#consumption
Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.
Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.
Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.
Oops, someone dropped the truth.
“Even if the outward and visible manifestations of class were not as conspicuous as they do in fact remain, it would still be quite unwarranted to interpret this as evidence of the erosion, let alone the dissolution, of class divisions which are firmly rooted in the system of ownership of advanced capitalist societies. To achieve their dissolution or even their serious erosion would take rather more than working-class access to refrigerators, television sets, cars… and more even than death taxes, progressive taxation, and a host of other measures denounced and deplored by the rich as ruinous and crippling, yet which have had no radical impact upon economic inequality–not very surprisingly since this system of ownership operates on the principle that ‘to him who hath shall be given,’ and provides ample opportunities for wealth to beget more wealth.”
— Ralph Miliband
Consumption isn’t a shortcut to character and morality goes well beyond fandom. That’s modern culture in a nutshell.
Consumption isn’t activism and we should be glad - because if consumption was activism, then your entire positive contribution to the world would be cancelled out by exactly one person having a different hobby.
Fast fashion and crochet
While we’re on the topic of crochet:
Please know that, unlike knitting, crochet cannot be manufactured by machines. This has a few consequences.
Labour exploitation:
Labour exploitation is rampant in the fast fashion industry: without it, the industry simply would not exist.
This means that if you see a genuine crocheted piece in a fast fashion shop, it was made by hand by someone who was paid peanuts for their labour, if paid at all.
Fibre crafts are very labour-intensive. This is why crocheted/hand-knitted items by indie designers are priced the way they are: you’re notjust paying forthe materials. You’re also paying for the hours that were needed to design and make the item. Even if the designer were to price those hours at minimum wage, they still add up.
Fast fashion strives to manufacture items as cheaply as possible. A lot of different things make up the final priceyou pay at a shop, such as design, materials, shipping, packaging, marketing,… Labouris only a fraction of that price, and garment workers rarely get paid a living wage as to keep the prices down.
Take this seven part TikTok breakdown of a crocheted Target bikini top by Drea’s Hook, for example. After replicating part of the top, she estimates it would take about 3 hours to crochet the full item by hand (and it was crocheted by hand). That doesn’t even account for the materials, the labour needed to sew the lining and the tag, the design, shipping, stock photos,… Yet it only costs $22. If the person who crocheted the top was paidat all, it can hardly have been more than a few cents.
Stolen designs:
On top of labour exploitation, there’s been multiple scandals regarding fast fashion brands stealing designs by independent crochet artists such as Knots & VibesorLoupystudio, among others.
Design theft not only profits off the work done by the original designer withoutany form of compensation in return, it also devaluesthe work needed to make an item.
Theaverage person doesn’t know how much work goes into making clothes. When fast fashion brands knock off original designs and sell them for a fraction of the price, it propagates the idea that the original item was priced unfairly. After all, why would someone charge €250 for a sweater when you can buy a similar one for €15 at H&M? This way, the industrykeeps getting away with exploitingits workers while indie designers struggle to get by.
Caneveryoneafford to pay that €250? No, of course not. Even that €15 sweater can be a big financial hit if you’re on a budget, and we all need clothes to keep us warm in winter. But practical issues aside, I think we can all agree that everyone deserves fair compensation for their work.
Conclusion:
People often assumetheir clothes have been made by machines. This is a logical assumption given the average fast fashion price tag, but unfortunately it’s a wrongone.
Sure, we’ve got sewing and knitting machines and all other kinds of mechanical helps, but someone still has to work those machines. When an item has to be made by hand, like crochet, it will take longer. If the price tag doesn’t reflect this extra labour, then neither will the worker’s wage.
This blog will never shame anyone for buying fast fashion. Even if you’re aware of the problems within the industry, there’s plenty of valid reasons why quitting just isn’t an option for most of us. We’re stuck in a broken system that we cannot change overnight, and not everyone has access to alternatives.
That doesn’t mean we can’t chip away at it.Educating yourself about these issues is a big first step. It makes us more conscious about the clothes we wear and the labour and resources that went into making them, which in turn motivates us to take action. If more people were aware of these problems, the industry would be much less likely to get away with them.
Somehow now I’ve cheapened delirium.
These days I float with a fever above
my bed, staring down at my husk in glum
humor. Dear foul body, I want to love
you, but damn! Even cirrhosis never
caused me this much grief and it was killing
me. Float and fret. Float and sweat in a blur
of noise that I can’t construe while passing
skyward. Once I thought consumption cool:
burbling blood just like Paganini.
Black-flecked spittle was so gothic. But now?
Niccolò, when I said, “Give me an old-school
death,” it wasn’t this; rather skag, filthy
deeds and all that deliria might allow.
][][
Notes:
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) was a violin virtuoso so astonishingly talented it was rumored that he had sold his soul to the Devil for his crazy skills. Like Dunbar, Chopin, Kafka, Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson, Paganini also died from TB (tuberculosis). Skag is an old nickname for heroin. On a personal note, I mention cirrhosis (a disease of the liver from chronic alcoholism) because I am a life-long alcoholic who would be dead right now if it weren’t for AA (this February 18 will mark four whole years of sobriety for me). While my doctor insists it was not Covid and just borin’ ol’ pneumonia, last year I was bed-ridden for months due to a painful, horrible cough that wouldn’t go away. With the coming of winter I can feel, once again, something in my lungs.
“In such a world, the people who will have the most to offer their communities, their societies, and the biosphere that supports all our lives will be those who have the courage, now, to walk away from the consumer economy and its smorgasbord of dubious pleasures, and learn, now, how to get by with less, use their own capacities of body and mind, and work with the patterns and processes of nature.”— John Michael Greer
“On the other hand, by transforming the worker into a consumer, the economic system manages to make the worker into an active agent in her/his own social oppression. For here consumption is both subtly and aggressively made out to be the means by which the individual can escape the experiential emptiness of their so-called free, yet serf-like, life.”— David Van Deusen