What does Karl Marx have to do with Karl Lagerfeld?

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ansey E. Hoskins clearly loves art, understands the ment, and can imagine a socialist society where the creativity of the vast majority will be unleashed to spectacular ends in clothing and many other spheres.

She has also written the most devastating decon­ struction of the fashion industry, as well as of the “ethical fashion movement,” to date. Her new book, “Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion”

(London: Pluto Press, 2014), leaves no negative im­ pact of the fashion industry unexamined. She expertly lays out the industry record regarding class differ­ entiation, worker exploitation, imperialist underde­ velopment, racial stereotyping, female self-loathing, environmental degradation, gender oppression, and artist cooptation.

What makes Hoskin’s book more than a very radical and comprehensive look at the world of haute cou­ ture, and its impact on the rest of us, is the fact that she can be enthralled by the collection of a sophisti­ cated designer at the same time that she shows her­ self to be a revolutionary socialist who has absorbed the best that Marxism and feminism have to offer on this question and can argue persuasively that nothing short of a battle for socialism can right these wrongs.

To better arm her readers for that struggle, she ex­ plains Marxist concepts like commodity fetishism, alienation, ideology, use-value, surplus value, and the reserve army of labor, and interweaves the history of garment production from the beginning of the factory system to today. In short, she effectively answers her own question, “But what does Karl Marx have to do with Karl Lagerfeld?”

The fashion industry, Hoskin’s argues, “lays out in sharp relief all the ins and outs of capitalism—the drive for profit and its resulting exploitation, the pow­ er that comes from owning society’s means of produc­ tion,” and its use of ideology to assert that “there is no alternative.”

Fashion, like all art forms in capitalist society, is highly contradictory. Individual artists can create work that inspires dreams of a different kind of soci­ ety, while, at the same time, the art system that abides that rebellion actually hides capitalism’s inherently destructive mode of functioning and its vulnerability to overthrow by the majority. Relentlessly examining the fashion world in its material context and refus­ ing to let the endless contradictions resolve, Hoskins argues, is the kind of practice that makes historical agency, and ultimately liberation, possible.

Liberation from our own alienation, retail therapy, credit card debt, and body image issues, Hoskins ex­ plains, can only be won collectively and in solidarity with garment workers acting in their interest world­ wide. While boycotts and consumer campaigns that accompanied the civil rights movement or farm work­ er organizing contributed to the morale and mobili­ zation of many, there is no “ethical” fashion purchase that will materially reduce the evils of the fashion in­ dustry under capitalism.

No company that produces garments, no matter what their public relations or green-washing campaigns as­ sert, can stay in business in this system unless it wins the costs of production war with its competitors. And these wars are carried out in the context of powerful militarized nation states negotiating trade rules in the interests of the ruling rich.

In the 1970s, the U.S., Europe, and Canada set selfserving quotas and tariffs under the auspices of the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA), an agreement whose ... NDP future (continued from page 10: “On to Ottawa for the People’s Social Forum!”) in the NDP, as it will take place in the unions. Not exclu­ sively there, but there too.

The battle against capitalist austerity continues. Quickly the Toronto Star warned Wynne to renege on her “progressive” promises and instead to reduce the deficit—“to avoid a credit-rating downgrade.” The Star asks, “Will Wynne play Hudak-lite and cut public service jobs or government spending?” It darkly predicts “con­ frontations with public sector unions.”

Let’s hope that there will be confrontations arising from resistance to the coming cuts. Let’s hope that union leaders don’t declare victory over Hudak and then go to sleep, as they did when the Bob Rae-led Ontario NDP surprisingly won a majority of seats in 1990.

One thing should be clear: for anti-austerity resistance to succeed there must be rank-and-file organization against austerity and concessions inside the NDP and terms determined where it was viable to produce gar­ ments and where it was not. Globally, countries like Bangladesh that were too poor to diversify their in­ dustry suddenly lost $7.3 billion a year. Others, like South Korea, were set up for profit-making. Still other locations, like Saipan, part of the U.S. Commonwealth, became a giant compound housing tens of thousands of young, female, Chinese workers.

In 2005, the MFA ended, and within a few years, Saipan’s industry vanished, and the young women without the means to return to China became the base of Saipan’s sex tourism industry. This volatility is en­ demic to an industry that due to competition overpro­ duces in nearly unimaginable numbers and survives on the creation of false need.

After 2008, when the ending of the MFA coincided with the global capitalist economic crisis and produc­ tion slowed, 10 million workers in China, a third of the 30 million textile and garment workers, lost their jobs. The figure in India was one million, and in Cambodia 20 percent of that workforce. The overwhelming ma­ jority of these workers were women under the age of 40 years working in frequently deadly conditions like the Rana Plaza, where over a thousand women lost their lives last year in a building collapse and where sexual abuse is rampant.

