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

Of course, the distinction between plain, functional, useful properties and fanciful and superfluous aesthetics is not just found in twentieth-century industrial societies. It is present in and is probably in part a legacy of a complex of cultural currents, including Protestant asceticism, Victorian utilitarianism, as well as modernist minimalism. Perhaps therefore, the distinction is just one element of the general process of rationalization supposedly underlying all of these. Yet to approach the concern about style obsolescence as just a manifestation of a modern imperative to subordinate form to function does not explain why the practice of frequent model changes was portrayed as a kind of fraud, in which the consumer gets cheated out of something. More sense can be made of the value-laden distinction between the aesthetic properties of commodities and their narrowly functional properties when it is interpreted in terms of the theory of consumption as wage-labor commensuration set out in Chapter 4.107 If this theory is right, it would follow that the functional properties of commodities—those seen as securing some duration of use—would be diferentiated from properties seen as peripheral to use (narrowly construed), such as aesthetic characteristics. So for example, a car’s material properties endow it with a certain amount of durability and with certain technical capacities. Owning that car then gives the consumer access to a concrete reserve of potential activity (use power), which is similar in kind to the activity given up as labor in exchange for the wage. The aesthetic characteristics of the car, however, are by comparison much more dificult to make commensurable with labor power. This is because it is hard to construe the aesthetic properties of objects, as opposed to their functional, use-conferring properties, as objectively commensurable with labor. There are two reasons why this is so. First, the aesthetic characteristics of products are less clearly linked to a temporal span of activity than their functional characteristics. This makes it more dificult to think of aesthetic properties as commensurable with the duration of activity given up as labor. Second, aesthetic value is typically regarded as at least somewhat subjective in nature. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then how can the aesthetic dimension of commodities serve as a criterion for establishing the objective fairness of a given wage? It is dificult to see how the quite subjective aesthetic side of the commodities aforded by the wage could serve as an objective measure of purchasing power.

262

Time for Things

If, therefore, wage earners are encouraged to exchange their labor (by way of spending the wage) for functionally redundant product features, such as the latest model year’s styling on an automobile, then that labor is, in efect, not being suficiently (that is, commensurately) compensated.108 In replacing a perfectly good commodity with a new version that difers only aesthetically from the one it replaces, wage earning consumers are efectively exchanging labor for a characteristic of an object that adds no substantive, functional (therefore commensurable) value. So they are exchanging the use value of their labor, abstracted in the wage, for an essentially insubstantial return. This interpretation of the objection to style obsolescence would explain why there was a strong current of opinion in society that consumers were duped and defrauded by the practice.

Of course, none of this is to say that there were not countervailing psychological motivations and cultural forces in play. If concerns about status, neophilia, and the dialectics of fashion (as, for example, theorized by Simmel), were not also powerful influences on consumer behavior, then the whole strategy of style obsolescence would not have become successful in the first place.109 However, the strong reaction against the success of the strategy suggests that it ran in some tension with the normative framework underpinning the consensus that wage labor is a potentially objectively fair exchange of commensurable substances. Thus, even the very distinction between style and material obsolescence expresses the fear that, when proper commensuration is sabotaged, the free activity lost to labor is unrecoverable.

In this chapter, and in the four that precede it, I examined various developments in US history that fit with the theory of mass consumption as wage-labor commensuration. The set of developments I considered is by no means exhaustive. The development of chain stores and the transformation of retail, for example, could be interpreted in a similar fashion (Rosenberg 2017). The empirical analysis of those chapters could also be supplemented by a much more detailed historical ethnography of attitudes toward the connection between work and consumption, along the lines of the brief account given in Chapter 5. But, as mentioned in the introduction, the point of the historical analysis is not to develop a comprehensive picture of one context but rather to serve as a heuristic, to “flesh out,” the argument and think through the theory in a historically grounded fashion. The objective was to construct through historical analysis a quite general explanation for the relation between mass production and mass consumption under industrial capitalism. The next chapter, which concludes the book, comprises a summation of the argument and some ruminations on the general character of economic normativity under advanced industrial capitalism.

