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

2.1. Why Does Commensuration Mean That

the Wage Must be Spent?

One objection to the theory could be directed at the argument that a wage needs to be spent on commodities to make it commensurable with labor— and that, consequently, workers feel compelled to convert their earnings into goods. The counterargument is that a money wage can efectively evoke a basket of potential goods even without actually being spent and so has the same power to index free activities as actually owning commodities. If this is right, then the commensuration theory gives us no reason to suppose that spending a wage will be preferred to saving it, and it therefore fails to account for the trends described in the Chapter 3. The theory would then sufer from an explanatory lacuna similar to the one I attributed to Colin Campbell’s (1987) argument.

One reason for the insuficiency of the unspent money wage to work as compensation is that the status of money is uncertain. Money is evanescent, mercurial, clearly conventional, and fundamentally unstable. Worries about the uncertain status of money are reflected in disquiet about inflation, even where real wages remain unchanged or increase, and in the associated impulse to try to ground value in commodities such as gold or material assets like real estate. Indeed, I would suggest that the impulse to make value concrete, by embedding it in things, is in part animated by underlying anxieties about converting the wage into something suficiently “real” that it can approximate labor. For wage earners, the disquieting thing about nominal inflation (where real wages keep up with prices) is that something of substance—labor and time—has been given, yet what is received in exchange—some amount of money—is unpredictable and perhaps illusory.

Moreover, as noted earlier in this chapter, the nominal wage is too abstract to function adequately as compensation for work. In buying commodities, by contrast, people come to own the set of use values embedded in them, which is far more concrete than owning a quantity of money. Possession of money in relation to use values is, as noted earlier, a second-order form of possession, in the sense that to possess money is to possess a potential to acquire potential use values. As such, money wages are removed from the concrete labor given as work. The exchange of labor for the wage is incomplete until the wage is itself spent on things that have use value.37 However, this point raises a second, perhaps more fundamental objection to the theory.

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2.2. Doesn’t Converting Increased Productivity into Actual Free Time Work Better as Wage-Labor Commensuration Than Projecting Time onto Things and Then Accumulating Them?

If wage labor indeed represents lost free activity (an opportunity cost in forgone leisure, as economists would have it), and if this lost free activity is compensated for by the free activity indexed by commodity objects, why not just directly exchange increasing productivity for more actual free time rather than time in the fetish form of things? To put it simply, if products equal time, why not just go directly for time? Just why is there an apparent bias in favor of higher wages over more free time? If an adequate response can’t be provided to this question from the perspective of the commensuration theory, then the theory is open to the charge that it merely redescribes our puzzle rather than ofering a constructive solution to it.

There are a number of possible responses to this point. First, the theory minimally entails indiference between free time and increased real wages rather than a definite preference for the latter over the former. Given that businesses will tend to have a preference for turning higher productivity into increased output, because of competitive pressures and, in the case of industry, big fixed capital investments, the indiference of labor between the two possibilities will, by default, lead to the former outcome. Unless labor actively pushes for reduced work time, firms will usually use productivity improvements to try to expand their market share by cutting prices and increasing output rather than cutting overall costs at constant output.

Second, as I noted in my discussion of renting goods, the accumulation of commodities works more efectively as compensation for labor than does the reduction of work time, because it creates the illusion that existential constraints on free activity, which are ultimately set by the horizon of human finitude, can be overcome. The hypothetical activity facilitated by a commodity object is unconstrained by real limitations of time and energy. In acquiring commodities, therefore, the worker can acquire a kind of virtual surplus of free time, because wage goods can contain more potential activity than the time given up in exchange for them. This surplus of hypothetical activity time is, in theory, unbounded. By contrast, increases in productivity can only be exchanged for a definite, and quite limited, increment of actual free time—the amount by which the length of work time is reduced while keeping wage income unchanged. At the limit, where labor time is reduced to zero (as in a fully robotic economy), the free time ex-workers have is just determined by the natural duration of a human life. However, by accumulating the potential activity alienated in objects, this absolute, existential limit on free time is seemingly transcended.

