Uniforms

There exists a general idea in todays society that clothes are a form of self expression, an outward reflection of ones personality and identity. The consequence is that the sense of self is linked with the purchase and consumption of certain brands or styles of clothing.
This seems to me to be an extreme waste of time and resources.
Think of all the work that goes in to producing all these different types of products and then promoting them, and even the time spent by consumers shopping.
If we could get people to wear mass produced uniforms we could cut down on labour, minimize wasted resources and probably save many impressionable minds from the anguishes put on them by not having the correct clothing or not looking like the models.

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Just had this conversation with my sister who noticed a little hole on my T-shirt.

The hallmark of a bad sci-fi: fashion designers sweat blood to come up with the fashion of le future. The hallmark of a good sci-fi: people wear comfortable and utility-based uniforms, different wears are restricted to different species.

prove me wrong
PROTIP: i don't care

But what if I like wearing a different color or if I prefer short pants or something? The idea that clothes are a form of self expression is true, same as hairstyle or living space. The problem with fashion is the commodification not the idea that people will wear things for aesthetic purposes. Most of contemporary fashion is about signaling status, which is about the most cancerous reason for dressing a certain way. If you remove nothing but status you remove this element. Job-based uniforms are almost a way of preserving the status signifying element of fashion. And of course people would wear different clothing in different contexts. A laborer's jumpsuit isn't appropriate for the weekend when you're at a pub or something.

Read Style Deficit Disorder

Pick up knitting as a hobby under FALC, stop trying to portray your superfluous petit-bourgeois sensibilities as some kind of objective need of society.

>idea of [concrete thing] = true
Currently, yeah. But then again, selecting carefully your own kind of slaves were a type of self-expression among slave owners too. These are historically contingent things, not free-floating truths that got materialized on Earth.

The two are literally inseparable from each other. You can't just pick and chose parts of the superstructure without looking at their support in the base.

It's in the eye of the beholder. If you shop based on what signals what status, you'll spend your money accordingly when buying cars, watches, clothes. Same if you believe that it is a form of expression of your inner most beliefs, or whatever. Only if you think that communism wouldn't abolish the necessary conditions of identity-formation (the social-individual dialectic) and by not understanding commodity fetishism (social relationships between people become relationships between things, e.g. your belief that your T-shirt expresses jack shit FOR YOU) can you believe that somehow this would go on post-capitalism.

suits of any kind whatsoever are for mentally retarded people. it's literally judging people on their appearance.

I dunno, I wouldn't want to boil it down to one or two things that everyone's wearing all the time (even if they get multiple outfits to prevent stankass).

There should be some diversity of style, if only for practical "telling people apart" purposes (both in large crowds and for investigations into gulag-bait). This is kind of important on a day to day level. Imagine being a parent looking into a playground of similar-sized, identically dressed little people trying to find the one you made.

Sadly yeah.

Only if you believe in that spookery.

So? Who cares? Life is a waste. All it does it increase entropy. I hope the revolution gulags all teleologists.

Good luck finding a taste that appeals to everyone.

Jesus Christ. Is the idea of wearing something because you like the look of it or because it feels comfortable so alien to the modern world?


Stop trying to portray your teleological brain rot as some kind of social necessity.

Incoming bourgeois fashion dump.
Stay mad: I don't give a fuck.

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what was teleological about that?

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I was going to address your points, but the other guy did it better already
Only thing I will add is the question of what clothes are used to express other than taste in commodities and group affiliation.
It seems to me a very shallow form of self expression that I for one would be glad to be with out.


yeah, probably.


Not an argument, you're just spooked by the movie.

This is going to be the uniform of the next generation of revolutionaries.

don't use words you don't understand

I wonder. Is there a person whose job it is to tear holes in perfectly good jeans, or has the job been automated by some sort of jeans ruining machine?

There are plenty of reasons to wear outlandish clothing, only that people in power wouldn't wear something uncomfortable for them unless it was something like a corset which isn't that uncomfortable.

The only issue I see with the image on the left is the prince has a neck collar that makes him look like a slave in irons.