Moral Panic about Utility

263

264

Time for Things

Conclusion: Capitalism, Commensuration, and the Normativity of Economic Action

Underlying the argument of this book is a claim that the peculiarity of capitalism has something to do with the kind of normativity that governs its economic activity. More specifically, the claim is that economic normativity under capitalism has features that go some way toward explaining the dynamic, yet irrational and treadmill-like character of the system.1 One side of the dynamism of capitalism, much discussed in social theory, is the imperative on the side of production to accumulate exchange value. The other side, the focus of this book, is the open-ended character of aggregate demand, which is rooted in patterns of consumer behavior. A normative feature of industrial capitalism that helps explain the character of consumer demand is the assumption that a wage ideally ought to be commensurate with the labor given in exchange for it. This assumption is expressed in the idea that, at least in theory, there is a fair level of wages for any given amount of labor. But for labor to be commensurate with its wages, the two must first be commensurable. The presupposition that wage and labor are commensurable helps explain the behavior underlying the demand side of the dynamic of capitalism.

To recap in some more detail, I argued that the materialistic orientation of capitalism—specifically, the tendency for increasing productivity to be turned into unending commodity accumulation, as opposed to the expansion of free time—is a consequence of the rise to prominence of the notion that wage-labor exchange can, at least potentially, be objectively fair. As noted in Chapter 4, what makes an exchange objectively fair cannot just be a matter

of convention, so that an exchange is fair just because it accords with some norm or custom. Rather, the notion of an objectively fair exchange entails that fairness is grounded in facts about the substances being exchanged. I suggested that the idea that labor can be commensurately compensated by its wage leads to a tendency for usefulness to be construed in quite abstract, yet at the same time also narrowly materialistic terms, as a function of the properties of wage goods. This is because the only way for labor to seem commensurate with its wage is for wage goods to become qualitatively equivalent to the labor that is given (and, therefore, free activity that is given up) in exchange for them. In efect, wage goods come to represent quantities of free activity, roughly measured by the duration of useful activity those goods, in theory, could facilitate. The legitimacy accorded to the exchange of labor for a wage thus both depends on, and in turn encourages, the ongoing accumulation by wage earners of stores of potential activity, reified in the form of wage goods. For by accumulating consumer commodities, wage earners accumulate a store of hypothetical “activity power” that, as such, is roughly equivalent in kind to the free activity given up through selling their labor power. The notional equivalence established between increasingly standardized consumer commodities and standardized labor was an essential part of what I described as the Fordist moral economy, which contributed to the stabilization of advanced industrial economies in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

While the notional equivalence between standardized consumer commodities and standardized labor makes sense of the work-time regime in advanced industrial capitalism, the open-endedness of consumer demand might nonetheless remain puzzling. For the commensurability between wage and labor by virtue of the activity power of commodities would not in itself preclude the possibility of reaching the state of satiation predicted by Keynes (thus ending the dynamic form of demand manifested in mass consumption). Considering this directs attention to the criteriological uncertainty of wage labor commensuration, which was discussed in Chapter 4. The criteria defining fair exchange of wage for labor are deeply ambiguous, because there are in fact no objective grounds on which to establish just when a given amount of labor has been commensurately compensated (if there were, then it would be much easier to resolve disagreements about how much a given amount of work should be paid). Even where wages are turned into goods that represent hypothetical free activity, thus establishing a notional equivalence between labor and its wage (the free activity indexed by wage goods being equivalent to the free activity given up in order to work), the exchange of work for commodities remains fundamentally problematic. This is because work and commodities— activity and things—are ultimately diferent in kind and have no obvious natural common measure. Indeed, as noted earlier in the book, it is not even clear how labor could be an alienable commodity in the first place. The norm of objectively fair exchange, thus, in practice, lacks criteria of satisfaction— criteria by virtue of which a fair exchange can be judged to have self-evidently occurred (or not). The imperative to obtain “fair” compensation for work (a wage able to command a quantity of wage goods that is, in some sense, objectively equivalent to the labor given in exchange for it) demands something that is impossible to accomplish—an equal exchange ungrounded by common measure, therefore without an obvious criterion for determining parity between the exchanged substances. The lack of inherent common measure between work and its wage means that any commensurability between the two can only be a pseudocommensurability.

266

Time for Things

Furthermore, the commensuration of wage and labor by virtue of the time signified by wage goods will always be uncertain because there is a basic difference between these two forms of time. Time given up in work is real time. On the other hand, time indexed by wage goods is hypothetical, in the sense that using those goods is conditional on having actual free time (as well as enough energy, complementary resources and access to an appropriate setting). Workers, at least in afluent countries, where wage levels are well above absolute subsistence levels, thus give up chunks of their lives in exchange for a store of potential free activity represented by a set of wage goods. However, it is unclear how the merely potential activity indexed by consumer commodities could serve as adequate compensation for the real time and energy spent at work. The commodities accumulated by spending the wage amount to a kind of promissory note (much like the warranty), to the efect that commensuration will be achieved at some point in the indefinite future through using those commodities in free activities. But the perturbing question remains of whether that will in fact come to pass.

In the absence of clear, objective criteria for determining a fair rate of exchange between labor and its wage, action oriented by the norm of fair wage exchange becomes open-ended. It becomes guided by an end that is presupposed as being achievable but, at the same time, lacks criteria for establishing whether or not it has been achieved.2 In the public realm, this leads to unending debates about what constitutes a fair wage, with diferent competing conceptions of the conditions under which wage labor is fairly compensated. In industrial relations, it leads to a tendency for labor to push for ever more purchasing power (as opposed to shorter hours, for reasons set out in Chapter 3), at least in part on the assumption that at some level of real wages, commensuration with work will be self-evidently achieved. To the individual wage-earning consumer, however, it will be ambiguous whether the failure of any given amount of wages to seem like objectively commensurate compensation for the work given in exchange for it, is the result of an inadequate wage or simply spending the wage on the wrong set of goods.

Conclusion

267

Here we encounter another kind of normative vagueness under capitalism, one not discussed at length in the book. While the hypothetical utility of a commodity in one way objectively subsists in its material properties, whether that utility will “work” for a given person is a matter of that person’s preferences, made clear to her by way of introspection. Yet the criteria determining whether a given set of goods counts as the right one for a given consumer are, like the criteria determining fair wages, quite obscure. There is some sense that the consumer ought to “optimize” over a set of choices but, because the diferent options are themselves often incommensurable, it is not at all clear what that might mean. The problem is compounded by the fact that preferences are uncertain and mercurial, and can always be subjected to skeptical interrogation. Indeed, the entire cultural machinery around consumption under capitalism encourages second-guessing about preferences. There is some tension between the notion that fair compensation for work is an objective matter, rooted in measurable substances, on the one hand, and the normatively subjective, evanescent character of individual preferences in consumption, on the other. Consumption by individuals is then at least to some degree driven by the urge to find the right set of choices to satisfy internal and external criteria that are ill-defined, unstable, and potentially contradictory.

Moreover, according to an influential norm concerning consumption under capitalism, rooted in the notion of consumer sovereignty, the subjective preferences of a given individual are supposed to constitute a kind of private knowledge. The normatively private character of individual preferences works against judgments about value being informed by public, intersubjective checks. Such checks can bring social knowledge to bear on assessments made by individuals about matters of usefulness. An example would be knowledge within a community about the contextual constraints on making use of commodities. But the asocial, private character of final consumption insulates thinking about consumption (and by extension also production) from social knowledge of that kind.

268

Time for Things

The normative force behind the idea of a fair wage, in conjunction with the uncertainty about the criteria that define fair compensation for labor and the notional privacy of individual preferences in consumption can lead wage-earners into a restless quest for some set of wage goods commensurate with the labor they have sold. The objective is to find a kind of mapping between those goods and life lost to labor, such that some quantity of the former becomes equivalent to the latter. To the extent that attention focuses on that objective (which, in its most general form, involves the purchasing power of the wage) larger questions about the form of economic life realized under capitalism (including its work-time regime) will tend to fall by the wayside.

This emphasis on the normativity of economic action leads to a diferent understanding of capitalism from that given by many political economists.3 Rather than conceiving of capitalism as a particular manifestation of timeless motives and forces, we can embed it in the development of a peculiar set of norms governing action in the economic realm. These norms seem to indicate how economic action should proceed yet have the efect of impeding the normatively scripted, and socially achieved, closure of action that makes other economic systems, by comparison, quite nondynamic.4 According to the argument of this book, consumer behavior in fully developed capitalist economies is to a significant extent guided by an imperative to make the wage objectively commensurate with the labor exchanged for it, in the absence of any criteria establishing when commensuration between the two has been achieved. Against that background, the criticism that the continuous sacrifice of free time to work is fundamentally wrongheaded and self-defeating will not get much traction. Consequently, the material expansion of capitalism, entailing the production of ever more commodities and the contraction of time available for making use of each of them, will be facilitated by an open-ended form of demand.

