"We Make Weekends": Leisure and the Commodity Form

The first third of the twentieth century witnessed a reduction in hours of work from 60.1 to 47 hours per week, primarily as a result of advancements, the activities of organized labor, new managerial approaches, and changes in the philosophy of within the economic elite.' However, although fewer hours were worked, output in the production of goods continued to increase.2 These trends created two problems: first, what to do with increased leasure time (Until lately, most people have had no leisure to use and, of course, they do not know how to use it),3 and second, how to absorb the economy's expanded productive capacity. Coupled with rising technological unemployment and declining opportunities for capital investment in traditional goods-producing sectors, these trends pointed towards a dilemma in continued capitalist development. The failure of existing markets to absorb the increasing surplus of goods revealed the limitations of the self-regulating free market4 and indicated that the deeply rooted cultural principles of deferred gratification were becoming a fetter to continued economic development. New opportunities for leisure posed the problem of social control over the industrial labor force as demanded by the labor-market system of modern capitalism. To maintain capitalist expansion, it was imperative that new markets be created to provide outlets for both the investment of surplus capital and the increasing abundance of goods. It was also necessary to provide a focus for workers' leisure compatible with the dictates of the workplace. A major response to both the problem of social control over leisure time of workers and the need for greater absorption of goods was consumerism. The social significance of consumerism was not lost on the leaders of corporate industrial thought: Prosperity, they declared, lies in spending, not in saving. The importance of leisure in this new scheme of things was sketched out by one of the leading architects of corporate capitalism: