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

“Being excluded from the dominant beauty ideal does not mean you escape objectification. Instead, you get a double dose of shame. That of being excluded and that of having an unacceptable body.”

- Maxine Leads Craig

“Women are too profitable a market to be allowed to relax into their physicality. Instead, they’re given an impossible quest for self perfection, which keeps them spending money.”

“Today, the fashion industry along with its handmaidens, the diet, food, and pharmaceutical industries, make billions from body insecurity. Described as ‘merchants of body hatred’, they depend on the breeding of body insecurity to create ‘beauty terror’ in so many people.“

2/2 Arguing that fast fashion is not the fault of the working class should not be taken for an assurance that life can carry on as normal. If things continue as they are, the working class will just sink together beneath rising sea levels.”

1/2 “Imagining that the right to buy limitless clothes at whatever cost to the planet equals freedom is to lose sight of what freedom actually means. Fast fashion is not pro-working class, it must be critiqued as a product for corporations’ drive for profit, not as the fault of the poor.

3/3 It is the working classes that are forced by low wages and the homogenization of high streets into shopping or working at cheap shops like Primark. It is also the working class that are driven to anxiety and a sense of inadequacy for not being able to ‘keep up’ with fashion.”

2/3 It is the working class that are held captive in sweat shops and have their unions smashed by Walmart and have their homes flooded or turned to dust by climate change. It is the working class that end up wearing poor quality clothes that easily wear out and are quickly scorned as unfashionable.

1/3 “Fashion environmentalists are often accused of being elitist and of using fast fashion to blame the poorest members of society for climate change. Should fast fashion be left alone because it makes working class life better, in the same manner as cheap flights? The short answer is no. Fast fashion is a false emancipation that is disastrous for the global working class.

“It is no coincidence that under capitalism, the things we are taught to aspire to are ruling class symbols of cruelty and power over nature. Furs and skins. What is a luxury skin handbag in a Paris boutique other than a sign that you are rich and powerful enough to command and destroy nature, that you can have living things die for your decoration and pleasure?”

“Rather than exist in harmony with eachother and the planet, humans are taught to measure themselves by their distance from the rest of the population and from nature itself. Bertol Brecht (not sure if I’m getting right name here bc of audio) described alienation as ‘the splintering of human nature into a number of misbegotten parts.’”

“Under capitalism, we relate more to commodities than we do to nature itself. We no longer see ourselves as a part of nature, rather nature is something to be gloriously conquered for profit. Everything becomes property. Land becomes real estate, animals become fur, the Lake District becomes a nuclear waste dump, and oceans become sources of fish. Everything must have a profit squeezed out of it.”

Living pythons have a hose inserted in their throats, are pumped full of water, impaled on a meat hook and skinned alive.


Foxes, minks, and dogs are farmed en masse for their fur in China, Finland, and the USA.


Horrifying, heartbreaking information.

Capital has a vampiric relationship with nature, a living death maintained by sucking blood from the world - Marx spoke of this

“Fashion is a deregulated, subcontracted, trend based industry that relies on selling billions of short life units every season at a maximum profit. Brands sell clothes that are not of the highest quality, ensuring that they can make them cheaply, that they will wear out, and that you will be forced to buy new ones.”

The throwaway culture encouraged by domination of exchange value over use value.

Environmental Data Justice Lab: indigenous led, indigenous majority lab that focuses on the relationships between data, pollution, and colonialism.

Ultimately, denial and indifference has one purpose. It makes exploitation easier. This exploitation of the planet, of animals, and of people is the beating heart of the fashion industry.”

“The fashion industry’s relationship with the future is deeply disturbing. It is simultaneously obsessed with the future and unable to confront it. As an industry, it constantly looks ahead and yet, it won’t. Fashion wants to be the future, to construct it by defining what new things we should lust after and yet it refuses to see the looming precipice this approach has created.”

“I urge you to be wary of solutions that risk deferring radical change by instilling a false sense of progress. After 20 years of such solutions, how can it not be insanity to think that capitalism, the cause of the disasters we face, is the key to saving the planet?”