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of working class consumption is coterminously invariable. In fact, socialisation of
consumption that abuts on to the increasing commodification of the society resorts to
a particular wage modality and a particular shopfloor structure of labour-power(i.e.
mechanisation or non-mechanisation of labour). In short, the contingencies of
effective demand, for Aglietta and contra Keynesians, are an element of the
production of surplus-value and not about the evenness or unevenness of income
patterns(1979:155). Social consumption norm is then tantamount to the terms in
which the collective worker under capitalism is a brisance of both the extent of the
social system of production and the determinant variants that cuff social consumption
into a strictly capitalistic model. On top of that, a wage-society under the stimuli of
the collectivisation of labour and increasing mechanisation must cater to all
consumptive units irregardless of the employability of those or the nominality of the
wages(since state may finance those temporarily or otherwise incomeless segments).
In other words, a wage-labour economy is truly a wage-society when there is indeed a
plenary socialisation of the mode of consumption to the extent that a social
consumption norm is evocative of a canonical modality of surplus-value production.
Again very briefly, with acute mechanisation of the capitalist labour process, workers
are no longer astute about their particular work effort. Work under such
circumstances is no longer an amalgam of myriad bravura but severely austere
fragments within a larger and increasingly elusive system of machinofacture. These
transformations via mechanisation anticipate a mass production of commodities which
then extirpates all non-capitalist forms of production to the extent that there would be
now a monolithic moraine of value. The fact that the non-capitalist household
network –the non-commodified mode of consumption of the working class- would
incrementally and soon abate, is generously concordant with this firsthand
mechanisation of work within the capitalist labour process and the Taylorist ideal of
an austere worker. This exile from the precapitalist household is therefore the
counterpart to the mechanisation of work into petty units of exertion. Each worker,
now a mere stale fragment of the collective worker and/or social labour-power and yet
simultaneously a solitary competitor in the labour market via the terms of the wage
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