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

Despite the increasing acceptance of wage-labor exchange, however, it was (and indeed remains) quite unclear on what basis the life activity given up as labor could ever be clearly commensurable with the wage. For the wage is a quantitative abstraction, while the activity of labor is qualitative. If labor activity and the wage are diferent in kind, therefore not obviously commensurable, on what principled grounds can they stand in a particular ratio to one another? You simply can’t have a meaningful ratio between magnitudes of diferent kinds.8 To be sure, the ratio of labor time to, for example, the amount of money needed to buy a car can be described—such that one car might equal two thousand hours of work. But describing the ratio at which things happen to exchange, at a given point in time and space, is not the same thing as establishing an objective principle of exchange, according to which a particular ratio is the correct—that is, fair—one. For an exchange to be objectively fair, some shared characteristic has to be attributed to the exchanged substances—something like utility, socially averaged labor time, or some other measure of value.

Moreover, for wage labor to be a fair exchange of commensurable substances, labor must be an alienable commodity—separable from the subject. But it is not obvious how that could be so. Indeed, a great deal of skepticism has been expressed about the proposition that labor is alienable, both in the early period of capitalism, and by thinkers such as Karl Polanyi, who argued that labor (along with money and land) can only ever be a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi 1957). Although within capitalism, labor is de facto sold for a wage, it cannot easily be thought of as alienable, because labor is, as Marx put it, just life activity and is in that sense at one with the person. The nineteenthcentury labor leader George McNeil put the point pithily: “He who sells his labor sells himself” (Stanley 1998, p. 88).

But if labor is neither obviously alienable nor self-evidently commensurable with the wage, what could a “fair wage” possibly mean? Of course, one concept of fairness in wage-labor exchange is that similar work should be similarly compensated.9 But that norm does not make labor per se commensurable with the wage. It gives criteria for making judgements about who is being unfairly compensated within a reference group but does not establish whether the wages of a given group are fair relative to the work done for them. The question of whether a given wage is fair compensation for the work exchanged for it under capitalism has thus remained (and perhaps must ever remain) unresolved, an ongoing subject of debate. Finding a way to think about and represent wage labor in terms that make it into a potentially fair economic exchange became, then, a project imbued with a great deal of normative force, for workers, for the state, and for business.

82

Time for Things

The tension between the urge to find grounds on which wage labor could be fair and the seemingly insoluble problem of the incommensurability between labor and the wage points to a possible explanation for the historical pattern described over the last three chapters. The pattern, to reiterate, is the tendency for increases in productivity to be converted into higher real wages rather than more free time and for those wages to be used to accumulate a greater number of commodities than seems reasonable given constraints on their use imposed by limitations of time. That tendency begins to make more sense in the context of an ongoing efort on the part of wage earners to make the wage commensurable with work (such that a kind of commensuration, therefore fairness, could at least seem to be achievable). Labor becomes commensurable with the wage to the degree that wage goods come to index (to use a Marxian image) congealed durations of time-in-use—that is, free activities that hypothetically could be undertaken by wage earners and so serve to counterbalance the unfree activity represented by work. In accumulating commodities, and, in particular, consumer durables, consumers accumulate envisaged, or virtual, free time. The wage, which, prima facie, is not commensurable with the labor given up for it, comes to represent an exchange of roughly equivalent substances by virtue of being converted into objects that index potential free time. In Marxian terms, labor power is given up in exchange for the use power (we could also say “leisure power” or “activity power”) indexed by accumulated commodities.

When commodities are construed as hypothetical durations of free activity, a fair trade-of between time and commodities becomes thinkable, because commodities become, in essence, stores of potential free time. To the extent that this approach to wage goods takes hold, we would expect wage workers to be at least indiferent to whether increases in productivity are realized as more free time or higher real wages. Given the tendency of businesses to prefer to turn improved productivity into increased output rather than a lower wage bill, the pattern evident in the US economy from the 1920s onward (and also, to varying degrees, elsewhere under advanced industrial capitalism) thus begins to make more sense.