Assuming the point of the economy is efficiency as some abstract goal. What is the efficiency for? We would generally say efficiency is a good quality for any process meant to achieve a goal, but efficiency itself isn't a goal. Talking about "waste of time and resources" assumes what people want the economy to be used for.

If we start out with the belief that the economy should meet basic needs, then we engineer the economy to meet those needs and see what materials and time are left over. Then we have to decide what to do with those. Do we invest them in further improving our ability to meet basic needs efficiently? Maybe we choose to do that. But maybe people are generally cared for and bored, and they consider frivolous cultural expressions like giant Aztec headdresses to improve their living conditions. Should something from outside of them tell them that this is a waste of time and resources? Maybe an individual can make that argument, but this is all so speculative because we don't even know what the global socialist society would look like and so don't know its priorities.

t. Hillary Clinton

pic related
You realize that the family unit under communism will wither away, right?

Mao did that, didn't he? Because it felt like literally everyone dressed exactly like him.

A sci-fi that consiously takes commodity fetishism and capitalism into account has to come with it of course.

And he was dressed like Sun Yatsen. And he was dressed like a Japanese cadet. And he was dressed like a Prussian officer.

This is the crux of it all. The answer is: nothing.


I actually wondered myself. Probably there are factories of both kind around. Just another example how superficial this whole fashion thing is. Factories producing clothes with intentionally inferior utility just so some people can buy into the "fuck you! image".


Name 5.


Under Mao the textile industry was worked by the army. A pretty good idea, imo.

1) People can't tell each other apart without wearing outlandish clothing.
2) You won't recognize your kids on the playground if they don't wear outlandish clothing.
3) You can't express the deepest essence of your individuality without wearing outlandish clothing.
4) Only people in 1984 under totetaritarianism don't wear outlandish clothing.
5) These are all equally footed and independent artforms: literature, painting, sculpture, cinema, poetry, wearing outlandish clothing.

Regardless OP i don't think we should be worrying about random shit like clothes right now. Sure it's nice food for thought but if it truly isn't necessary in a communist society to make different clothes then there just won't be.

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The usefulness of these threads is to show to some people how their post-capitalist visions haven't reached full maturity in the sense that they carry the baggage of bourgeois ideology. They project what is now to what may be, without having questioning the underlying reasons for the existing phenomena.

Threads about the family unit and its abolishment have similar effect.

Can I get it in magenta

Barracks communists get out.

No, but you can be the edgy attention-seeking faglord who dyes it himself.

"Communism but with bourg ideology" idealists get out

Pretty good idea actually

Clothes are a form of self-expression, yes. This only becomes a problem when this self-expression becomes hijacked by the the fashion industry.

Keep on consuming.

You're entire worldview is upside down. Cause and effect propagate forward in time not backward. I'm not going to reply to all your individual points because they're fundamentally autistic screeching about the rhetoric I used. The central point here is you have some bullshit telos in your head about communism and can't stand that other people would deviate from it. You also clearly have a very narrow view of what fashion is and how it works. It's not just what things you have (that's what capitalism emphasizes), but it's what you do and what you do with the things you have. Fashion predates and will outlive capitalism, even in your dystopian future with everyone wearing gray uniforms. People will sew on additional pockets, rip holes, sew on patches, roll up their sleeves, re-lace their shoes, etc. And as for the individual-social dialectic (lel), communism isn't a project to turn the world into the fucking Borg. It's a project to reshape production so that people's needs are met without the artificial obstacles imposed by previous systems. Communism would allow for more flourishing of identity and individuality than other systems because individualism and collectivism are complementary, not conflicting.


Oh gee, fuck. I dunno that's really hard. All I can think of is

There's three levels to this even.
1. The critique of fashion being put forth ITT is embarrassingly trash.
2. Lifestylism
3. Prescriptivism


It's too bad the people presuming to instruct believe in the fucking Tabula Rasa and/or believe that capitalism is the only factor in shaping the way things are under capitalism. You fuckers are no different from cultists demanding people shave their heads and you give the left a bad name.


Fuck the entire way off.

You know you can't win against this guy.

Read more books and look at yourself in the mirror less.

