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.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    13 hours ago

    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.

    • glans [it/its]
      hexagon
      ·
      13 hours ago

      For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers

      For rich people sure. But for normal people?

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
        ·
        2 hours ago

        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.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        13 hours ago

        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.

      • vovchik_ilich [he/him]
        ·
        8 hours ago

        Meat was also for rich people 500 years ago, but the wonders of industrialization led to many previously unattainable goods to become widespread.

        • kristina [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          7 hours ago

          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.

          • vovchik_ilich [he/him]
            ·
            6 hours ago

            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.

            • kristina [she/her]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 hour ago

              I don't even know how you'd begin to measure meat consumption when basically everyone owned chickens and reporting them would be bureaucratically impossible until the modern era

              Even modern peasantry often have cattle for milk and chicken eggs all the time.

      • regul [any]
        ·
        12 hours ago

        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.