class, conspicuous consumption, and our contradictions

This week, we moved from the spiritual to the material plane. I’m so grateful for the open minds who sit with these concepts each Sunday morning, and for the kind feedback. Listeners online, thank you for tuning in – and a new essay and announcement is coming out next week :)Timestamps00:00 landing in the body08:48 theme 1: a primer on karl marx and bell hooks on class17:07 prompt 118:06 theme 2: class signalling and upward mobility22:57 prompt 224:06 key concepts: commodity, class consciousness, false consciousness25:40 imagining another way27:55 closingReflective Writing Prompts*  Reflect on the class that you and your parents came from, and your relationship to it.* Reflect on your relationship with conspicuous consumption, i.e., purchasing things as a performance or signal, rather than for practicality. How does it make you feel? Further reading* Class Matters: From Where We Stand by bell hooks was responsible for the second of a two-punch political awakening I had while recovering from a major surgery two years ago – in quick succession after the memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Chinese activist and artist Ai Wei Wei. Below is the quote I read in class:This uncertainty is shared by those who are not poor, but could be poor if jobs are lost. They too are afraid to say how much class matters. While the poor are offered addiction as a way to avoid thinking too much, working people are encouraged to shop. Consumer culture silences working people in the middle class. They are busy buying or planning to buy. Although their fragile hold on economic self-sufficiency is slipping, they still cling to the dream of a class-free society where everyone can make it to the top. They are afraid to face the significance of dwindling resources, the high cost of education, housing, and healthcare. They are afraid to think too deeply about class I understand the resistance that comes with thinking about class because we’re all complicit. We all have contradictions inside of us.* In 2009, Mark Fisher put words to the totalising effect of capitalism in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, speaking on behalf of all those who feel suffocated by a system that not only serves capital over the people, but also closes off all theoretical exit routes. When a community or an individual is being oppressed, there really is no more radical or necessary act than to look beyond the apparent limitations of the present in order to believe that something other than what appears to be real and pragmatic might one day arise, and probably sooner and in more forceful ways.* As early as the late 1800s, people thought the ultra rich from Gilded Age were doing weird things with their money. Sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen captures the absurdity and greed with rational clarity in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Two hundred years later, people are doing increasingly absurd and greedy things, but at least now we can (and should) call them out on it – while looking inside of ourselves to sit with our own contradictions.* The cover image of this post is by Lewis Hine, of a fourteen year old spinner in Brazos Valley Cotton Mill in 1913. See the collection here.Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. The NCLC photos are useful for the study of labor, reform movements, children, working class families, education, public health, urban and rural housing conditions, industrial and agricultural sites, and other aspects of urban and rural life in America in the early twentieth century. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yunshu.substack.com