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

“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

“Utility versus the New Look represented a political crossroads: For whose benefit should society be run?' It is a return to our thought experiment, which asks, what is fashion for? To clothe society in well made, well designed durable apparel, or to make profits for businesses?”

“After the war, British retailers and manufactures lobbied for the abolition of the Utility scheme, while trade unions campaigned for its retention. This difference of opinion, over the provision of cheap, good quality clothing, showed the disintegration of the wartime alliance between government, capital, and labor. With the war over, society was once again polarizing.”

Movement from WW2 utility fashion to Dior ‘new look’ has been painted as something that women chose.
- ignores political climate of the era & role of powerful fashion system

- fashion promotion: styles receive heavy coverage through publicist backed campaigns (every magazine, every celebrity given clothes to wear, etc.), encourages women to buy entirely new wardrobes

Dior’s new look post WW2

“Essentially, the ‘new look’ replaced ease of movement and physical strength with an ultra conservative vision of femininity, complete with corsets. The look matched the political agenda of returning women to home and hearth. The style’s forward thrust of the hips assigned that women were designed for childbearing. As 1.25mil women left industry, the message was clear: women no longer needed workwear.”

Christian Dior - spent WW2 designing clothes for the wives of Nazi officers & French collaborators.

- turned his talent towards reinserting rigid hierarchies into fashion, which were challenged thru rise of utility clothing as stylish

“we were emerging from a period of war, of uniforms, of women soldiers built like boxes. I drew women flowers: soft shoulders, flowering busts.” - Dior

“Utility clothing led commentators to write that the workers looked well dressed. One writer declared that, ‘for the first time in history, fashion, such as it was, derived from the proletariat, not from the privileged.”

- rise of utility clothing as the main fashion during WW2. Marilyn Monroe photographed in workers’ clothing.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Ursula Leguin

“Capitalism is not a natural state of affairs, it is an economic system with a history, and what can be born can also die.”

2/2 Is access to medicine, housing, education, leisure, and opportunity based upon access to wealth? Are the worst people in charge? If this is not your ideal society, how would you change it for the better?”

1/2 “What kind of a society do you want to live in? Does it look as it looks now, with some people starving while others hold more money than can be spent in 1,000 lifetimes? Is the planet displaying signs of deep distress with wildfires, typhoons, and floods wreaking havoc? Have entire species gone extinct? Are the forests being razed to the ground? Is life hampered by prejudices, like racism and homophobia?

Concept of fashion as key to ideology: ideology legitimizes and substantiates power, making it look inevitable. Of course A happened because B exists, etc. Unquestionable facts of life

“The mere fact of switching clothes can bestow a person with ruling class prestige.”

“The role of ideology is to ensure that this power structure either feels natural or is simply not felt at all.”

“In the anti-capitalist book of fashion, anti-capitalist means the rejection of capitalism as a whole because it is the systemic cause of sweat shops, child labor, environmental devastation, and alienation. The problem is not simply one of bad companies or bad people at the top of companies, though these exit, but of a bad system that produces destructive imperatives.”

Neoliberalism: an economic model championed by Margaret thatcher/Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s & Bill Clinton/Tony Blair in the 1990’s.

Emphasizes the liberalization of trade, the privatization of public services, the global integration of markets, the deregulation of state power. All portrayed as inevitable, like gravity.

Drives down wages, pits workers across the world/companies against each other