Under communism, how do we clean our clothes?
- It’s not really efficient for every housing unit to have its own washing machine let alone dryer
- some people can dry clothes on lines but some can’t
- Washing clothes by hand sucks
- Laundromats suck
- Industrialized clothes washing? I have no direct experience with this
And it needs so much water.
To my mind laundry is one of the most intractable issues.
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I will ban clothes
More like kink_owl
then ass juices and piss will be everywhere, do you wanna sit in elderly grandma ass juices and piss?
do you like… just not clean yourself? are your clothes all full of ass juice and piss? what the fuck even is ass juice use a bidet holy shit
idk if you know this but plenty of people ‘leak’ when they get old.
Old people will also be banned under our great owl overlord.
that’s what diapers are for. you don’t just go around leaking piss and shit into your clothes
i am now on board with the policy of banning clothes specifically so people like you can be caught instead of just passively stinking places up with plausible deniability
But then you won’t be naked if you’re wearing diapers
never done any caregiving eh
You’ve got my vote!
Probably just do commcerial laundries. For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers. You bag up your clothes at the end of the week, they pick up the bags, wash everything, and send it back to you the next day or whatever. It’s been handled at all levels from individual mostly women doing laundry for clients to pretty substantial operations serving large numbers of people at once.
Right now hospitals and hotels have laundry systems with pretty high throughput. It’s very doable and largely a solved problem.
For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers
For rich people sure. But for normal people?
Yeah, pretty normal people. Doing laundry by hand is really labor intensive and you have to have fuel to heat water. It was worth it for relatively poor urban people to have someone do their laundry for them in many times and places. Like economically having one person heat a whole bunch of water at once just made more sense. If you did it at home you’d have to do laundry plus all your other daily tasks.
During the colonization of the American West, who did your laundry mostly depended on your marital status. Since laundry was “women’s work”, bachelors wouldn’t do it. But there weren’t a lot of women around during the early era of colonization, so you got Chinese immigrants (largely from Hong Kong) who would establish these commercial laundries to cater to all the single men who couldn’t or wouldn’t do their own laundry (it was also very time-consuming and arduous work). American racism against Chinese immigrants who held these jobs led to things like the avowedly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which was a labor organization that fought to keep these jobs legal.
Meat was also for rich people 500 years ago, but the wonders of industrialization led to many previously unattainable goods to become widespread.
Such a nonsense take, chickens and cattle were very widespread, as well as fishing. Inuit famously had a diet of almost entirely meat, though of course it wasn’t healthy and there were many vitamin issues.
This definitely varies from culture to culture, but being Spanish, I can tell you that meat was more often than not a cause for celebration, to the point that the pig slaughter was a community event that took place in the main square of the village. Data for meat consumption over time in the former Russian Empire and the USSR also suggests that meat wasn’t a thing people used to have often, and whose access increased with industrialization.
I don’t even know how you’d begin to measure meat consumption when basically everyone owned chickens and reporting them would be bureaucratically impossible until the modern era
Even modern peasantry often have cattle for milk and chicken eggs all the time.
There’s variety within any profession like this, at many points in history it hasn’t been the norm for normal people in urban settings to cook their own food or have cooking facilities at home, instead they purchased food from people whos job it was to cook.
But there would still be a difference between a business serving everyday people and personal chefs/cooking staff.
people in urban settings to cook their own food
I’ve already solved this problem in my mind. Got the basics of a system worked out for neighbourhood cafeterias.
You can still cook at home if/when you want to, but you can also attend the local cafs. There is 1 caf per x population, adjusted according to how heavily used they are. You can eat there or pickup (returnable, standardized) tupperwears for a middle ground if you prefer to have private at-home meal. I think it would be a great benefit especially for families. Reduce the amount of time you need to spend at the grocery store, cooking, cleaning, dishes etc. Would overall reduce the amount of food waste at both the individual kitchen and the grocery store level.
The food would be prepared according to healthy guidelines. We also have some sort of accounting for regional availability of foods. The selections would be subject to some sort of democratic control so that people could get food they liked. Regionalism would be accounted for. Some kitchen teams might decide to be extremely specialized in a given cuisine. I’m sure at the end of the days we’d have something that takes things like lent, ramadan, whatever, into consideration.
