In all likelihood, if you were to ask someone if they were rich they would not reply in the affirmative. At most they would say “I’m doing okay.” Apart from the obvious tackiness of admitting one’s wealth, there is a general societal disconnect in regards to the objective nature of wealth. Media Matters offers a wonderful critique of a recent Los Angeles Times piece which presents wealth in purely subjective terms. While it is accurate to say that there is a profound difference between poverty in America and poverty in, say, Darfur. An individual making $300,000 is wealthy by any objective standard. Here is a passage from the article:

The Times then quotes its wealthy Manhattanite complaining that the $310,000 she and her husband make each year has to cover mortgage payments and college funds and private tutors, as though a Manhattan condominium is something other than an incredibly valuable asset. Rich people, the article seems to suggest, shouldn’t be considered rich if they spend their large salaries on the kinds of things rich people have. Or if there’s someone else who is richer — which is a rather limited definition of “rich.”

The 45-year-old Manhattanite is then quoted complaining “The 310K we live on in Manhattan is like the 70K” her parents “raised me and my brother on in Queens.” Maybe — but $70,000 a year was a lot of money in the 1970s, in Queens or elsewhere. In 1975, only five percent of households had income of at least $32,000. The Los Angeles Times did not point this out.

The Times then endorses the wealthy Manhattanite’s claim that she is not wealthy, asserting “When it comes to evaluating where she stands in the pecking order among her deep-pocketed neighbors, she “is probably as good a judge as academics or politicians.”

This obliviousness of social-class is characteristic of late-capitalist society. As described in the previous post, reification obscures the objective structure of society. Frederic Jameson offers a concise explanation of this process as follows:

The reification of late capitalism - the transformation of human relations into an appearance of relationships between things -renders society opaque: it is the lived source of the mystification on which ideology is based and by which domination and exploitation are legitimized. Since the fundamental structure of the social ‘totality’ is a set of class relationships - an antagonistic structure such that the various social classes define themselves in terms of that antagonism and by opposition with one another - reification necessarily obscures the class character of that structure, and is accompanied, not only by anomie, but also by that increasing confusion as to the nature and even the existence of social classes which can be abundantly observed in all the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries today.

As in the case of the wealthy Manhattanite, qualitative differences in living are brushed off as merely quantifiable differences in consumption. There is, however, a very real and substantive difference between the quality of life enjoyed by an individual making $310,000 per year and one making $35,000.

Read Media Matter’s article

By: Will C