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.
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.
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.
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.
I will ban clothes
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
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.