You don’t have to go to your own neighbourhood caf, you can go to other ones too for variety or it’s more convenient for you. Maybe there is some sort of reservation system (website/phone/walk-in) so that food can be produced in correct amounts. But extras can always be portioned and frozen for pickup later.
For those who have extremely specific dietary requirements such as intolerance/allergy, religious, ethical, cultural, there can be specialized cafs which they can either attend physically, or if too remote, have pickup/delivery of meals. Delivery could be either at the home or to their local caf. So if you are a tiny minority vegan in a constituency which largely favors vegan-unfriendly food, the vegan kitchen can drop off meals for you at your caf and you can still go to the collective meal with everyone else.
Kitchen teams could do fun events things like swap locations, tours or guesting at other kitchens, come up with contests etc if they wanted to. In a dense urban environment you’d have lots of cafs all over the place so it wouldn’t be like needing to travel a long way (unless they wanted to!). In terms of a workplace, I think you could keep some of the elements of kitchen culture that suits a certain kind of person, like competitiveness and showing off, but without it being so toxic and abusive. Because there would be many, many teams in a city, they could sort themselves by work-style preferences. Those who wanted a totally different wokrplace culture could have it.
Also include some way to teach cooking skills, particularly with an eye to preserving cultural styles of cooking. both to other professional food workers but also to whoever just wanted to learn.
This is my delicious dream.
Laundromats are fine, but actually, I could imagine there being a launderer that collects bins of laundry at a municipal level like they already do for garbage (and recycling and compost in some places!)
The laundry collector can be a community hero much like the garbage collector, with good compensation for their time doing a dirty and socially necessary job.
EDIT Oh someone already said that. Well. I agree!
Laundromats are fine
What’s your experience? I’ve been washing my clothes mostly always in laundromats for 20+ years. They are not fine.
- You need to spend so much time either hanging around or going back n forth. Every week I spend 1-3 hours of time that I wouldn’t have if I had an in-unit washer/dryer.
- Lots of maintenance/equipment problems
- Uneven availability of machines — you can show up and have to wait around because someone else came and filled every single machine at once
- Problems like the last person used bleach and it didn’t rinse properly so now there’s just bleach and your clothes get ruined
- machines are really limited in their settings, don’t allow the freedom to add things at different parts of the wash, let is soak for a bit, or other things you can do with a normal domestic unit
- people are always there with all their bed bug stuff
Some places in the US have what are called “wash and folds” where your drop off your laundry and they’ll do it for you, usually charging by the pound. You pick it up folded.
Even some dry cleaners will do this.
Obviously more expensive than a laundromat, but, as always, it’s a question of how much you value your time.
I was eyeing a wash n fold for a while but then I moved and now there isn’t one anywhere close. I was procrastinating the whole thing because it felt too… lazy. But holy fuck I hate the laundromat.
Laundromats suck. No argument here.
I’m in a rural area so the traffic to laundromats is pretty low; my experience probably doesn’t match the typical one! The machines all worked, there were rarely more that one or two people, etc.
Yeah, the time lost to laundry in of itself is a pain. I could bring a book, but I still gotta carve out a block of time to do me and someone else’s laundry. I gotta do it often as well, since I got a messy job and not a lot of clothes. I mean, I got a lot of clothes but it’s hard to find the time to break out my sewing kit and fix up some of my pants.
Communal laundry rooms with washers only, one room with several machines per floor in the commie block. The machines are owned in common by everyone in the building. Everyone has this kind of dryer in the bathroom.
What’s the evidence that washing machines are not efficient? They probably use less water than a human would.
Having said that, maybe there’s a better designed machine or something that hasn’t been invented yet?
They’re not in use most of the time when everyone has one, so we’re overproducing washing machines just so people can have them privately in their homes.
I’m not using my chefs knife most of the time either, but I sure as fuck am not going to walk to the community chef knife repository every time I want to use one.
My shower only sees 10 minutes of use a day, do I need to remove half of my bathroom and share with a dozen people so we aren’t over producing fiberglass showers?
