expectations.4 If in an exchange more was demanded or less given than custom dictated, the legitimacy of the exchange would be thrown into question.

With the growing importance of wage labor, and the broader expansion of the market economy, economic exchange became, at least in theory, a more neutral matter, in the sense that the particular social identities of the exchanging parties were not supposed to determine the terms of the exchange. But this did not mean that emergent, modern ideals of economic exchange were devoid of a normative dimension—a sense of the conditions under which exchanges could be deemed proper and fair. There were formal and substantive normative dimensions to modern economic exchange, both of which informed conceptions of fair wage exchange.5 On formal grounds, economic exchanges were viewed as fair insofar as they are entered into without coercion by notionally free subjects, conceived of more or less along the lines of liberal ideology. On substantive grounds, fairness was objectively grounded in the properties of the substances being exchanged. A substantively fair exchange is one in which the exchanged substances are self-evidently of roughly equal value (however value is construed). To be sure, there were variations across diferent capitalist contexts in how exactly the substantive notion of fairness was worked out. As noted briefly in the previous chapter, Richard Biernacki’s (1995) comparative work on the norms governing wage-labor exchange in Germany and England in the early industrial period shows how in Germany value was a function of labor time, whereas in England value was reified in the product of labor. According to Biernacki, this diference reflected distinct, culturally embedded notions about the source of value. But in both cases, there was an understanding that fairness in the exchange of work for a wage obtains where the value represented by the wage is equal to the value represented by the work given for it.

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Work on historical semantics ofers some evidence of the historicity of the modern notion of objectively fair economic exchange, at least in the case of the English-speaking world. According to the investigations of linguist Anna Wierzbicka (2006), it was only quite recently that the English term fair came to take on its contemporary ethical sense, which has connotations of equality.6 Before the nineteenth century, fair meant proper adherence to an agreed-on procedure. The earliest usage of fair in this procedural sense is found in the expression “fair play,” the first records of which date to the sixteenth century. Fair play—simply following the agreed rules of a game—captures to some degree the formal moral dimension of modern economic transactions. However, Wierzbicka notes that the meaning of fair play is distinct from the modern sense of fair as equal—the sense that is present in notions such as the “fair wage.” This point becomes clear when considering the respective antonyms of fair (play) and fair (exchange of equivalents). The opposite of fair play was foul play, which means flouting the rules of a game. To play foully is to break rules, to cheat in some sense, with the assumption that the players of the game freely agreed on those rules before play began. For a player not to follow those rules thus involves reneging on an agreement, the breaking of a compact. Although the procedural sense of fair (the sense involved in fair play and foul play) is clearly still in common use today, that sense does not capture the contemporary, substantive, and essentially distributive notion of fairness, with its connotations of equality and, therefore, commensurability.7 The antonym of that sense of fair is just unfair, the meaning of which is broader than foul play. While unfair can mean deviating from agreed-on rules, it can also mean substantively unequal, as in not getting a fair share of some good. It is the latter sense of unfair that is used to refer to unequal exchange, where the quantity of value given by one party is greater than the value received in return from the other party. An exchange can be judged by an observer as unfair, in the sense of being unequal, whether or not the observer knows the “rules of the game” and indeed independently of whether those rules were freely agreed on by the exchanging parties.8 The earliest mention of unfair is found in the mid-eighteenth century, but Wierzbicka suggests that the modern meaning of the word did not fully emerge until well into the nineteenth century. The emergence of fair as meaning equal thus, significantly, coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism and wage labor.

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To complicate matters further, before the nineteenth century the word fair primarily had an aesthetic, rather than an ethical, meaning. As a noun, the word could mean beautiful, agreeable, clear and distinct, smooth, even, free of irregularities, well-proportioned, and in balance. The word could be used as a verb, to mean to smooth, to make even, to beautify. It was perhaps as much by virtue of the aesthetic meanings of fair as it was of the procedural sense associated with fair play, that the word came to be extended to economic matters to mean substantively equal exchange. For the aesthetic sense of fair can more readily capture the idea of commensuration implicit in fair / equal exchange than can the narrowly procedural fair play. This is because the notions of balance and symmetry involved in the aesthetic meaning of fair entail a kind of commensurability. For something to be symmetrically arranged, proportional, or well balanced, clearly it must have some property—weight, for example, or area, or shape, or shade—in terms of which it can be seen, or otherwise sensed, as proportional, in balance, or symmetrical. In order to judge, for example, whether a figure is symmetrical, it must be possible to compare the area and shape of diferent parts of that figure. Similarly, in order to gauge whether a symmetrical object is well balanced, the distribution of its weight around its axis of symmetry—how the weight on the one side compares to that on the other—must be discerned. An objectively fair exchange is one in which exchanged goods or services are in balance, while to be in balance they must be commensurable. The aesthetic sense of fair, as balanced and well-proportioned, thus gets at that concept of fair exchange. In addition, the aesthetic meaning of fair, when extended to denote substantively equal exchange, suggests that whether or not an exchange is objectively fair is something that can be perceived in the objective form of the exchange—in the degree to which the substances being exchanged are self-evidently balanced and in proportion. The aesthetic denotations of fair thus work well to convey the idea that legitimate economic exchanges are characterized by equal exchange of commensurable substances—an idea deeply embedded in market justifications of wage labor.