Of course, as objects are accumulated with no increase in free time, it is increasingly dificult to realize their use value—time does not in reality expand as commodity objects are acquired. But once things come to index hypothetical free activity, the possibility of commensuration between labor and wage becomes plausible, insofar as the wage can be used to accumulate free-time indexing objects. By spending the wage on goods that are framed as reserves of free activity, wage earners come to have some sense of having achieved (or at least of being in the process of achieving) fair compensation for their labor.10 Moreover, when commodities represent standing reserves of potential utility, to be drawn on in a time frame extending indefinitely into the future, it becomes easier for consumers to ignore the decreasing amount of time they have in the present in which to actually realize the use value of the commodities they own.

A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration

83

Thus, the use of the wage to accumulate potential free time congealed in wage goods provides wage earners with a general sense that labor can, when compensated by suficient real wage income, be fair. And the sense that it is possible for the exchange between labor and wage, if the ratio is right, to be objectively fair, then attenuates the categorical understanding of wage earners as subjects of exploitation. The exploitation associated with wage labor changes from being an essential feature of the institution, to one contingent on the amount of purchasing power received in the form of the wage.

To be sure, certain background conditions are required for this state of afairs to take hold. The most important of these is that wage labor should not be so onerous as to strike people as abject exploitation. If work hours are endlessly increasing, or if conditions of work are dangerous, then the ability to accumulate time-indexing objects would be unlikely to seem like adequate compensation. But in the context of working conditions that are not abject, the urge to commensurate labor with its wage produces an open-ended form of consumption, as wage earners are moved to accumulate commodities that signify free time as compensation for their ongoing loss of time and freedom through labor. This accumulative mode of consumption, as noted earlier, played a crucial role in maintaining what became a quite robust dynamic equilibrium under industrial capitalism for much of the twentieth century. Increasing productivity (and aggregate output) led to rising real income, which increased aggregate efective demand (thus absorbing output), which encouraged further investment in fixed capital, which in turn then led to further increases in productivity (and output). This dynamic characterized capitalism in the relatively stable form it took during its Golden Age or Fordist incarnation (Aglietta 2000; B oyer 1990; Piore and Sabel 1986; Mandel 1999).

84

Time for Things

The materialist disposition of wage earners—expressed in their assent to an arrangement in which increased productivity was realized as more real income rather than less work—thus made possible the stability of the system of mass production. We need not, however, follow the neo-Marxist Keynesian theorists of the regulation school—or classical Marxists, such as Ernest Mandel—in positing systemic mechanisms to explain how Fordist workers became mass consumers (Aglietta 2000; Mandel 1999).11 Nor, for that matter, need we follow the more cultural and psychoanalytic path taken by some theorists of the Frankfurt School, who saw mass consumer demand as being a result of desublimation caused by the capitalist culture industry (Marcuse 1964). Rather, the propensity to turn increased productivity into more commodities, as opposed to less work time, can be viewed as a response on the part of wage earners to the perturbing question of what underpins the legitimacy of wage labor—more specifically, to the question of what could possibly make wage-labor exchange objectively fair. Once wage earners accept that the wage in theory represents an exchange of commensurable substances, despite there being no conclusive, or even obvious, grounds on which to establish that a given wage is commensurate with the labor exchanged for it, there will be some impetus to convert wage rate increases (and higher productivity) into stuf—commodities—that can more readily be construed as equivalent to life activity sold as labor.

The behavior of wage earners in the sphere of consumption can, therefore, be made sense of in terms of an efort to resolve tensions underlying wage labor. These tensions were a result of the emergence of a loose consensus that working for a wage must at least potentially constitute a fair economic exchange, in the absence of any obvious objective definition of fairness—that is, one based on self-evident facts. The dificulty in arriving at a clear definition of fairness was in large part a result of the problem of the inalienability of labor and the incommensurability between labor and its wage. But wagelabor exchange, according to my argument, became plausibly fair in the context of an understanding of wage goods as reservoirs of potential free activity, and through a corresponding, accumulative mode of consumer behavior. If what wage earners get from a higher wage is a store of commodities that are at least notionally convertible into free time at some imaginable future point—in other words, something like a store of free activity—then an increase in real wages becomes qualitatively interchangeable with an increase in free time. For workers, spending the wage in order to accumulate stores of use value in efect retroactively rationalizes wage-labor exchange.