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Now of course, if wage earners reduce their work hours for the same wages, they are clearly getting paid more per unit of work time—and so, in theory, are receiving more congealed activity time, in the form of wage goods, for each hour of work than they were when working more hours at the same wage. But the productivity of industrial capitalism is such that the amount of hypothetical free activity indexed by the goods commanded by the hourly real wage will tend to be greater than the amount of time it takes to earn that wage. Once the distinction between empty real time and the hypothetical time signified by goods becomes elided—in order for wage labor to become an objectively fair exchange of commensurable substances—the free time indexed by turning increased productivity into higher real wages will be greater than that yielded by turning it into a shorter working week at constant real wages.

Third, it is easier to imagine time spent in specific activities than “empty” time. Commodities serve as useful cognitive props to focus attention on particular practices. The potential free activity contained in wage goods is, in this sense, more available to contemplation than is free activity in the abstract. That this is so might well be contingent on what Keynes (1930) saw as the withering away of traditional collective and individual practices that could be pursued relatively independently of the possession of commodities. But once the new regime of time-use and consumption took hold, recovering those kinds of practices became quite dificult.

Lastly, taking compensation for increasing productivity as increased purchasing power, rather than reduced work time, underlines the status of wage workers as free participants in a market exchange rather than subjects of coercion. Precisely because labor is not obviously alienable, in order for it to be exchanged—that is, in order for it to be made alienable—it needs to be “returned” in a thing-like, or alienated, form. So wage goods in efect become animated by the labor given in exchange for them, such that they come to represent durations of free activity. In acquiring those goods, the wage earner acquires the free activity subsisting in them, and in this way the wage becomes equivalent to the labor given during work. By contrast, if wage earners exchange increased productivity for less time at work, they are exchanging it for something that in theory already belongs to them—their time. That sits in some tension with the ideology of free market exchange. According to the contractual logic of “free” labor, the initial, precontractual condition is one in which the workers’ time belongs exclusively to them— they then get to dispose of it as they see fit. Free workers then supposedly bring their labor power—and thus their time—to market. The presupposed antecedent state is one in which they own themselves, which entails that they own all of their time.38 To exchange increased labor productivity for more actual free time (that is, for less time at work), however, suggests that the antecedent state is one in which the workers’ time belongs to their employer, such that workers are, in efect, buying back their time. That brings the logic of wage labor uncomfortably close to that of slavery (only lacking the legal category of the slave) or indentured labor (only without the debt). In the case of slavery, all of the time of the slave is owned by the slaveholder, but slaves can, in theory at least, buy their freedom. Similarly, indentured laborers work to end their bondage. As we shall see in the next chapter, in the earlier nineteenth century, the legitimacy of wage labor was questioned, in the United States and elsewhere in the capitalist world, precisely by comparing it to slavery, while the status of the bonded laborer was generally disparaged. Wage labor became legitimate to the degree that it was construed as a free exchange of commensurable substances—that is, to the degree that it became something categorically distinguishable from slave labor or bonded labor. The only way that wage labor can be a free exchange of commensurable substances, brought to the market by independent parties, is if time is alienated in wage goods, which are given to workers in exchange for their time.39 Indeed, as we have seen, if time is alienated in objects, it becomes possible for wage earners to gain more potential time than they have given up in work.40

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2.3. How Do Services Fit In?

A further question about the commensuration theory is what place consumption of services has in the theory. For while the theory places great emphasis on consumer durables, advanced industrial economies have over time tended to shift in the direction of services. The three-sector developmental model of the economy, according to which economies move progressively from extraction, to manufacturing, and then to services, has proven to be an empirically very sound model of economic development. In advanced capitalist nations, the service sector has inexorably grown as a proportion of the economy. But the theory of consumption as wage-labor commensuration entails that as incomes increase, the demand for manufactured goods, not services, should expand. How, therefore, can services be made sense of in relation to the theory proposed in this chapter?