ENOUGH

No, that's not really what I meant. Self-expression through clothing is one of the few avenues that's still available to people. However it is alienated like the rest of this shit society. Since the fashion industry constantly hijacks authentic forms of self-expression (trend scouts etc) it continually voids this attempt of authenticity, thus forcing people to continually reinvent themselves. Of course this sucks and lets to a cycle of meaningless consumption.
My intuition now is, that once the fashion industry has been toppled we remove the vicious cycle of constant reinvention and of course we also remove commodity fetishism. People now have the chance to express themselves through clothing without it being an utterly destructive waste of ressources. Or so I think atleast.

"Communism with borg characteristics" get out

Commies show again how they hate beauty.
Truly an ideology for resentful people.

lol nigger

Mate, you are the one dealing with empty rhetoric. I phrase my points with color because I'm a human not a robot. If you refuse to see the forest for the trees that's on you.

Oh and here's more of that Marx quote, which includes some choice bits left out of that picture that establish the rather specific context.
>But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural muh privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

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ITT: faux-individualists can't understand that they are, in fact, already the living embodiment of the borg.

There legit are people who can't recognise faces, famalam

Fashion preferences or deviations existed before generalized commodity production.

There was no 'fashion' as we understand it today before capitalism, and there was no 'fashion' in any meaningful sense before class societies. This shouldn't be that hard to grasp, really.

imagine being this autistic

I don't think that works on leftypol, fam.

There was no fashion industry but fashion did exist.
A lot of things didn't exist before class society. Unless you're an anprim I'm not sure what your point is.

nice backpedal

Can someone go over this in more depth or suggest a book on it? I can see it being less enforced by the system (the model of a man working while a woman raises them would no longer be a necessity), and society would be less atomized, but people still tend to form long-term bonds with partners and care for their kids. It's not like kids would become 100% communal.

I don't think "uniforms" is the dialectical sublation of fashion. But whatever. I think it is a complete failure of the imagination to envisage communist utopia as simple annihilation of everything that might also for whatever reason exist in bourgeois society. "X exists now, therefore it won't exist in communism" is just lame.

Actually I'm an anarchist. And I never said we should make uniforms mandatory.


Actually I was thinking now, not post revolution. A sort of anti consumer-movement. It is clear (to me at least) that the current level of consumption in the west will have to be seriously reduced under any socialist system, and so if our culture is not changed the people will not only fail to create a socialist system, but probably take arms against any other part of the world that tries to achieve it. Fashion has under capitalism been exalted as a way to express individuality, because it by it's seasonal nature makes sure we can never produce sufficient amounts. If people adopted uniforms would kill the texture industry in a year.


>

But even more hilariously, yes, quite literally, aesthetics didn't exist before the 18th century. The ancient Greeks would laugh at the faux-individualists attempts ITT to force this post-romantic period idea of self-expression onto art (let alone clothes!), for at least two reasons: they didn't see a separate "art" as we see it today (look up techné), and for them this 'thing' was more about imitation of nature.


Fashion literally didn't always exist, but keep forcing your miserable bourg ideology onto the past.

Yes, like production of luxuries exclusively for a ruling class. But we needn't to go that far, really. Just look at serfdom in Europe. Each village had a traditional wear that differentiated them from people of other villages that was used exclusively for feasts, marriages, holidays, etc. and their regular working clothes. That's basically two types of dresses for each individual, and that was it. Now what was going on with the lords is another story completely. It was a sort of dick measuring contest between who amasses the most luxuries shit, gold encrusted clothes, best artists, etc.


Why is it that the edgiest most useless faglords are the ones that turn out to be afraid of even just mentioning this totally legit distinction? It's almost as if once collective authority, discipline, responsibility gets brought up they feel the pressure growing as their falseness surfaces.


Lets look at this hilarious list:
>

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This is another thing. See the hysterics here:
Nobody argued that the Stalinist borgs will outlaw any set of cloths, but rather
1) under communism production will follow human needs
2) many things we believe to be basic human needs (or pertaining to the human condition) now are just reifications of the commodity form
3) that under the free association of men most forms of social pressures, anxieties will completely disappear and thus their expression in faux- or standardized-individualism will cease to exist
4) that history shows that fashion as we understand it now didn't always exist and that what people wore either signified social status (class) or tradition (belonging), the only constant being utility

There are self-proclaimed left radicals ITT who think that browsing in 10 stores to pick up a set of clothes is a form of self expression, even better, fucking aesthetics! They think that under communism we'll go on producing 5 million different types of clothing when most around a few hundred types can cover all the combinations we really need, and that people who argue for the latter are straight out of that totalitarian novel by George Orwell which they didn't even read.