How about my vacuum? I only use that about once a week, probably shouldn’t even own one of those either. I’ll just pop on down to grab a vacuum when someone else isn’t using it, maybe make a schedule for who gets to use one and when for max efficiency, like a vacuum library.
It’s not like they wear out sitting there for a week, they wear out when they get used. I would agree that the race to the bottom in quality is bad, and more people should have durable repairable machines that don’t hook up to the wifi, but I don’t think that a non-consumable utility like a washing machine is bad for people to own and use.
It’s not about good or bad, it’s about efficiency. I get being skeptical about Americans currently being able to come up with a reliable system of sharing, but we desperately need to curtail consumption and durable shared goods is one way to get there. If I had the extra time afforded by reasonable production levels to go to collective repositories for a vacuum I wouldn’t mind that. It’s a drag right now because I alternate shifts with my partner to afford to live, but in a more reasonable society a little exercise and planning wouldn’t hurt me.
Westerners live an unsustainable lifestyle. Things will have to change to coexist with everyone on a planet we can sustain.
You could say that about most things in peoples homes…
just wear the clothes in the shower with you
As to washing up! Where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of this long and dirty work, that is usually done by hand, solely because the work of the domestic slave is of no account.
In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which hot water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under these conditions the problem was a simple one, and a woman – Mrs. Cochrane – solved it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates or dishes, wipes them and dries them, in less than three minutes. A factory in Illinois manufactures these machines and sells them at a price within reach of the average middle-class purse. And why should not small households send their crockery to an establishment as well as their boots? It is even probable that the two functions, brushing and washing up, will be undertaken by the same association.
Cleaning, rubbing the skin off your hands when washing and wringing linen; sweeping floors and brushing carpets, thereby raising clouds of dust which afterwards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places where they have settled down, all this work is still done because woman remains a slave, but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely better done by machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into households, and the distribution of motor-power in private houses will enable people to work them without muscular effort.
Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for them, it is because they are not in general use, and chiefly because an exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to live in grand style and who have speculated on land, raw material, manufacture, sale, patents, and duties.
But emancipation from domestic toil will not be brought about by small machines only. Households are emerging from their present state of isolation; they begin to associate with other households to do in common what they did separately.
In fact, in the future we shall not have a brushing machine, a machine for washing up plates, a third for washing linen, and so on, in each house. To the future, on the contrary, belongs the common heating apparatus that sends heat into each room of a whole district and spares the lighting of fires. It is already so in a few American cities. A great central furnace supplies all houses and all rooms with hot water, which circulates in pipes; and to regulate the temperature you need only turn a tap. And should you care to have a blazing fire in any particular room you can light the gas specially supplied for heating purposes from a central reservoir. All the immense work of cleaning chimneys and keeping up fires – and woman knows what time it takes – is disappearing.
Candles, lamps, and even gas have had their day. There are entire cities in which it is sufficient to press a button for light to burst forth, and, indeed, it is a simple question of economy and of knowledge to give yourself the luxury of electric light. And lastly, also in America, they speak of forming societies for the almost complete suppression of household work. It would only be necessary to create a department for every block of houses. A cart would come to each door and take the boots to be blacked, the crockery to be washed up, the linen to be washed, the small things to be mended (if it were worth while), the carpets to be brushed, and the next morning would bring back the things entrusted to it, all well cleaned. A few hours later your hot coffee and your eggs done to a nicety would appear on your table. It is a fact that between twelve and two o’clock there are more than twenty million Americans and as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton, boiled pork, potatoes and a seasonable vegetable. And at the lowest figure eight million fires burn during two or three hours to roast this meat and cook these vegetables; eight million women spend their time preparing a meal which, taking all households, represents at most a dozen different dishes.
“Fifty fires burn,” wrote an American woman the other day, “where one would suffice!” Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if you like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal! Why fifty fires, when two people and one single fire would suffice to cook all these pieces of meat and all these vegetables? Choose your own beef or mutton to be roasted if you are particular. Season the vegetables to your taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a single kitchen with a single fire and organize it as beautifully as you are able to.
Why has woman’s work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think “of those kitchen arrangements,” which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge – woman.