A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration

85

Once wage goods become understood as abstract stores of potential activity, to be turned into free activity at some indeterminate future point, and once free activity is thought about in terms strongly mediated by the use power of owned commodity objects, the decision about whether to push for more free time, rather than higher real wages, loses much of its urgency. There is no longer the kind of trade-of envisaged by some economists, whereby as income increases, so does the relative value of leisure. That trade-of would result in a backward-bending supply curve for labor, which, as we saw in the last chapter, fails to describe the empirical pattern of work time, labor productivity, and wages over the course of the twentieth century.

To be clear, the argument here does not involve a functionalist claim that in order to secure quiescent workers and suficient aggregate demand, the capitalist system somehow induced in wage earners a tendency to think about usefulness primarily in terms of the properties of things (as opposed to thinking of it in terms of the conditions under which activities are possible). Rather, it posits a response on the part of wage earners, to make wage labor into a fair exchange by construing commodities as repositories of free activity. Given a state of afairs in which there is no alternative to wage labor, wage earners accommodate themselves to their situation by thinking about wage-labor exchange in terms that make it at least potentially fair. As noted, viewing commodities as indexical of free time rationalizes the institution of wage labor. It makes what used to be regarded as an illegitimate exchange of incommensurable substances (parts of a life for a wage) into an exchange of commensurable substances and, therefore, conceivably legitimate. The argument rests on the normative power of notions of fairness, under conditions in which there is no longer an easily imaginable practical alternative to wage labor. The concern with how to square the circle of a fair exchange of labor for a wage was, it is important to mention, present across the public sphere, and also in government bodies and business. There was a quite general tendency, once capitalism was established, to construe wage-labor exchange in terms that make it a potentially fair arrangement.

In sum, this efort to make work commensurable with its wage thus suggests a novel explanation for the demand side of capitalism’s characteristic expansionary dynamic. In the introduction I posed the question: Why has aggregate demand under capitalism tended to facilitate the drive toward capital valorization in the sphere of production? If capitalism is driven to expand, how is it that aggregate demand has, on the whole, enabled that expansion? Of course, it is not always the case that there is enough shortterm efective aggregate demand to forestall crisis, as was shown most dramatically in the 1930s. But why haven’t economic crises occurred more often than has been the case? Why are catastrophes like the Depression periodic rather than perennial features of capitalism in the era of mass industrial production? More precisely, why, under industrial capitalism, do markets tend to clear at rates that ensure that the economy remains stable enough to allow for the reproduction of capitalism? After all, production precedes consumption, and capitalists, when making decisions about investment and output, are therefore always taking something of a leap of faith into an uncertain future.

86

Time for Things

Famously, Keynes (1936, pp. 161–62) thought that capitalist investment is impelled by irrational “animal spirits,” by which he meant a “spontaneous optimism,” and an irrational “urge to action rather than inaction.”12 The crucial role Keynes attributed to animal spirits followed from his belief that consumption is governed by habits that are slow to change. As he put it; “a man’s habitual standard of life usually has first claim on his income, and he is apt to save the diference which discovers itself between his actual income and the expense of his habitual standard” (p. 97). The natural sluggishness of consumer demand, according to Keynes, makes the important variable in determining macroeconomic stability the degree to which capitalists feel inspired by irrational spirits to invest the diference between national income and national consumption. But clearly investment decisions in industrial capitalism are also made on a rational, inductive basis. For capitalists have good empirical grounds for believing that consumers will tend to be responsive to increases in output simply because since the inception of capitalist mass production, aggregate demand has tended to keep pace with increasing output.13