To keep a penny ahead of the competition, the in­ dustry carries out “global scanning,” ready to move a room full of sewing machines in an instant, leaving chaos and women forced into further degradation or exploitation. Hoskins demonstrates, as well, that any claim by any name in the industry that they were un­ aware of any of these conditions is simply impossible.

Particularly effective is Hoskin’s depiction of the special environmental destruction of the cotton, tex­ tile, and garment industries. She describes the Aral Sea, once a home to 24 species of fish and families dependent on them, today a diseased salt-rock desert plagued by winds blowing carcinogenic pesticide dust into villages. The sea was drained to irrigate Uzbeki­ stan’s 1.47 million hectares of cotton, as well as those in Turkmenistan, grown in unsustainable ways to feed the insatiable cheap for-profit garment industry.

China’s textile industry, which supplies most West­ ern name brands, is considered the third worst pol­ luter out of the country’s 39 spheres of production, due to the huge amount of water used for dying and the unions.

A critical test of that idea will occur at the Ontario NDP Convention in November. To prepare for that, the Social­ ist Caucus will host an Ontario Conference on Saturday, Sept. 6. It will petition for a change of leadership and political direction of the party and decide on priority resolutions. It will select SC candidates for the ONDP Executive. And it will plan the next edition of Turn Left, the SC magazine, for which a fund appeal is presently underway.

Can the Socialist Caucus make a difference? It has proven that it can. The SC won the federal NDP in 2006 to the policy “Canada Out of Afghanistan.” The SC led the fight at the 2011 NDP convention in Vancouver to keep “socialism” in the party constitution, and again at the 2013 convention, where we won the debate on “free post-secondary education.” We forced the Ontario party leadership in 2010 to conduct a review of public fund­ ing of Catholic separate schools, and held the only large public hearing on the issue.

Clearly, socialist revolution requires more than social­ ist resolutions. But change starts with joining the fight Marty Goodman / Socialist Action (Above) Society women parade in high fashion as they enter gala event to honor Haitian President Martelly and Bill Clinton (see story on page 4).

finishing. Aldicarb, the pesticide that poisoned up to 15,000 people in Bhopal in 1984, is primarily used for cotton and is still being manufactured in the U.S., though pressure may force the cessation of produc­ tion by 2015.

All this human suffering and violence to the planet contributes to profit making only by the creation of false needs, resulting in the production of 80 million tons of textiles and “throwaway” garments that could clothe the world many, many times over if distribut­ ed based on need. Yet, of course, they are not, since fashion is a trend-based industry that relies on selling billions of short-life units every season at maximum profit.

The United Kingdom, she tells us, deposits 4 mil­ lion tons of textiles in landfills each year. According to Hoskins, annually turning 80 million tons of textiles into short use garments every year requires 1074 bil­ lion kilowatt hours of electricity, 132 million tons of coal, up to 9 trillion liters of water, and an incalculable amount of pesticide, dye, and metallic fasteners. For every kilogram of textiles produced, an average of 10 kg of chemicals are used.

Hoskins concludes, “This spells disaster for the en­ vironment and led Marx to describe capital as having a vampiric relationship with nature, ‘a living death maintained by sucking the blood from the world.’”

While not denying the impact on nature of the cur­ rent setup, the green fashion book “Eco Chic,” Hoskins tells us, urges women to “buy less, spend more,” i.e., choose more expensive but better-made clothes. As comforting as this might be to those who can afford haute couture, the author, explains, high priced gar­ ments with designer labels are made in the same pol­ luting factories as cheaper garments.

There is no buying strategy that can subvert the laws of production and profit making under capitalism. Rather, Hoskins says, the labor movement, because of the strategic place of workers in the whole rotten setup, is the critical element in the journey towards a just society where human needs, which dovetail with environmental health, come first. She may be able to convince your friends and coworkers as well. n inside the main working class organizations.

Capitalism has nothing to offer workers, women, youths, seniors and the poor. The Occupy movement showed there is a hunger for change, and re-defined the notion of “majority.” The Quebec students’ movement showed what a mass “social strike” against neoliberal­ ism looks like. The current continental campaign for a $15/hour minimum wage inspires millions.

Opposition to Line 9, to the Northern Gateway pipe­ line, and the fight to save Canada’s postal services have the same potential. The global popularity of Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” in­ dicates the wide disdain for growing inequality, and the appetite for a radical new direction. The defeat of Ken Georgetti’s executive slate at the Canadian Labour Con­ gress Convention in May is further evidence of stirrings below the surface.

In our tortured world, there is anger and suffering aplenty. What’s lacking is leadership. Leadership is born in struggle. Join the struggle for a new leadership in the workers’ movement. Join the NDP Socialist Caucus. To­ gether we will win. n SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2014 11

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SOCIALIST ACTION