On the Petty Bourgeoisie and Luxury Goods

It is perfectly normal for young people to feel lowly when they see luxury goods and lavish places. The original purpose of designing luxury goods is precisely to make proletarians with little or nothing feel lowly. A sense of lowliness and powerlessness is already a basic feeling among those with tiny amounts of capital and proletarians. Luxury goods are simply a precisely targeted psychological attack.

Destroying and wasting small amounts of capital for others to see is both a threat and a temptation. Drive a nice car, and people will treat you more politely. It is a declaration of rank in a hierarchy of power. When proletarians with next to nothing have to trade their lives for even small amounts of assets, this is a destruction of life and negative entropy. A sacrifice of blood, a sacrifice of entropy. In Durkheim’s account, ritual allows people to perceive the existence of society. Luxury goods participate in the construction of society and the drawing of class distinctions.

Luxury goods are inevitably priced against benchmarks of average monthly income per person (Moutai, accessories, iPhones), annual income (handbags), and 40 years of income (luxury cars, the threshold for petty-bourgeois status).

When people with tiny amounts of capital sacrifice their hard-earned money to participate in these rituals, they are blindly worshipping and imitating big capital. Young white-collar workers following fashion and spending their hard-earned money on expensive ocean-fish sashimi have something of the feel of a sinister cult, eating their own flesh and blood (I mean my former self).

Luxury goods are a ritual of capitalism, a form of social construction. Maupassant’s “The Necklace” is a classic piece about luxury goods.