The willingness of capitalists to invest in industrial facilities and equipment has, then, depended not just on blind optimism, but also on what has been a quite consistent tendency for consumption to expand to absorb production. The inductive grounds on which investments are made are surely, on balance, more important to the ongoing stability of capitalism than the eruptions of exuberance Keynes had in mind. Yet it is unclear why, once afluent conditions prevail, aggregate demand should be, on the whole, strong enough to encourage investment (thereby facilitating the expansionary impulses of the system of production). Why, in Keynesian terms, should the propensity to consume be such as to facilitate the conversion of increases in productivity into increases in aggregate output? After all, Keynes himself, in his 1930 essay, argued that it is common sense that at some level of productivity, material demand would be sated, and the economy would come to rest in a stationary state. In fact, the actual historical dynamism of consumer demand, its responsiveness to increasing output under capitalism, goes against Keynes’s assumptions about the habitual constraints and rational limits on consumption. It was only because under capitalism “man’s habitual standard of life” had become curiously dynamic and open-ended that capitalists came to feel confident about risking their capital in productive investments. Keynes’s theory thus leaves out a crucial, demand-side element in the workings of industrial capitalism.

A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration

87

The theory of mass consumption as wage labor commensuration argued for in this book fills that lacuna. According to the theory, the tendency of aggregate demand to keep pace with increasing output is a consequence of the moral economy underpinning the legitimacy of wage labor itself. The propensity to consume that facilitated the expansion of output under industrial capitalism reflected an urge to make the wage into something commensurable with labor. However, there is an ambiguity underlying the efort to make work commensurable with the wage through the hypothetical free time indexed by wage goods. Although free time objectified in wage goods seems qualitatively equivalent to life activity spent working, the equivalence between the two clearly does not yield a precise equation, such that n commodities = x hours of indexed free activity = x hours of work. While accumulating commodity goods might present itself as the best, or at least the most natural, way to make the wage commensurate with work, the efort to achieve commensuration is not guided by a clear and definite point at which the two are self-evidently equivalent, and a given amount of work has consequently been adequately compensated. This is because those goods can only even approximately work as commensurate compensation when they are put to use in activities, yet it is very often unclear to what degree that will be possible.

As has been noted, there are powerful constraints—such as limitations on time, energy and access to public goods—on the extent to which wage workers can actually convert accumulated commodities into free activities. These constraints, and the tensions they produce, occasionally lead to disenchantment with wage funded consumer accumulation, expressed in antimaterialistic social movements and ideologies. An alternative, and more common, response, however, is simply to move on to diferent products, in the belief that the problem is not constraints on free time but rather that the set of commodities the consumer happens to own at a particular time is not quite right and so needs to be changed. One efect of the dificulty of establishing just when commensuration between labor and its wage has been achieved is therefore to make consumers receptive to the flow of new products coming onto the consumer marketplace.

88

Time for Things

Moreover, because life activity and dead things are qualitatively distinct, the problem of making them commensurable remains ultimately intractable. Wage earners try to fill an ongoing deficit of freedom incurred by work by accumulating commodities that are, in themselves, just things, and so cannot possibly work as commensurate compensation. The norm by virtue of which work and wage goods are rendered commensurable is therefore inherently vague, entailing a kind of pseudocommensurability, based on only a rough sense of goods as denoting possible activity power.14 The vagueness of wagelabor commensuration has three dimensions: (1) the indeterminate quantity of wage goods required to commensurate a given amount of labor; (2) the uncertainty about whether goods will actually eventually be turned into free activity, such that the commensuration is consummated; and (3) the underlying incommensurability of things and life activity. This vagueness makes the project of accumulating wage goods, in order to achieve commensuration between labor and its wage, indefinite and interminable. Thus, the pursuit of commensuration gives consumption under capitalism the same irrational, open-ended, dynamic character as the capitalist system of production.