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It'll never happen. Uniforms are great though, I will say. The "individuality" of "unique" clothing is just consumerism, and it's disgusting.

My basic outfit is shorts (because it's hot as hell in NC) and a regular t-shirt. Sometimes I'll wear pants in the winter but when it's usually 80f here it doesn't make sense to. Everyone I know gets on to me about "wearing nicer clothing" but I don't see the point.

said nobody ITT


Keep in mind that in the beginning of his book Engels uses outdated anthropology, but the general argument is solid. Read the chapter on the Commune in Cockshott's book to get a sense of practical overcoming of the family unit.

My dude, the OP suggested we should all wear neutral jump suits. I think that is what people are responding to, not the notion that we should have hundreds of clothes with a huge amount of combinations. But I'd still point out that aside from this, people will still disagree about what role clothing can play as expressive or whatever. But that is another argument.

Define consumerism in this context.

Promoting the interests of consumers that the fashion industry itself puts there. There is literally no reason to wear anything beyond solid colours and what is applicable for your industry or location in the world.

People will disagree about what role cars can play as expressive or whatever, that doesn't make it a Marxist analysis, tho. What makes people currently feel unique (self-expressed) are just a set of choices made from current trends, market supply, morals, etc. all of which are nothing without their supporting institutions and processes… If the only historical constant we can name for cloths is utility (just like for transportation devices) there's a strong case to be made that (1) they are projecting shit backwards in history, portraying something contingent as eternal; (2) that they are caught in commodity fetishism without realizing; (3) that (1) functions as a retroactive ideological justification of (2); and (4), that their understanding of communism carries over the ideological baggage of commodity fetishism.

Yeah, forgot about OP.

Some forms of family unit. It would be to presuppose too much that all forms would wither away. Besides, look how well the "State withering away" worked.

Technically some of them are correct since I asked what clothes are used to express.

Pretty scary tbh.


Yes, within reason. I didn't mean to imply people should use the same clothing on the beach and in Siberia. The my suggestion was adopting uniforms and rejecting clothes as self expression. I think people got that.

Oops, wrong markers, should have spoled the bold text. Bully me.

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So relaxed fit jumpsuits mean good scifi while tight fitting jumpsuits mean bad scifi?

Will people even wear clothes in the future

Probably, yeah, for practical, social, and comfort reasons, just like now.

But hopefully nudity becomes more common.

Wear the Mao uniform or the Slavic tracksuit, literally most proletarian clothing there is.

To people who don't care for fashion there would be mass produced utilitarian clothing. If people wanted fashionable stuff then it would be available or the materials required to make them would be available.
I'd personally prefer the utilitarian overalls.

There is a difference between making a distinction between two things and claiming that those two things are in conflict. The notion that individuals and collectives are necessarily opposed is baseless and relies on the toddler-tier understanding of the two as opposites. Just because things can be differentiated and seen as separate organizational levels does not mean they're necessarily in conflict with one another.


Yes they did. What are you on about? It's right in the OP.
Nobody said this. Stop projecting your stereotypes onto people who disagree with you. My entire point is that people are different and will choose to do different things out of preference, and OP's dream of forcing conformity is fairy tale nonsense. You don't need 10 stores to have different options available for different tastes. And variety is actually pretty important because it increases capacity for innovation, which, being a primary source of improvement in efficiency, is rather important to the


Just because capitalism influences these things doesn't mean it wholly controls them. It's forever in the process of expanding its influence. It's not as if as soon as capitalism took over from feudalism that everything immediately changed to fit capitalism.

Here's an example from my life. I have a number of old t-shirts with damage from years of wear that I've repurposed slightly by tearing the sleeves off (since that's where most of the holes were). I wear them now when I exercise or do yardwork so I can enjoy more freedom of movement, more air flowing through the shirt, and less concern about stains from sweat and the like since I barely wear the shirts and only when my comfort already isn't a concern. A side effect of this is that I show more skin (my arms) which signals a number of things including social openness and the signals associated with the levels of fitness that can be seen by viewing someone's body.