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The increasing normative force of the idea of objectively fair economic exchange set up a tension in wage labor. Wage labor had by the later nineteenth century become, to a large extent, simply a fact of life. Perhaps it was acknowledgment of that de facto situation that led to the growing influence of the politics of purchasing power, which accepted the broad parameters of the capitalist system, yet sought better terms of exchange between labor and capital. The legitimacy of wage labor hinged on the degree to which labor was regarded as alienable, and wages were seen as commensurable with work. But seeing labor as an alienable thing, commensurable with the wage given in exchange for it, was in tension with customary understandings of work. Moreover, as emphasized in the last chapter, it was entirely unclear how labor—the activity of a person—could be alienable or in what terms it could be seen as commensurable with a wage and, therefore, what criterion should determine a fair exchange of labor for a wage. So while the general idea that wage labor can be fairly compensated had taken root by the late nineteenth century, there remained, in part as a result of the persistence of older understandings of work, deep conceptual problems with putting that idea into practice. In the next section, I briefly consider how these tensions were worked out in the case of the United States.

2. A Brief Note on the History of the Legitimacy of Wage Labor in the United States

The story of the ascent of wage labor is not just about its spread as economic practice but also about its growing acceptance—the increasing tendency for it to be taken for granted, a quasi-naturalized institution. There is broad consensus among American labor historians, and indeed historians of other parts of the capitalist world, that wage labor in the early period of capitalism was regarded with a great deal of suspicion and that its legitimacy was, at best, questionable.9 In antebellum America, the economic dependence entailed by being a waged laborer was seen as undermining the condition of individual autonomy that, according to the Republican ideology that held sway at the time, was a prerequisite for virtuous citizenship. During the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Sean Wilentz (1984), the American labor movement was more or less united in holding that labor is not a marketable commodity and so should not be treated as such. Eric Foner (1995) has similarly drawn attention to the degree to which antebellum America was marked by widespread hostility to wage labor, even as the ideology of “free labor” became increasingly influential. Foner argues that, as wage labor increasingly became the dominant economic relationship, “the ideal of the autonomous small producer reemerged . . . as a full-fledged critique of early capitalism and its inexorable transformation of free labor into a commodity” (p. xvii).

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The spread of wage labor in the United States, and indeed elsewhere in the capitalist world, was a gradual and complex process, the result of incremental moves on the part of business and labor away from customary arrangements that determined pay and work conditions and toward more explicit contracts.10 Amy Stanley (1998) has charted the cultural, intellectual, and legal complexities of the early history of wage labor in the United States. She shows how in the first half of the nineteenth century, contracts were predominantly informal and tended to serve the interests of employers, at least with respect to who controlled the labor process. In taking a job, a worker was presumed to have consented to all rules imposed by the employer, even those unstated in the contract itself. It was not uncommon for piece rates to be decided by foremen and subcontractors on an ad hoc basis, on terms that rarely favored the worker. Early labor struggles were often directed at making contracts more explicit, as well as at establishing the principle of collective bargaining. According to Stanley, it was “[labor’s] eforts [that] altered the wage contracts from an oral promise full of ambiguities to a precisely worded written document” (p.  68). The picture drawn by Stanley broadly accords with Eric Hobsbawm’s (1964) sweeping account of the history of industrial relations across the capitalist world during the nineteenth century, in which he shows how the proletariat became increasingly savvy in its dealings with employers. But Stanley argues that the more explicit written contracts that emerged in the wake of older customary arrangements, while having some advantages for employees, at the same time struck many workers as uncomfortably close to a form of bondage. While, in Hobsbawm’s terms, American workers had, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, learned to play “the [capitalist] rules of the game,” they nonetheless remained deeply ambivalent about those rules.11 In Stanley’s nuanced argument, wage labor embodied a contradiction. On the one hand, a wage-labor contract is notionally freely entered into by the worker, but at the same time, it legally inscribes a relation of domination and subordination. This contradiction was expressed in contract law. According to what Stanley (1998, p.  83 [emphasis added]) describes as the “modern definition,” set out in an 1886 “plain statement” on labor law, a “hireling” is: “one who, by reason of contract . . . becomes subject to the authority and control of another in some trade.” Wage labor amounted, therefore, to a kind of voluntary bondage.

