The other day I shared this post by Sustainable Human on Facebook. It popped up on my feed and it’s great so I’m following the page now.
(For those unable to access the post/Facebook: It’s some surprisingly deep musings on clothespins, and how the quality of the new ones is so much inferior to the old ones that were built to last. It is obviously widely applicable to many things you and I can think of. The post shows a photo of two wooden clothespins. One old and built to last, one new. As a person who uses clothespins every day, I constantly experience how flimsy and breakable the newer ones are.)
My thoughts: On a related note, in a real community that’s divested of capitalist/consumerism sickness, people are ALL needed & valued. Everyone’s skills are needed.
In such a community, there will be one person who is good at making clothes pins. It might need to be one person on every block! If people start hanging out their laundry again instead of relying on expensive and high maintenance clothes dryers.
I mean maybe there’ll be more than one person, but my point is that in real community, every single person and all sorts of little skills we don’t usually think of are 100% needed, and I think that’s one of our huge anxieties in capitalist colonizer culture, we define certain people as not being needed, and being superfluous.
This includes very young children and the elderly and people who would be classified as having supposedly unworkable disabilities etc. etc. etc. They can also include people who would in mainstream consumer-capitalist society be written off as mentally ill or deranged and impossible to deal with. If we all need each other, we all have to find ways of talking with each other!
Wait and see what happens when the only person in your community who knows how to repair machinery or catch fish or make clothespins or whatever is the person you thought was useless. By the way, it’s not only skills; it’s also patience or stamina or whatever you would call it. Not everybody has the patience, mix of inclinations, etc. for every task.
(Note, Even though the post I shared points out that the good old chopstick is made of hardwood, I doubt they are saying we need to be chopping down distant hardwood forests just to make clothes pins. We can all be growing enough local wood in our communities/bioregions so that we can sustainably fell some trees for our clothespins and chopsticks and other things we need.)