Independent of capitalist ideology there are a number of signals being sent by the choice to wear shirts this way, even though capitalism introduces more that would otherwise be irrelevant like the frugality of repurposing old things instead of throwing them out. This kind of thing is an element of fashion because there's a social dimension to it, and trends can form as people get new ideas from seeing other people doing things. I thought this kind of shirt was just a dumb fad for bodybuilders to show off their oversized arms until I actually tried it myself. Once I realized that I actually prefer the change in certain contexts and saw that there are good reasons for it, I realized I had been wrongly making assumptions about why people wear things based on the same sort of simplistic presuppositions that you're showing off here.

In DPRK Kim Il Sung gave everyone in the country a spiffy new Slavic tracksuit at one point. To most of the people there this was an believable luxury, so they tried to keep it as clean and intact as possible.

Look at Ursula K Le Guin's novel about an ancom society: "The Dispossessed." Everyone wears a utilitarian grey jumpsuit. Btw, the title either refers to the communards, who live in a propertyless, moneyless, classless society (and thus don't "possess" property besides personal property), or to the proles trapped in a bourgeois society nearby. Basically, I love this book and you guys should check it out.

Bwahahahhahaha this is the funniest fucking thread i have seen yet. lmao lmao, like, fuck, i'm just thinking of us all looking like pic related i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170109100009-north-korea-missile-launch-threat-trump-hancocks-lok-00002012-large-169.jpg

i always thought mao's uniform was total shit tbh. he literally had the "hillary clinton" look going on. Should have just gone full retard and strapped on some depends for his meetings with Nixon too

Even aesthetic domains have become top-down and mediated. Music is downloaded and listened to, often privately, not sung and produced together. Dance is for professional celebrities on television shows, not performed by everyone. Sports are for professional athletes and perhaps children, at least those children who are unusually good at them. Even when food and clothing do not come from factories, and are produced by hand, they are produced by recipes and patterns, not ground-up expressions of creativity from the fluent use of a shared pattern language.
The work of elaborating an aesthetic together, as a small group, providing context for each other’s selves, is some of the fundamental work of being human, a way for humans to be valuable to each other that markets cannot supply.

It is perhaps a hipster universal, and one I share, to declare that modern fashion is ugly compared to almost every “folk costume” ever devised. Clothing is cheaper and more plentiful than it has ever been in human history, and yet we all look terrible. The “chunks” that individuals may select from the market are difficult to fit together into a coherent aesthetic; most retreat into a nondescript uniform (jeans, printed t-shirts, hoodies) that is more of an apology for existing than an outfit. If people are not good at solving even so simple a problem as fashion, with the help of all those factories, how are they supposed to design excellent lives for themselves? I am not blaming anyone for bad fashion here; I am remarking that we are all deprived of a possible source of beauty and enjoyment by the lack of coherent community aesthetics. We are deprived of both context and excuse for beauty, and individuals are seldom up to the effort and social risk. It is not a problem we are well-designed to solve individually, for it is not an individual problem at all, but one of groups.
t. sarah perry via ribbonfarm

Normcore, friendo.

It's basically the whole point. This was the mistake of the 20th century "counter-culture" movements. By embracing "alternative" fashion style, you still operate within the logic of commodity fetishism, the idea of clothing as self-expression.

By dressing in an intentionally plain way, we reject this concept explicitly.

FALC would allow you to step into a machine that uses lasers to take your measurements and then to design your own outfit, clothing items, or entire wardrobe in a computer to have it fabricated for you. We'd basically end up with what you're describing - communities taking back clothing as a domain of their culture instead of merely participating in the market - but a lot more efficient than if everyone just made their own clothes by hand.

The anti-fashion argument also seems to have a very 20th century idea of production. If you want to get a sense of how much things have changed, consider that even with the inefficiency of capitalism we now can make printed tshirts to order and still be profitable. There's a whole market of people who submit designs to tshirt companies who make the tshirts to order, and both parties get paid. Even within capitalism that sort of system could (and probably will) develop beyond just the prints into the domain of assembling the garment itself using specifications entered into a computer. People would be able to design their own clothes or share designs with others. Without the pretense that capitalism has added, people would care a lot more about design itself instead of the context surrounding it.