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The status of wage labor was made more problematic in the United States by its entanglement with the question of slavery. Slavery complicated the issue of wage labor during the nineteenth century because of apparent similarities in their underlying logics. Both arrangements involved, to varying degrees and in diferent ways, coercion and the sale of labor. Lawrence Glickman (1997, p. 157), summing up a generation of research by labor historians, concludes that “most antebellum workers placed wage labor with slavery along a continuum of bondage.” Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, a very common way to condemn wage labor was to refer to it as “wage slavery.” The association of wage labor and slavery was not just a rhetorical ploy but a central animating idea in the labor movement, both in the United States and elsewhere.12 The call to reduce hours in the postbellum period, for instance, was very much couched in the language of emancipation, reminiscent of the rhetoric used in the campaign against slavery. Ira Steward, eulogized on his death by American Federation of Labor leaders as “the most important American contributor to labor thought,” saw the fight for shorter hours as entirely continuous with the abolitionist cause (Roediger 1986).

The question of the legitimacy of wage labor thus turned to a significant extent on the degree to which it was viewed as being diferent in kind from slavery. Stanley (1998, p. 88) sums up the debate about the relation between slavery and wage labor as follows: “The crux of the disagreement concerned the meaning of emancipating all men to sell their own labor—whether this transformation established self-ownership or self-dispossession, contract freedom or wage slavery.” The answer to that question, in turn, depended on whether labor could be reasonably construed as an alienable commodity, just like any other: “The legitimacy of commerce lay in the legal equality of employers and workers and the likeness of labor to other commodities” (p.  76). As long as wage labor was conceived of as diferent in kind from the commodities aforded by the wage, it remained overshadowed by the question of whether it could, even in theory, be fairly compensated. For how can inalienable life activity be in any sense fairly exchanged for a wage and the lifeless things it commands? This question threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the wage-labor exchange.

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The comparison between wage labor and slavery was not just a feature of radical labor ideology and politics, confined to the margins of thought about the problems and dilemmas of early industrial society. Rather, during the nineteenth century, there was very widespread disquiet about the moral status of wage labor, which was felt well beyond the laboring classes. Wage labor was generally thought of as presenting an intellectual and moral problem, one that aroused debate among politicians, political economists, and in legal circles. The moral complexity of wage labor was acknowledged in 1883 congressional hearings on the matter, which, according to Stanley (1998, p. 84), “registered the wider concerns of public debate” about the “enduring ambiguities of the wage contract in free society,” at the core of which lay the question of whether labor should be treated as just another commodity. As a legal matter, the question was eventually settled by the Supreme Court in 1923, in the Adkins vs. Children’s Hospital case (concerning the constitutionality of a minimum wage law). According to the ruling; “In principle there can be no diference between the case of selling labor and the case of selling goods” (Holmes 2010, p. 173). How much a worker should receive for her labor was thus taken to be a matter equivalent to how much a merchant could get for her wares. In both cases, the market alone should decide. That it was necessary for this point to be spelled out in a ruling by the highest court in the land indicates the extent to which it was a matter of contention in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13

Beginning in the years following the end of the Civil War, the mind-set described by the historians of antebellum labor began to change. The focus of American labor shifted from a critique of wage labor and struggles over the length of the working day to increasing the purchasing power of the wage. Labor was not initially unified behind this change of agenda, and, particularly between the late nineteenth century and World War I, radicals and moderates competed for working class support. Howard Kimeldorf, in his analysis of turn of the century labor activism, sees the diferent mottos of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as expressing the main contending ideologies within organized labor. The AFL adopted for its motto “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” while the more revolutionary IWW chose “abolish the wage system” (Kimeldorf 1999). The IWW emerged to fill the vacuum left by the AFL’s move toward a more corporatist vision of industrial politics. According to Kimeldorf: “By the time of the IWW’s formation in 1905, the AFL had come firmly to embrace American values and institutions, including its system of capitalism, which Gompers, the former Marxist radical turned pragmatist, endorsed as ‘the best yet devised’” (p. 2). Kimeldorf sees the first twenty years of the century as a critical turning point, as the radical agendas of the Knights of Labor and the IWW came to be replaced by the workplace-focused syndicalism of the AFL. According to his account, there was a real ideological struggle between the ALF and the IWW, the outcome of which was not a forgone conclusion. But by the end of the First World War, the AFL and its moderate agenda were clearly in the ascendant. The post–World War I era saw the beginnings of welfare capitalism and corporatism, setting the stage for the coalescing of the Fordist regime in the years following the Second World War.

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By the third decade of the twentieth century Selig Perlman (1928) was confidently characterizing American labor as, above all else, wage conscious. For Perlman, and other members of the industrial relations school founded by John Commons, the struggle of labor was not over the fundamental legitimacy of wage labor but rather about how well labor is compensated for its labor. While the projection back in time of Perlman’s picture of American labor has been challenged, as has the associated argument that American workers are, for deep cultural and historical reasons, essentially conservative, it is certainly true that by the middle decades of the twentieth century, the legitimacy of wage labor per se (as opposed to particular wage contracts and labor practices) had become largely uncontested. Over the first half of the twentieth century there was thus a reorientation of the politics of labor from a more radical agenda, which questioned the capitalist social order, to a reformist one, presupposing an increasingly corporatist model of industrial relations.

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