im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged
the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.
“buy secondhand only” in response to this is such an egregious misunderstanding and it’s doing the exact fucking thing that is implicitly being criticized by this tweet, which is that individual consumer choices are totally disconnected from the global production of consumer goods and therefore moralizing about making the Correct choices and imploring people to go to fucking goodwill instead of tj maxx is meaningless
Slave labor and borderline slave labor allow cheap junk to be made for so little that some companies can make up for the loss several times over by claiming it on insurance, getting government subsidies, or even selling certain things as scrap or filler to other industries. Companies are so frequently part of some vast network of brands owned by the same entity that they can waste a billion dollars without batting an eye. Just saturating a market with *your* unsellable shit can be seen as advantageous if it helps push out a competitor. Someone buying one new pair of shoes for $20 can mean they just covered the manufacturing cost for 500 pairs. Passive boycotting isn’t going to work ever again at this point. The only ways any of this can change will unfortunately require vastly, vastly more work from more people than just telling Twitter to stop buying pants or switching a fast food chain to paper straws.
Funny how as economic inequality increases capitalist society starts to look more and more like the dysfunctions we associate with the Soviet Union. Like, “socialism is bad because it causes production to become decoupled from demand” is one of the biggest right-wing and libertarian anti-socialist talking points.