You're still going out and buying "plain clothes" just so that you can evoke this image of "normal". It should really be about wearing cheap second-hand clothes if anything.

Following your logic, a best way to cut down on labour would be the full acceptance of nudity as the default outfit. Clothes are really needed only for some kinds of labour or when it's cold.

"Communism is when everyone wears the same clothes and is equal." - Carl Marks

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We live under capitalism, there's no escaping that. This is more about fighting the concept of clothing as self-expression.

Imagine being this deep in consumerist ideology.

Great illustration of the point. You have been indoctrinated to think of clothes like a reflection of your soul, linking the essense of your being to the products you consume.
It would take much less work to make a standardised uniform. Are you suggesting we should work more, so that it will look like we work less, in a society aiming to abolish work?

Personally, I think uniforms fucking suck.
I understand the need for and am in fact in favor of clothes you wear specifically for work, but outside of that, I'm gonna dress however the fuck I want to, and fuck anyone who doesn't like it.

And hopefully nobody smokes, especially not the anime girls.

I think you're missing the point.

You could save a lot of labor time and resources by mass producing a single "uniform" based on a single model than having to needlessly and wastefully produce thousands of different types of garments for little purpose beyond upholding the standard of the current consumer culture (and its conceptualization of consumer products as an extension of your metaphysical being) when the goal should be its abolition.

Shitposting flag, etc.

What the fuck, I thought leftists were all supposed to be smartly dressed college students in cardigans and loafers with a cigarette in their mouth discussing critical theory and drowning in pus, where did you autistic social pariahs crawl out from?

If it made austists like you screech in rage like this, it must've been worth it tbh.

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Not a meme, the Philosophy college across from my STEM one is full of people like this and the friends I have from there fit the "handsome existentialist bohemian student" to a T.

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STOP

How many times were you dropped on your head as a baby?

Those are liberals, user.

This is the most autistic thread I've seen today. Clothing can perfectly be an artform and it is seen as so in the artistic world like in theatre or visual arts. What's next, music is bourgeois and shouldn't exist? Nevermind, I've actually seen spergs saying exactly that in here.

Hey there. I'm vision impaired, not autistic. It's easier for me to pick out people at further than 10 feet away if I can scan for clothing color before I try squinting to see the face.

You need to get that Porky out of your head, gomr8.

You need glasses, not fashion.

They all define themselves as various flavour of Marxist (with a predominance of Lacanian Marxists, because this is Ljubljana after all) tho.

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I've seen spergs argue that any art shouldn't exist.


Forcing people to wear certain things is not communism you shitbird.

You people are really fucking ignorant.

Dang that seems like a nice place to go to school.

Ask them what their favorite work from Marx is.

That's when you'll learn that they never actually read Marx and are simply following some latter 20th century academic Marxist.

Laser eye surgery?

Newsflash you autist, people arent functionalist robots, but like having some variety in life. Or will you accuse the fabric dyers of old Sumer of being spooked by Porky?

Jesus Christ dude. That kind of thing will only help the cornea, which is just one part of the eye. The eye, being effectively a machine, has a number of points of failure. And that's ignoring the cognitive element of vision.

Glasses are a fashion element. Glasses are made by porky, you consumerist trash! Abolish glasses!
t. totally leftist

It really is
if you dont majorly fuck up
;_;

KILL THOSE WHO WEAR GLASSES

How the hell can any person that's worked in a min wage service industry McJob ever defend uniforms?

The kind of people who talk about communism like it's going to fundamentally change everything about human society and turn people into borgs tend to be the kind of people who barely interact with other people, much less have a McJob where they interact with people regularly.

a-at least I have my McJob where I interact with the two other people in my department, h-heh

You failing dude? Gotta do better, user.

I wasn't saying that was communism, you brainlets.