All of this suggests an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this book: Why did Keynes’s 1930 prediction about the future of industrial capitalism fail to come true? Keynes thought that following a necessary diversion into a growth-driven economy under capitalism, the economy would eventually enter into a stationary state, in which material wants would be satiated. But Keynes was presupposing that economic action is organized by ends the satisfaction of which would, when met, be quite apparent. If, however, consumer (and wage earner) behavior under capitalism is influenced to a significant degree by very general norms that stand without clear criteria of satisfaction, then consumption would, as a result, become unbounded. Keynes’s envisioned state would never come about.5 Thus, the peculiar pattern of accumulative consumption characteristic of mass consumer society, and the corresponding inelasticity of work time to increasing productivity and hourly wages, is at least in part a consequence of the open-endedness of economic norms under capitalism

Conclusion

269

As noted earlier in the book, the focus on norms (those concerning commensurability, commensuration, fairness, and utility) in my account brings it close to Weber’s approach to capitalism. For Weber also saw a normative imperative as lying at the root of modern industrial capitalism. But while Weber provides a coherent account of the origins of the normative framework that motivated capitalist production, he pays much less attention to the normative dimension of the mode of consumption that is required for the material expansion of capitalism (and for the realization of profit against the background of rising productivity).6 As noted throughout the book, the conditions of possibility for the inexorable expansion of the industrial economy include not just the instrumental pursuit of profit by capitalists but also ever-increasing consumer demand. And the dynamism of consumer demand, which is so crucial to industrial capitalism, rests on peculiar aspects of capitalism’s normative structure—namely, the notion of the possibility of objective commensuration between wage and work, and the privacy of the criterion that determines whether or not consumers have ultimately made the two commensurate through their particular spending decisions. These features make the normativity around wage-labor exchange, economic value, and consumption indeterminate, with the efect of encouraging behavioral tendencies that in the aggregate produce a mass consumption capable of absorbing the output of capitalist mass production. This form of consumption represents, in Marxian terms, the endless pursuit not of “exchange value” but of a peculiarly decontextualized form of “use value,” contained in commodities, yet disconnected from actual activity, hence often unrealized. If, as Marx argues, capital pursues fetishized exchange value, then labor, in a mirror image, pursues a fetishized form of use value—a merely indexical use value, signified by dead things rather than animated through activity. The normative indeterminateness of wage-labor commensuration and consumption thus contributes to capitalism’s expansionary tendency, which is impervious to considerations about what its consequences are for human welfare. Once consumption, like production, is untethered in this way, the growth machine can then grind inexorably onward—at least until some ultimate limit in nature is reached.

270

Time for Things

But what would a diferent arrangement look like—one in which attitudes to consumption and work time are no longer influenced by an imperative to make labor and its wage commensurable, and therefore potentially commensurate? What would need to be in place for patterns of work, free time, and consumption to be more attuned to human welfare? Part of the answer surely has to do with making consumption and work matters of explicit public deliberation, about alternatives that are very often incommensurable. What is required is the cultivation of a thoroughly conversational and contextual approach to the ends toward which economic activity ought to be directed. A dialogic procedure, focused on the concrete realities of everyday life, would stand in for isolated individual introspection, or an abstract quest for the objective ground of value (by virtue of which all things can be made commensurable), as the method for deciding questions about economic value. Public deliberation about economic value would bring to the fore the communal practices that make up a form of life—practices that provide a horizon or condition of possibility for the very coherence of norms and therefore for meaningful action of any sort (Wittgenstein 1953).7 To make usefulness and utility matters of public deliberation would thus bring them within a social frame of reference. Within this frame of reference, the conditions under which practices actually take place, including constraints of time and energy, could be brought to bear more systematically on thinking about the human consequences of commodity production and consumption.

Making consumption, work, and use value thoroughly explicit, public matters would therefore involve a kind of reembedding of the economy in political and social life. It would, more specifically, involve resolving questions about economic value through a democratic politics comprehensively extended to the economic sphere. How choices are made between incommensurable alternatives, and how economic priorities should be established, would then emerge contingently from an ongoing conversation about the nature of the good life—a conversation grounded in collective experience and knowledge. Utility, instead of being a rarefied abstraction—“a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity,” as the prominent economist Joan Robinson (1962) put it—or being reified in decontextualized material objects, would be substantively defined through public deliberation. Usefulness and utility would thus no longer be phantasms in the mind of abstracted individuals or fetishized properties of commodities. They would be concrete and contextual, assuming their natural form as emergent features in the social life of communities. The result of this regrounding of utility would be to make possible the state of afairs Keynes optimistically envisioned for the future during the dark early years of the Depression.

Conclusion

271