"Luxury then can take on many guises, depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change, by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the privileged and the onlookers-- the watching masses. Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes stated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp.
The moral is not surprising: every luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement creates. An eternal 'class struggle.'
In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote: 'it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the great stimulus'." from The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979-1981.
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Does this mean we can expect the masses will soon all be owning yachts? Or boats? Or at least vacation getaways?
Luxuries are things that set the rich or elites apart but also tantalize ambitions in the poor. It's possible with a generous reading to imagine in this social relationship some possibilities for progress, and not just the dreary treadmill of the "eternal class struggle," IF so many actually existing rich were not such cold stingy misers.
This is also a capsule chunk of an argument economic anthropology has with formal economic science. Econ 101 assumes production is the driving force in social development. Anthropology, Mauss and Braudel, say the pursuit of luxury, this eternal class struggle, is the driving force in social development. Although not "class struggle" like Marx, a dialectic struggle that will eventually resolve itself with armed revolution and then some fully-automated communist Kumbaya utopia. But eternal struggle like there will always be rich and poor and the latter will always desire the exclusive privileges of the former; a cultural social hierarchy in constant state of tension and flux.
World building, or politics, from this anthropology angle then, Mauss, Braudel, Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, might concern negotiating some sustainable peaceful balance between those that would rather defend existing inequality and property relations by force, conservatives, Republicans, police state fascists, and those that would rather liberate the poor from the predations of the rich. Braudel's sympathies are obvious and appreciated; if too CRT for the present.
Liberal in the sense of government protections for individual human rights. Governments, communities, investing in progressively reducing the hardships of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of health care, education, etc. Not neoliberal in the sense of protecting wealth and markets from democracy and basic human rights.
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