The point is that our current mode of producing clothing under capitalism is highly wasteful, inefficient and only serves capitalist profit. In a more rational communist system, there will no longer be a fashion industry that needs to churn out and rotate between a thousand different garments to remain profitable, so it will be possible to make just a small handful of garments based on utility. The only thing standing in the way of this is the current consumer culture and the prevalence of commodity fetishism as faux individualism.

As communists, we should be able to identify commodity fetishism where it lies and not allow it to stand in the way of human progress. With any luck, the people of the future will look back at us and think to themselves how silly we were to believe that commodities were extensions of our souls.

It will.

That's not even technically correct. Clothing still functions as clothing even if it also makes profits for Porky. Just because it makes profits doesn't mean all other functions vanish. Diminish, yes. Vanish, no.

Based on what exactly? Plenty of points have been made ITT for other reasons why variation would still exist but your response is to autistically handwave all of that and reiterate that it's just commodity fetishism.

Humans aren't brains in jars. We're animals with physical presences and our surroundings are an extension of us in the same way that our relationships are an extension of us.


read the rest of the fucking sentence you nitpicking autist

Do you understand that there's a difference between owning things and using things? Wearing clothing is not just ownership. It's use. You're not arguing for getting rid of ownership. You're arguing for restricting how people are allowed to use things.

No I'm fed up with retards thinking communism is just capitalism but with better jobs.

Your bullshit is painfully transparent.

I wasn't advocating just a single garment, but a small variety based on utility (work clothing, summer clothing, winter clothing, etc). I'm aware that different clothing has different utility. My suggestion was that it be based purely on utility with no regard with the latent capitalist consumer culture that tries form a conceptualization of the self around what one has rather than what one is.

And, yes, your environment is an important part of who you are, but let's not go overboard and start suggesting that commodities are an extension of you metaphysical being. We need to put these little absurdities of our capitalist age to rest.

cease this meme at once

ik, ik

APOLOGIZE

That's not better in principle, just degree.

And what about regard for what people want in general? Are you saying that you know better than everyone else? Hell, who are you to declare the utility of clothing for other people when they're the ones who will be using it?

As tool-users, yes the tools around us are part of "us". You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just because capitalism has commodified something doesn't mean that thing now intrinsically has cooties.


What does that have to do with anything I said?

Is not suggesting a restriction on anything. I'm saying the socialized factories of the future should only produce a small number of clothing templates based on utility and efficiency. People can still wear their old clothing if they want. But eventually that clothing will wear out and they'll be forced to either choose the utilitarian clothing or make clothing themselves. If they choose the latter, then the clothing they produce will be a genuine item of human self-expression and creativity, rather than a mass produced capitalist facsimile of it.

Dude come on.

Or maybe since they have control of the MoP they will organize to socially produce clothes that they want.

Genuine question: what did you think I was referring to with this post and others?
Because what I was referring to was this.

Daily reminder Adorno was right and establishing the concept of Reason was the most totalitarian move ever concieved.

And hopefully, by that point in time, people will have recognized the falsehood of capitalist commodity fetishism. The hardships that a struggling socialist state would go through during the years of world revolution certainly won't have lended itself well to the production of a thousand different kinds of luxury clothing, and utilitarian clothing might just be the new normal by the time we emerge on the other side. And there's nothing personal or creative about mass produced clothing. It's pumped out en masse by machines by the truckload. The idea that it isn't soulless because it's low quality, low utility and died some garish color is one of the great illusions of our times.

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In a democratically planned system, people will hopefully be informed about the costs and quality of what they're producing and consuming. This means that in order for fashion to persist as it does now, the populace will have to vote to have lower quantity and/or quality of a product purely for a frivolous aesthetic change. Do you really think people will do that? Vote to have less in the name of meaningless aesthetics? Especially coming out of the hardships of the fall of capitalism?

I often feel like proponents of this almost always come from monocultural blocks like the USA where their culture has never really been endangered in living memory.

Yes, culture is irrational. Progress doesn't need to stand on hold for it, culture will simply change with the change in material conditions. Give it a generation and you'll have a group of young people who only know people dressing more or less the same way and the fashion trends of the past will seem quant and old fashioned, just as quaint and old fashioned as wearing a petticoat or bowler would be today.

We will all be genetically engineered posthuman cyborg machine-hybrids.

So probably not.