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In response to this question, first it should be noted that while the proportion of GDP devoted to services has increased in every advanced industrial economy, this is in large part due to the efect that increasing productivity has on the relative cost of goods and services. Because it is dificult to increase the productivity of service sector work, as manufacturing productivity increases, the cost of goods tends to fall relative to the cost of services (Baumol and Bowden 1966). Since, over time, the relative cost of services tends to increase, it seems as if the sector is expanding. But the increase in the value of the service sector masks a material reality of massively increased output of commodities, for which there has been a ready market. As noted in chapter 3, according to a chain-quantity index measure, which best approximates actual quantity of things produced, per capita output of consumer durables increased ninefold in the United States between 1925 and 1998 (Sherby 2000). The relative shift toward services, measured in terms of GDP, is therefore evidently entirely compatible with ever-increasing production, consumption, and accumulation of material goods.41

Moreover, part of the apparent increase in the proportion of economy devoted to services is an accounting artifact, resulting from the commodification of activities previously carried on outside the market sphere (Gershuny and Miles 1983). For example, as eating out becomes more common, the amount of labor involved in food preparation does not necessarily increase (it might well decrease), but more people are in paid employment to provide that service. The commodification of previously uncommodified activities accounts for a significant part of the nominal increase in the value of the services sector and for the increasing proportion of the labor force employed in service provision.

Nonetheless, the increasing prominence of services cannot be entirely reduced to an accounting artifact. As capitalist economies have matured there has undoubtedly been a significant movement of labor from manufacturing to the service sector. Many of the new service sector jobs are not just the result of commodification of activities previously conducted outside the market. Rather, as productivity increased in manufacturing, industrial workers were shed and were reemployed providing quite novel services—call center work would be a prominent contemporary example. However, this development is not incompatible with the commensuration theory. The theory does not presuppose that the workforce is employed in the extractive and manufacturing sectors. The argument is that wage workers seek commensurate compensation for giving up their time and freedom, whatever sector they work within.

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Moreover, the aforementioned “marketization” of services provision is arguably precisely a consequence of the time bind in afluent societies, caused by the failure of the working week to decline by much as productivity increases. The motivation for the consumption of some services—for example paying for day care for young children—is to free up more time in which to work. Outsourcing services is also a response to the demands made on individuals by the commodity objects they own. Television sets must be watched, cars driven, pots cooked with, large houses cleaned and maintained, and, underlying all of this, wages spent. The purchase of time-saving services might be driven in part by the need to shop for and maintain consumer commodities as well as to find time to make use of them.

A final thought is that there are grounds on which to wonder why the service sector, despite its growth in recent years, is not much larger than it is. Like renting goods, buying services ofers a flexible form of consumption, one not requiring possession of a stockpile of goods. Moreover, because a service is consumed in real-time, at the point of purchase, it is an eficient way to satisfy some want. With services, the duration of useful activity (taking a taxi, having meals cooked, clothes washed, and so on) made use of is the same as that paid for, so nothing is wasted. But that apparent advantage becomes a constraint if the point of consumption is to achieve wage-labor commensuration. For only so many services can be consumed in a given unit of time, and so consuming services makes salient the limits imposed on consumption by the availability of time. By contrast, using money to accumulate goods can, in the context of a certain attitude to those goods, suppress the temporal horizon on consumption. As noted earlier, owning stores of potential activity power makes it possible to endlessly defer the question of whether a wage produces enough actual useful free activity to justify the labor given to obtain it—the issue gets projected into the indefinite future. So if the purpose of spending the wage is to make wage labor into a fair exchange, then spending it on commodities fulfills that purpose more efectively than spending it on services.

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2.4. What about Gender?

