5 April 2009: "An intense feeling of ‘being trapped in suburbia’ overwhelms me when I have to ‘run errands.’"

This post is about the democratization of luxury. Phrases like the third world and its euphemistic derivative, the "developed world," have the effect of naturalizing the political divisions imposed by conquest and colonialism, recasting exploitation and despoliation as progress and "humanitarian aid." Using a lyric style to subtly underscore the poetic pretenses of developed-world narcissism, Carles looks at this history of territorial war through the lens of golden age myths that idealize the "primitive" state of nature.

It makes me sad
That all humans in the developed world
must go to the grocery store / an ‘everything store’
in order to stay alive

Wish things were more natural
and we had to hunt and gather
instead of ‘gathering money’ [via job]

Carles thereby sets up the opposition between decadent consumers in the first world and the noble savages elsewhere who have the unfair privilege of leading a more authentic-seeming existence.

I buy ‘groceries’
Makes me feel less unique
because I see every one there
rich or poor.

Class struggle, seen from the worm's-eye level of the individual consumer, seems like a struggle over personal identity, and how to make it redolent of the most cultural capital as possible -- to be "cool" and, if one is especially savvy, to leverage this "coolness" into economic advantages. Identity is proven to be itself a weapon of the bourgeoisie, a luxury good made up of decadent individualism that they lord over the proletariat even as workers struggle to unite and forge a collective resistance.

The simple solution to protecting this valuable aura of "cool" for the wealthy is a regime of sumptuary laws -- forbidding the rich and poor to shop for the same products. But the colonialist system of exploiting overseas workers achieves the same effects with less coercion and less unpleasantness for the individual consumers shaped by such market structurations. Then it just seems like fate that the poor and the rich have access to a different quality of goods, or more pernicious, that the poor simply make bad choices:

the poor usually buy stuff that’s ‘bad 4 u’
and I am fortunate enough to buy
stuff that’s ‘better 4 u’

The poor, displaced conceptually to some primitive other place, are presumably compensated by their more natural way of life in that elsewhere which of course does not exist. In reality, they suffer an existence to that chronicled by Marx in the blistering middle chapters of the first volume of Capital.

But if upper-class "uniqueness" is protected because of geographical segregation between rich and poor, far fewer feelings will be hurt through unpleasant confrontations, as when one discovers that one shares brands with one's house cleaner or nanny. Carles, naturally, uses his poet persona to skewer such snobbery:

I have built my personal brand around
’seeming like I have nothing 2 do with ppl
who have 2 perform trivial tasks 2 stay alive’

De-democratizing luxury may ultimately be a primary effect of our current financial crisis. The luxury goods may again become inaccessible, but the true posture of luxury transcends goods and instead depends on an ingrained attitude toward what is perceived culturally as work:

I want to be some1 who seems ‘young’
and ‘out of touch’ with ‘real life’ and ‘real errands.’

Insofar as luxury goods convey this distance, they are successful markers, functioning like barbed wire on the fence that separates the echelon of fat-cat vultures from the walking-dead working-class carrion they prey on. But when they fail to fulfill that function, the act of shopping itself can be brought into the breach. Ordinary consumption can be transvalued as degrading work, to better set it off from the discretionary spending in which the parasitical classes can indulge. But Carles, in a delicious piece of irony, intimates that the work shunned by the idle rich is precisely the nexus of the Real, wherein human can realize their species being through directed efforts and cooperation with their compatriots. Meanwhile, the idle, locked in individualistic isolation, can take solace only in the endless quest for the next distinction the preserves their trasured illusion of unique selfhood.