Status Updates From The Anti-Capitalist Book of...

“If makeup is a creative pursuit, allowing women to express their individuality, why is the same picture painted day after day with little room for novelty and imagination? The woman who does not paint her face encounters sanctions that would never be applied to someone who chooses not to paint a watercolor.”

“If we do not critique capitalist compulsions, then statements from makeup magnates, like Helena Rubinstein - ‘there are no ugly women, just lazy ones’ - become truisms rather than merely grasping attempts to make billions by exploiting peoples’ insecurities.”

There is a difference between criticizing people for enjoying, buying, and wearing fashion and criticizing capitalism for compelling people constantly to buy new clothes.

Aesthetic labor: the facets of a person’s employment that insists they maintain a certain appearance to remain employed.

- staying up with fashions, hairstyles, makeup, etc. to receive promotions, be taken seriously, etc.

“While fashion can provide an outlet for aesthetic creativity and enjoyment, this is subject to the demands of the markets that control fashion production. In this way, the human need for clothing and creativity has been commodified into the production of fashion for profit.”

“Imaginary appetites and false needs are created without regard to whether they are real or dehumanizing and without regard for what they have done and continue to do to the biosphere, the animal kingdom, and the planet.“

“In the late 1990’s, when the Adbusters Media Foundation tried to buy air for its Buy Nothing campaign, it was turned down by CBS on the grounds that it was contrary to the country’s current economic policy. These are examples of the subordination of human needs to the imperative of corporations to accumulate wealth.”

“Instead of Use Value, symbolic values like love, wealth, and power are attributed to commodities. Capitalism has changed what we value as a society, value is now associated with market based value alone, that which can be traded or sold. Real value, that of love, solidarity, truth, connection, and nature has been reduced to existing in a haunted form.”

Use value: the value of a commodity based on its ability to meet human need

“World trade churns almost entirely around the needs not of individual consumption, but of production.” - Marx
“Corporations must produce fashion in order to make money. If everyone bought only the clothes they needed, it would spell disaster for corporations, so instead, false needs are created to keep everyone shopping.”

40,000 year old sewing needles have been found on Paleolithic sites

“Displays of excess wealth are as much a product of poverty as a $2 bikini. There is no luxury without blinding inequality and exploitation, nor is there any evidence that shopping for expensive clothes is better or that wealthy, ‘good’ shoppers have smaller carbon footprints.”

“The problem we face is not scarcity, but inequality.”

“We have been sold a nightmare, one in which the communal question of ‘what do we need?’ is less important than the consumerist question of ‘what do I want?’”

2/2 Is it any wonder that under neoliberalism, having endured decades of propaganda that says community is dead and the consumer is king, that people wanted to shop to deal with Covid sadness and uncertainty, and that we sometimes feel more of a sense of connectivity with the things we buy than with the human beings who deliver them to our doors?”

1/2 “The commodities that surround us, from clothes to electronics, are steeped in violence, from the violence of colonial trade routes to present day workers trapped in burning factories. At the other end of supply chains, life buckles with dissatisfaction. Bullshit jobs, an acute loss of control, and a system that presents shopping as salvation, identity, community, & entertainment all rolled into one. -

Communicative Capitalism: A system where networked media channels political energy into the circulation of opinions and feelings, rather than collective action, fostering a culture of consumerism and self-interest

- replaces real political change. I.e. posting Instagram stories instead of organizing irl and feeling like one has done a hard day’s work

“The theory of communicative capitalism does not argue that networked communications never facilitate political resistance, nor that all web based activity is trivial. The Internet is very useful for connectivity, but the question remains: why in an age celebrated for its communications, there is no response?”

Traditional forms of resistance that bring about massive social change: class based organizing and action, strikes, physical demonstrations.

- replaced by communicative capitalism

“Not only does this infrastructure that we find ourselves in fail to deliver democracy that tackles issues like inequality, factory safety, climate change, and war, but even worse, it makes us worship the technology that is supposedly making things happen, even while things get worse.”

- the lie of social media strengthening democracy

social media users are essentially being used to turn their real lives into content for the wheelhouse of social media ad revenue - you’re a little hamster on Zuckerberg’s wheel, man

“If listening to this makes you feel defensive about social media, this is something worth exploring. Corporations like Instagram and Twitter have poured billions into making social media accounts seem like extensions on the self, so an attack on the company or the system feels like a threat.”

“Medical studies have repeatedly found social media and, in particular, fashion-synonymous app Instagram, to be detrimental to mental health.”

“Fashion consumption is something people are continually told they must just stop doing, but this simplistic approach fails to take account of the systemic issue of internet privacy and non-consensual data collection. Consumption is a social act and any attempt to reduce it must tackle the structural compulsion of psychological targeting which drives an unhealthy warped relationship w/ fashion consumption.”

Surveillance capitalism: the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets; business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.

Licensing of products: a brand can license their product to an unaffiliated warehouse (i.e. a perfume manufacturer) for a cost, the manufacturer makes the product, then sells it at a major markup to retailers, who then mark it up even more, so that by the time it reaches the consumer, its cost is astronomically different than its value