If the commensuration theory of consumption is correct, then modern industrial capitalism, especially during its Golden Age, between the Second World War and the 1970s, was made possible by a combination of mass industrial production, organized around various forms of Fordist enterprise, the emergence of a moral economy that secured widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the wage form on the basis of the commensurability of work and consumer commodities, and the development of a consumer economy that presented wage goods in a way that made them seem plausibly commensurable with work.15 Had mass production developed in the absence of the latter two developments, the demand-side problems generated by mass production, identified by analysts such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel (1986), would have ensued. The high and stable levels of aggregate efective demand required in order for industries based on very large fixed-capital investments (the kind of enterprise characteristic of mass production) to be profitable would not have been forthcoming. The positive feedback loop between increasing returns to scale in production and increasing aggregate demand would consequently have ground to a halt.

A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration

89

Moreover, as noted in Chapter 2, the tendency for the working population to be at least indiferent to whether increasing productivity is turned into more free time or more wage goods formed an important background condition for the success of Keynesian macroeconomic techniques in stabilizing the economy. Where labor comes to be regarded as commensurable with the wage by virtue of the notional activity power of wage goods, increases in income will tend to be used to increase consumption rather than being used to reduce work hours. This tendency for people to spend added increments of income means that demand-side macroeconomic policies, devised to ensure that aggregate efective demand is suficient to absorb output, are more likely to be efective. For example, fiscal policies aimed at stimulating the economy by putting more dollars in people’s pockets, such as tax credits for wage earners, presuppose that those dollars will add to aggregate demand rather than being used to reduce the amount of time spent working. If increases in income were used to reduce the length of the working week at constant real income, then the whole project of macroeconomic demand management would become much less feasible. The same is true of eforts on the part of government to increase aggregate demand by way of prolabor industrial relations policies. The strategy followed, for instance, in the United States during the New Deal, to shore up demand by bolstering union power (the idea behind the Wagner Act of 1935), operated under the assumption that unions would use that power to increase their members’ real wages, which would subsequently be spent, thus stimulating the economy. If union power, backed by government-sponsored collective bargaining rights, had been used to force reductions in work time at constant levels of real income, rather than to increase real income (and therefore boost aggregate demand), then that strategy would have failed.

At the same time, without the availability of mass produced, and importantly, standardized consumer commodities, endowed with stable properties and framed in such a way as to signify reserves of potential free activity, the exchange of labor for a wage would not have been so readily construable as a legitimate practice. For the standardized product notionally entailed a predictable duration of product use, which made it easier to envisage the accumulation of (standardized) commodities as representing an increasing store of potential free time. The creation of a certain kind of commodity—the standardized mass-produced consumer durable—understood as a material repository of free activity in potentia, thus made possible a form and magnitude of demand capable of supporting the system of production required for its manufacture. The moral economy that underpinned Fordism thus had both demand and supply sides—a demand for commensuration between labor and its wage, as a condition on its legitimacy, and a supply of wage goods framed in such a way as to make this commensuration seem possible.

90

Time for Things

The theory set out here is, in the first instance, an abduction—an attempt to account for a puzzling pattern by postulating a state of afairs from which that pattern would follow as a matter of course (Peirce 1903 [1997]; Frankfurt 1958). In the chapters that follow, I draw attention to some historical features of wage labor and consumer capitalism that provide some support for the theory. The empirical analysis concentrates on the United States between roughly 1900 and 1980, with particular focus on the period between 1920 and 1970. I take the US case to be an exemplar of high industrial consumer capitalism and would suggest that similar features can be found in other consumer societies, albeit in forms mediated by local conditions, particular histories, and cultural context. In the remainder of the present chapter I first note some explanative advantages, at a variety of diferent levels of analysis, ofered by approaching consumption as a form of wage-labor commensuration. The commensuration theory of mass consumption sheds light on otherwise puzzling aspects of the economic behavior under capitalism, and on a variety of large-scale cultural, institutional, and economic developments. Second, I consider some of the more obvious objections that could be lodged against the theory and ofer some responses to the objections.

1. Some Explanative Advantages of the Commensuration Theory

In this section I consider some ways in which the commensuration theory of work and consumption explains general patterns of economic behavior in modern industrial capitalist societies. This is not to claim that the theory is the only or best explanation for these patterns. However, the degree to which the theory can make sense of various features of capitalism provides some initial grounds for thinking that there might be something to it.

A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration

91