Another possible objection to the commensuration theory of mass consumption is that it ignores gender diferences in work and consumption. At least according to some accounts, in the earlier twentieth century, women formed, in the United States, a majority of consumers (L. Cohen 2003). At the same time, until relatively recently, female participation in the labor force has been significantly lower than male participation. If consumers have predominantly been women, while men have tended to be the breadwinners, that would seem to weaken the connection between consumption and work. For if nonworking female consumers are somewhat removed from the logic of wage-labor exchange, then, arguably, the force of that logic will be attenuated in the sphere of consumption.

This is a complex theoretical and empirical issue. Conceptually, it raises the question of whether, and to what extent, the household should be thought of as a composite of individuals as opposed to a corporate entity. If the household is a corporate entity, such that its members think and act in a collective manner, then the justification of the labor of the household’s wage earners might well inform the consumption behavior of everyone in the household. If, on the other hand, households are composites of individuals, then, to the degree that there is a gendered division of labor that separates work and consumption, the latter will be insulated from the logic according to which the former is justified.

There is some evidence from US history that women, when contributing to the household’s consumption decisions, had in mind issues of fairness and commensurability that were very much connected to wage labor. Women were at the forefront of campaigns for fair prices, as a means of preserving the purchasing power of the wage. They were also key actors in the movement to boycott non-blue-label (that is, non-union-produced) products during the early and middle years of the century (Frank 1994; Glickman 2009). This suggests that women were conscious of notions of fair exchange in consumption that were indeed articulated to conditions of production—whether workers were unionized and getting paid fair wages. And of course, in every period of industrial capitalism, large numbers of women have participated in the labor market, albeit often in part-time or temporary work.

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Moreover, despite the stereotypical representation of the consumer as female, it is not clear that women, in fact, did the lion’s share of household spending (as distinct from the activity of shopping). Women may have predominated in certain kinds of purchasing, for example, grocery shopping. But although provisioning corresponds to a certain stereotype of what it is to shop, there are obviously other ways for a household to spend its income, especially as that income increases. And, indeed, as general afluence rose over the course of the twentieth century, provisioning accounted for a smaller proportion of household expenditure. There is at least some evidence of a gendered division of household consumption, with women responsible for provisioning and men having more say in decisions about the acquisition of big-ticket consumer durables. Sociologist Mark Swiencicki has suggested that men’s role in early consumer culture has been overlooked and underestimated. He used the 1890 census of manufacturers to assess the relative size of male versus female consumption and found that male spending levels were twice as large as female levels (Swiencicki, 1998). Furthermore, decisions to increase total wage earnings, as opposed to reducing work time, would be made by those doing the waged work, in negotiations in the workplace. Although other household members would no doubt have had some input on the issue, norms concerning the conditions under which wage labor is fair would have exerted significant influence on that decision. In sum, while the gendered division of labor and consumption within the household potentially complicates the proposition that patterns of consumption, wages, and work time reflect changes in understandings of wage labor, it is certainly not inconsistent with it.

2.5. What about the Rise of Disposable Products?

If mass consumption is about accumulating stores of use value, in order to justify wage labor, then why, in modern capitalist societies, is so much stuf thrown away? Is there not some tension between the extent to which commodities are regarded as disposable and the argument made earlier in this chapter, that people become attached (sometimes irrationally so) to the things they own because those things represent their labor? Surely things, once animated by the labor given in exchange for them, should be kept indefinitely?

Part of the answer to this question might be as prosaic as limits on storage space. According to the commensuration theory, because wage labor is a perennial fact of life, the impetus to convert the wage into potential activity stored in commodities is ongoing. If storage space does not increase to accommodate ongoing accumulation, then consumers will eventually have to discard some of their accumulated goods. But that then raises the question of why storage capacity does not keep pace with accumulation. To some extent, of course, it has done so. As we saw in Chapter 3, the average size of homes in the United States increased substantially in the postwar period. However, the degree to which living and storage space can increase is ultimately limited by the fact that the supply of land is fixed. As increasing productivity reduces the price of consumer goods, the relative cost of land, and therefore of housing, increases. This implies that the rate of accumulation of goods, as real wages increase, will be higher than the rate at which homes can grow larger. That means that even if homes increase in size (as occurred in the United States), over time they will, nonetheless, tend to fill up with goods. Periodic culling of stuf then becomes necessary to prevent domestic life from becoming increasingly impinged on, and eventually crippled, by clutter.

