Quarancleaning and social reproduction?

[bloodygranuaile]

For reasons that were not at all my idea, the politics book club decided we would read Marie Kondo's influential treatise on domestic space, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I'd read it before, last winter when the TV show dropped, and promptly became a militant Marie Kondo defender after seeing a million and twelve rich people lose their shit in obviously racist ways and pretend to be concerned about poverty, as if poverty still means having fewer bowls or whatever instead of getting crammed into increasingly tiny and unstable housing, like it's feudal times or some shit. 

 

Having already done some tidying the last time I read the book, like the shirts folding thing, this time I did slightly less tidying, although I did reorganize my desk and the boxes under my bed, and I threw away a whole bunch of papers. The thing this book really, really left me wanting to do this time is reorganize my books, which I did not do last time. Unfortunately, the time commitment involved in gathering all of my books from all around the house, putting them in a big pile, and going through them one by one is currently in conflict with my work and meetings schedule, not to mention that I would probably have to do the big pile in the dining/living room, which means I'd need to fit it into a couple of days and not parcel it out into too many chunks over like a week or two. 

 

Anyway, most of it was still great and some of it was still either not applicable or a bit batty (I'm not HANGING my SPONGES on the VERANDA, sorry, I'm just not), and it definitely made me want to tidy the shit out of everything, which is as I expected. I did pick up a couple of tips that I had forgotten from the last read, which is nice.

 

But the real purpose of this reread was to attempt to read it through a political lens and then discuss what it says about stuff like capitalism, consumerism, domestic labor, the relationship between wealth and stuff, and whatever other fun questions we could come up with to give ourselves excuses to yammer about Silvia Federici. As a result of this, we apparently also decided that our next book is going to be Federici's Revolution at Point Zero, so after that I hope to write a longer and more pretentious piece than this review where I discuss both of them at the same time. It was a very fun discussion that I don't really have the energy to rehash here, and it wouldn't be quite the same anyway, but we talked a bit about the housing crisis and a bit about the the contradictory standards of moralizing that go around American culture and a bit about the relationship between wealth, sufficiency, and possessions (Josh brought up that last one and he could explain it again much better than I can). At any rate, I highly recommend reading a bunch of Marxist theory about social reproduction and then reading Kondo while quarancleaning; it's quite a combination.