Madeline’s Reviews > The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion > Status Update

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