Time, Money, and Labor History's Encounter with Consumer Culture

TY - JOUR

T1 - Time, Money, and Labor History's Encounter with Consumer Culture

AU - Cross, Gary

N1 - Funding Information: Although the benefits of time and goods seldom were placed in opposition, free time was stressed because of the assumption of limited needs. Since the 1880s, the traditional liberal understanding of productivity as flowing from fear of want gradually was displaced by a social liberalism which saw growth as emanating from the systematic deployment of trained physical labor and managerial organization. This productivist ideology linked efficiency with improved working conditions and especially shorter working hours. The international and nearly universal concession of the eight-hour day immediately after World War I was justified on productivist principles.31 An uneasy and ironic detente emerged during World War I between organized labor and efficiency reformers who affirmed that innovation was the instrument and concomitant of plenty and leisure. Only capitalist mismanagement impeded the full realization of these benefits.32 This thinking was part of the rationale for the thirty-and forty-hour-week campaigns of the early depression years. Labor and its allies argued that increased productivity in the 1920s had not been balanced by either higherwages or a sharing of worktime. The consequence was "underconsumption" and massive unemployment (or to put it in labor's terms, unfunded and undistributed leisure time). While the thirty-hour week in the United States failed to win the support of the Roosevelt administration and international short-hour efforts produced no practical results, the French did pass a forty-hour week in June of 1936." To be sure, rank-and-file interest in free time was brief and almost always intertwined with concerns for job security and income, but the bias toward money was essentially defensive rather than drawn by the lure of consumer goods, at least in the interwar years.34 Rather, it was the whip of job and wage insecurity and the absence of a viable organized alternative that made that choice. In the interwar years, populist intellectuals and advocates of "democratic leisure" anticipated cultural benefits from free time. Linking together an optimistic assessment of new technology and its democratic cultural potential was a belief that increased material security and free time liberated a positive, not negative, psychological core.3S Paralleling early twentieth-century movements for shorter workdays were political struggles over the use of free time. Here the potential division between time and money was clearly revealed. Movements across the political spectrum attempted to organize the "new" leisure outside the consumer market. Politicians saw time free from work as the setting for the restoration of family, social solidarity, and character formation lost in the division and intensification of labor. A disparate group of liberals and social democrats on both sides of the Atlantic advocated democratic leisure, a voluntary and decentralized system of holiday camps, organized excursions, adult education, and sports clubs.36 These facilities were to create social alternatives to the private realm of commoditized pleasure. In Western Europe, at least, in the 1930s the holiday with pay became a symbol of this dream of social solidarity through leisure beyond the market. Politicians (especially those identified with the French Popular Front) began to give legitimacy to privatized expressions of family togetherness and youthful sociability in leisure.37 These ideas and programs failed, of course. But they were hardly marginal, even if they are today. Understanding why the free-time option has been eclipsed should help us explain the emergence of its alternative and sometimes imitator, mass consumerism. My short explanation is that in the long run the disciplinary implications of time and especially money prevailed over their empowering and liberating potential. But this was worked out in the intellectual, political, and social history of early twentieth-century industrial democracies. Briefly, let me suggest several ways in which the time option may have been eclipsed.

PY - 1993

Y1 - 1993

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=61049176192&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=61049176192&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/S0147547900011789

DO - 10.1017/S0147547900011789

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:61049176192

SN - 0147-5479

VL - 43

SP - 2

EP - 17

JO - International Labor and Working-Class History

JF - International Labor and Working-Class History

ER -