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But it is also the case that many people in fact throw away much less stuf than might be expected, given the negative efect that excessive accumulation has on ease of life. In recent years, pathological hoarding has become a topic of great cultural fascination, reflected in reality TV shows and popular books about the condition and in the rapid spread of self-help groups (Frost and Steketee 2011). According one study, about 5 percent of the contemporary US population are compulsive hoarders, while another study found a similar percentage (4.6 percent) among contemporary Germans (Frost 2010, 2013). But hoarding tendencies are much more widespread than is suggested by focusing on a relatively small (but still quite significant) number of extreme cases. From one perspective, compulsive hoarding is just an extreme manifestation of the endowment efect—the tendency of people to become irrationally attached to the things they own—which, according to experimental research by behavioral economists, is a quite general disposition in modern capitalist societies (Kahneman, Knetsch, Thaler 1990, 1991; Knetsch 1989; Thaler 1980). Indeed, the contemporary fascination with hoarding suggests widespread recognition of the disposition underlying the pathology—which, in turn, probably reflects the degree to which hoarding tendencies are quite common in the population.42

The increase in throwaway consumption, however, is a product of not just the discarding of overaccumulated consumer durables but also the emergence of consumer goods that are disposable by design. For, in addition to the creation of supposedly high-quality consumer durables, the twentieth century also witnessed the appearance and rapid spread of a wide range of disposable products—razors, ballpoint pens, paper tissues (as opposed to cloth handkerchiefs), and so on. It is immediately not clear why demand for disposable goods should have taken of in the middle part of the twentieth century. Disposable products do not necessarily take up less space than more durable items; therefore, there is no reason why a consumer should own fewer disposable items than their durable equivalents—so the motivation for switching to disposables cannot be that they reduce clutter. Moreover, buying items that require frequent replacement, rather than more durable products, means devoting more time and energy to shopping. Why should consumers choose to acquire items that so frequently have to be replaced? The obvious explanation is that durable items require upkeep—straight razors, for example, must be honed, cloth diapers and handkerchiefs washed, fountain pens flushed and refilled, and so on. In addition, since regular provisioning for food occurs in any case, replacing disposables can, to a fair extent, be folded into a big weekly shop. Big shopping trips became increasingly possible with the dissemination of automobile ownership (which allowed more stuf to be transported by consumers), in conjunction with the concentration of retail space that took place with the emergence of malls and shopping centers in the postwar years (L. Cohen 2003; Longstreth 1997, 1999, 2007; Mertes 1949). In the context of these developments, using disposable items might well have been a more time-eficient option than owning and maintaining durable goods.

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But if disposable artifacts are, indeed, more time eficient, then the question I raised with respect to renting objects arises. Why have things not moved more fully in the direction of a low-upkeep mode of consumerism, by making everything disposable that can possibly be disposable? Why is the market for consumer goods not entirely dominated by a combination of disposable goods and durable goods that are rented? As with rented items, the answer might be that the duration of ownership of a disposable item is closely tied to actual use. Consequently, disposable items cannot signify a quantity of free activity that exceeds actual free time. Of course, consumers can accumulate a very large number of disposable items, to act as a reserve of potentially useful objects. But although some consumers do engage in bulk buying and stockpiling of disposable products, that mode of accumulative consumption quite quickly runs into storage limitations. Accumulating a smaller number of more expensive durable consumer goods is a more practical way to achieve wage-labor commensuration.

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