The borgs don't even wear uniforms, and the reason you assumed they did is because you've bought in to the fashion industries propaganda telling you that individual uniqueness should be expressed trough their products. You are the hive mind.

Am I the only person that has a visceral hatred for pantsuits?
They accentuate all the wrong curves. Her hips look too wide, and her legs too short. The jacket - instead of hiding it - only emphasizes her weight gain.

It just makes her look grotesque.

The only reason one would find this appealing is if you're alienated as fuck. Most people who don't live in your shitty Sci-Fi universe wouldn't submit to this shit.

Truly the best uniforms in the series.

It was meant as a joke, but would it really be that bad? You can keep the human aesthetic intact. I definitely would.

Imagine if you only had to eat because you like food, not because you need sustenance. Oh, and you don't need to shit either. You never smell bad, nor do you get tired. (unless you like that)
What if you could breath underwater? Or survive in space without a pressure suit, or walk at the bottom of the ocean without getting crushed? What if you could just look the way you wanted or learn whatever want, without being burdened by genetics?

I'm not for pursuing "efficiency" or merely using technology as an escape. But transhumanism can be liberating.
It's about being able to live on your own terms. If we exist, we might as well make sure life isn't a chore.

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All I know about ST is there's a stoic gay elf, sentient plushies and a cube that assimilates stuff.

the emoji movie got weird

So we should not use uniforms because it would trigger some self loathing service workers? In construction we wear uniforms every day, not met anyone who thinks that's a problem.
I bet service workers just think they don't like wearing uniforms, but that actually it's that the costumers don't wear uniforms that really bother them.


It's when the people who decide what clothes should be produced also have to do the labour to produce them. It will be a lot less appealing to produce excessive amounts of clothing when we don't have slaves or wage slaves to do the work for us.


Can't speak for that guy, but I'm OP and I'm not a burger.

I think you've just been reading my diary and mistaking it for Star Trek tbh

"The fashion industry represents MSM better than Star Trek does" is a wildly scalding take

Isn't the uniform a consequence of capitalism? What place would a uniform have after the proletariat has been abolished?

I think some people here are really romanticizing uniforms, when reality they're pure capitalism.

this dude reads


This may sound strange, but I can tell individuals apart by their faces, voices, body language, and so on. Failing that… maybe comrades could …. wear name tags?


Yeah – I was a monk for a while and it was awesome not giving a fuck about fashion. My friends who've served in the military and spent time incarcerated feel the same way. Fashion is a waste of time and mental energy. There's a reason why guys like Zuck just wear the same kind of clothing every day. Definitely recommend looking into Quakerist "simple living"


of industrialization

The US created standard clothing sizing to clothe soldiers during its civil war. Uniforms and sizing came from a pragmatic need, not a capitalistic one.

If everyone were to speciate into a chaotic mess of a thousand combinations of posthuman super-beings then yes it would be incredibly bad. Also that statement reeks of transhumanist entryism.

You'd be nothing but a shell of human, and don't anyone give me the

we don't need to get everyone to wear the same shit. We can have a pretty good variety of colors and models without any problem, so that people can have some interesting choices and comfort plus you need to take climate in conseideration also. With 10shirt types and 20 colors, 20 types of pants and 20 of shorts you already have 8000 possible combinations and this is still quite limited and really economic in terms of production.
What is really fucked up about today's fashion industry ,beside the near slavery in sweatshops, is how we have a gazzillion of
must buy everyting fashion seasons each year and scummy first worlders throw their clothes off every six months.
And those who really want to express their personality through clothing can do so by making custom clothing in their free time in workshops or get some local community made clothing.
I think diy would be quite a trend in socialism because without a buying power gap people will have to show off things they actually made or that are rare and unique in other forms rather than buying expensive shit no one else has.

You didn't make a single argument in your entire post - just whining about how you don't like the sound of it and some unsubstantiated claims about how nondescript bad things will happen if people don't listen to you. You may well be one of the worst posters on Holla Forums.

Fortunately your impotent whining won't impede technological development and those of us who want to surpass the limitations of random evolution will be able to.

Something Insanely Nazbol. Think a cross between Soviet Uniforms, SS uniforms, and the Peacekeepers from Farscape.