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.
I don't think it has to be one way. Maybe some people have their own units, maybe other places have communal units, maybe certain places have industrial launderers. It'll depend a lot on the conditions specific to each location.
Personally I lean towards communal units with anything that only gets used once a week or less (and takes up space and/or a decent chunk of resources to produce). Boats, laundry machines, power tools, trucks, guns, whatever.
What's the evidence that washing machines are not efficient? They probably use less water than a human would.
Having said that, maybe there's a better designed machine or something that hasn't been invented yet?
They're not in use most of the time when everyone has one, so we're overproducing washing machines just so people can have them privately in their homes.
If we all wear the Half Life 2 blue jumpsuits can I just get a clean one in my size? I don't care about specifically getting back my jumpsuit
Communal laundry rooms with washers only, one room with several machines per floor in the commie block. The machines are owned in common by everyone in the building. Everyone has this kind of dryer in the bathroom.
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
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
Old people will also be banned under our great owl overlord.
that's what diapers are for. you don't just go around leaking piss and shit into your clothes
i am now on board with the policy of banning clothes specifically so people like you can be caught instead of just passively stinking places up with plausible deniability
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?
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.
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.
This definitely varies from culture to culture, but being Spanish, I can tell you that meat was more often than not a cause for celebration, to the point that the pig slaughter was a community event that took place in the main square of the village. Data for meat consumption over time in the former Russian Empire and the USSR also suggests that meat wasn't a thing people used to have often, and whose access increased with industrialization.
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.
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
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'm in a rural area so the traffic to laundromats is pretty low; my experience probably doesn't match the typical one! The machines all worked, there were rarely more that one or two people, etc.
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.
