Wealth & Money Quote by Raoul Vaneigem

Vaneigem’s line is a slap delivered with velvet gloves: it reframes “rich” not as a summit of achievement but as a storage problem. The sting comes from the inversion. Wealth, in the modern consumer economy, isn’t elevated taste or expanded freedom; it’s the capacity to accumulate junk at scale. “Poor objects” isn’t only about shoddy craftsmanship. It’s an insult aimed at the entire life-world of commodities: items designed for fast turnover, quick dopamine, and planned obsolescence, stripped of durability, repairability, or lasting meaning. Richness becomes a quantity metric precisely because the objects themselves can’t bear the weight of quality.

The specific intent is Situationist: to expose how consumer capitalism colonizes desire. Vaneigem, writing in the orbit of May ’68 and The Society of the Spectacle, is attacking the idea that material abundance equals a richer life. Subtext: the affluent subject is not sovereign; they are managed. A home filled with “poor objects” signals not discerning choice but successful capture by advertising, status anxiety, and a culture that confuses ownership with identity.

The phrase “nowadays” matters. It suggests a historical downgrade: a shift from wealth as patrimony, craft, or social power to wealth as throughput in a marketplace of disposable things. Even the rich are trapped in the same system as everyone else, just with bigger carts and better branding. The cynicism lands because it targets a modern embarrassment: we can buy almost anything, yet we keep buying things that feel like nothing.