To emancipate woman, is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the “emancipated” woman will always throw her domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.
It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.
Conquest of Bread, Chapter 10.2
This is a utopian answer, but you asked a utopian question. I couldn’t find a Marxist who wrote about this.
absolutely a utopian question. thank you for the utopian (if 19th c answer).
“Fifty fires burn where one would suffice!” said some smart lady ?200? years ago. Foretelling climate catastrophes…
Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity
yo
I don’t think it has to be one way. Maybe some people have their own units, maybe other places have communal units, maybe certain places have industrial launderers. It’ll depend a lot on the conditions specific to each location.
Personally I lean towards communal units with anything that only gets used once a week or less (and takes up space and/or a decent chunk of resources to produce). Boats, laundry machines, power tools, trucks, guns, whatever.
If we all wear the Half Life 2 blue jumpsuits can I just get a clean one in my size? I don’t care about specifically getting back my jumpsuit
When I was a little kid it was explained to me that Under Communism this is how things worked. You don’t even get your own clothes. Since I was a freaky little kid with a …distinctive… fashion sensibility it was horrifying enough.
Now that I’m adult and worn down by the world it doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.
you don’t need a washer and a dryer in every unit, but you can have like 2 washers, a heated drying room with good ventilation and a tumble drier per, like, 20 units. a communal laundry room where you book a time slot like once every week or two weeks. very common in Scandinavian rental blocks.
Washing clothes by hand sucks
it doesn’t suck that much, i could see people rotating out this task like any other chore. idk how necessary that would be though, im not sure how energy/water efficient washing machines are
If it’s a rotating task, that means someone is washing hundreds of ponds of laundry by hand. Washing machines exist for a reason
If it’s a rotating task, that means someone is washing hundreds of ponds of laundry by hand
yeah, so?
Washing machines exist for a reason
and we got by without them for thousands of years
I apologize, but this is not a coherent nor Marxist line of reasoning. Since labor is definitionally socially necessary, washing clothes by hand is just wasted time and unused labor. The socially necessary labor required for cleaning clothes is the labor of the washer and a small portion of that of the engineer, machinist, and all of those involved in the production of the machine and detergent. In washing clothes by hand, the labor performed is still only that of the labor it takes to load and run the machine, however, the effort expended by the either is significantly more than that; the labor of those involved in the production of the machine goes nowhere. By refusing to keep labor to socially necessary means, you might as well be using gold plated washing machines. The worker’s time belongs to the workers and shouldn’t be wasted.
you’re assuming that there are no negative effects of using washing machines, which is not an assumption I feel comfortable making.
and I never claimed to be a marxist, don’t go throwing that around as an insult
The negative effects of washing machines are that they consume quite a bit of electricity. This, however, is negligible compared to transportation, recreation, and cooling. Going back to 18th century technology serves only to waste a considerable amount of effort from the workers in order to save very little electricity. Furthermore, the issue with electricity is not overconsumption from residential sources, but rather industrial overconsumption and poor production.
The negative effects of washing machines are that they consume quite a bit of electricity
What mathematical formula did you use to determine that washing machines consume less water than hand washing? Or that the production and shipping of washing machines totals less labor than hand washing?
M'=M+M∆applies here, but the expressionC'=c+v+salso applies. The issue with all the equations derived fromM -> C -> Mset is that they all assume exploitation by the capitalist and don’t precisely map to socialist production. I strongly recommend you read Capital to understand how the labor process works. Pay special attention to chapter 1 of volume 1 as that clears up most of your misconceptions.
a Valtori seems fun.
this is great if we can make an updated version that’s mechanized?? oo many cranks turning chains etc in this one.
looks to be doing 1 garment at a time, is that for the sake of the video?
it would be really cool to just dump my clothes into a canal, then stroll down to the end to have them come out cleaned.
Mechanized?!?! The water does the mechanization!! I think the cranks and chains is just to assist those who may be more on the feeble side.
This machine can clean 5 blankets in 10 minutes.
This is the canal, just twisted around in one spot, you can stroll somewhere if you want to and come back or chat with your neighbors while they wash their crap.
A tourist video of some Romanian Valtori.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
