Tag: luxury communism

Ideas On A Collectivized English Country Estate

Actually a collectivized English country estate sounds like it could be a very pleasant place to live, basically some people choose to do the farming and live in the cottages (that have been renovated to be super charming and nice) some people live in the big house and they do all the domestic labor and cooking for the people who do the farming, including like laundry, cleaning, clothes mending and maybe even clothes making and so on and like you can switch out if you don’t like the role you’re doing. Ladies maids could be like inhouse beauticians and governesses could mind the collectively cared for children in the nursery while the parents worked… seems sort of idyllic. You could also have your doctor and dentist and vet there, your tailor, your mechanic, a hub for public transport to places outside of the village and like you could put your library there, and like a woodworking workshop and like a place for big expensive tools you don’t need all the time (like lathes and table saws and belt sanders) because they have a ton of room, so basically it’s like a service hub at the center of a big circle and you could have your social functions (dances, weddings, town meetings etc) there, and it would also probably be your designated place to go in case of natural disaster, and you could also store things like a snowplow and backhoe and things for common use there, also maybe your local school depending on the size of things and the outbuildings and you’d go there for meals.

Also you could have a tailor there because getting things tailored is nice. It’d also be nice because you’d always have access to the stuff that you like need sometimes but not all the time (like floor waxers, and carpet steamers and weird special cake pans and other special pastry equipment, and stud finders and sewing machines, and like fancy audio equipment for recording whatever, and nice cameras and double boilers because they’d be shared in common and you could have enough that you were never like “awww someone took the last good camera” (also you’d probably get some of that stuff for people who needed it often) and you could have a giant store of board games and it’d be easy to find people to play with.  Everyone would get fresh fluffy towels delivered like in a hotel… like it wouldn’t be the thing for everyone but for people who like that sort of thing it’d be lovely, and you’d be able to keep horses and things for people who like different sorts of sports and probably have like fancy spa equipment and a collective gym… basically it’d be like ALL THE AMENITIES which’d be cool.

Imagine the giant awesome playground you could have for the kids, and like the super cool treehouse/s you could have for them to hang out in and like a giant shared dollhouse and things like that for the nursery playroom, and the like gigantic blowout birthday/Halloween/other holiday parties you could have because there’s this giant fancy house available, and a bunch of specialist cooks so you could have awesome food and people’d pitch in to decorate (also like onsite petting zoo basically lol) Fuck you’d probably have room in one of the out buildings to store a bouncy house if needed)

Okay so my dream is an algorithm

that tells us where goods and services are needed by society by monitoring and prioritizing requests in real time, as well as monitoring “purchase” data (having people swipe an ID card and enter an ID when “shopping” online and so on).  Like all that data gathered and put to use for good rather than evil… 

Like seriously, imagine an economy run based on wants and needs, prioritized by data gathered about human happiness and life expectancy and shit, the thing tells us when we need more workers in whatever sectors because of demand, predicts what products people want so you don’t end up with shortages historically associated with planned economies.

Like I believe capitalism is an IT problem and also like imagine all those algorithms used to show you ads, used to curate your netflix and your facebook and everything used to benefit humanity rather than to shill crap?

I mean we have the ability to gather and interpret immense IMMENSE amounts of data, can you imagine what we could do with a records of everyone’s consumption of products and services?  Of everyone’s requests?  

Imagine the society we could build with all that data used for good, maximizing human happiness would be so easily within our grasp.

Seriously though

Silk sheets, Hermés bags, spa treatments, whirl pool baths nothing’s too good for the working class. When society is properly organized you’ll come home from doing your voluntary 2 hours of work and be brought fresh strawberries of perfect flavor and succulence by your robot fridge, and you’ll be able to lounge around and read, or putter in your garden or go dancing, or do Mani-pedis with friends or whatever you like. Life’s going to be so sweet after the rev

Decadence, Asceticism, Virtue and Frivolity

I have been considering the shift in styles of decadence from the French revolution to now, and the nature of revolutionary movements from then till now.  I have also been considering the concepts of “trashiness” and “tastefulness” as they relate to class struggle, and class values.  Also there is the interesting concept of “classiness” which has relevance to class struggle in and of itself.

In the French revolution the upper class was indulgent in obvious decadent ways, peacocks everywhere, massive dinners, giant wigs, and the revolution opposed all that frivolity and frippery and what not, ditto the Russian revolution.

You had a fetishization of the “virtuous and simple” ways of an idealized proletariat.  

Today classy is clean minimalist lines, juice cleanses, simple elegance, an absolute lack of “clutter”, neutral colors, ascetic diets, and a faux virtue in this fetishized simplicity.  They have taken the clothes of the peasant from an era before and made them their symbol.

Trashy is faux gilt, bright colors, excess, a desire for and love of goods born of material scarcity.  Poor people spend significant percentages of their income on weddings, elaborate gowns, and such for these events because showing one can makes one feel more human in a world bent on dehumanizing, simplicity is a virtue for the rich.

Take goth as a style it is often a proletarian youth’s fantasy of aristocracy, it is decadent, but it is also free from the mandatory cheeriness of the bourgeois.  The bourgeois are the ones who moralize about health (making being unhealthy immoral, because they can afford diet, and medical attention and other things to assure them of this state and even go off on absurd health fads to achieve some form of imaginary super health) and moralize happiness, unhappiness under Capitalism, like all bad circumstances in this system must be moralized and considered to be caused by their victim, as otherwise the inequity of the system is exposed.

Goth is dark, gloomy, a rebellion against the cheery veneer of capitalism, it is also decadent, self indulgent, in opposition to the virtues imposed by the bourgeois on the proletariat, as it is languid rather than hard working, refusing the “virtues” of thrift and self denial.  It is about pleasure.

The bourgeois sneer at their abandoned symbols, the Louis XIV style mirror with a plastic frame lives in a prole’s living room, not in their clean modernist cube or charmingly rustic country house, they the eschew gilt frames and sparkling clothes of their predecessors, now made widely available by mass production.

Gaudy, garish, ostentatious, vulgar all of these are words of bourgeois disgust at these delightful things appropriated by the proletariat.

Classy is an interesting word, it is aspirational, it is the word used to describe bourgeois morality, bourgeois aesthetics and so on from a proletarian viewpoint (through a positive lens of course) but of course the reality and the presented reality of the bourgeois are very different.

Similarly “serious” media is often difficult to get through if you do not have a lot of spare time and demands more emotional energy than “lighter” fare which is more enjoyable if your own life is hard and you require escape, and so a claim to find “virtuous” happiness in ascetic or essentially unpleasurable experiences (like eating kale) is now what the bourgeois do.

We will cast off asceticism when we cast off our chains.