Worn Out

 “Worn – A People’s History of Clothing” by Sofi Thanhauser, 2022

This is an environmental, labor and historical materialist analysis of the development of the clothing industry.  It is based on 5 main segments – Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics and Wool.  Given clothing is a human essential, this book provides a great background to understand what has happened to clothing in the colonialist and capitalist age, and why it should not go on. 

I’m only going to look at the chapters on cotton and synthetics. 

COTTON

The story of cotton is somewhat familiar.  It was the foundation of the ‘industrial revolution’ in England, spurred by slave-grown cotton from the U.S. and later, the peasant-grown cotton of lower caste India.  The English actually destroyed the Indian artisanal handicraft clothing industry during the U.S. Civil War after slave-cotton was no longer available in bulk.  So the British East India Company forced rural peasants to grow cotton for export instead of food for themselves.  E.P. Thompson noted that the textile factory system, first started in 1771, destroyed the textile artisans in England earlier.  All in the interests of a full blast commodity economy.

Thanhauser weaves a story of the vast cotton ranches in the Texas panhandle near Lubbock, desperate modern Indian farmers committing suicide in small villages in Tamil Nadu and the cotton lands and industry of forced Uyghur workers in Xinjiang, which has become China’s cotton hub.

TEXAS

Cotton uses 20,000 liters of water to make a single pair of jeans.  Worldwide it uses 24% of insecticide and 20% of nitrogen fertilizer, while decimating the land as a monocrop. The U.S. is the #1 exporter of cotton in the world. Modern cotton growing uses bio-engineered pesticide-laden seeds.  The Texas and Kansas wheat and cotton ranches suck huge amounts of water out of the Ogallala aquifer, which in Kansas is down 60%. Liquid nitrogen doses the drip tubes. Cotton is sprayed with toxic paraquat to make it mature faster and sprayed with Bayer / Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide to kill bugs.  Latino field workers get cancer, while the EPA gives Monsanto© a pass.  The life expectancy of Latino farmworkers is 49.  The U.S. subsidized cotton growers with $1.1B in 2017.

Buddy Holly’s club, the Cotton Club in Lubbock, is closed.  It figures. Lubbock itself is a ghost town according to Thanhauser.

TAMIL NADU

The colonial English push for cotton in India led to deforestation, the enclosure of common lands and private ownership over cooperative farming. India also became a cloth importer when it had been a cloth producer!  A famine in the 1870s partly due to export production led to 19 million Indians dying – never mentioned in the context of capitalism of course.  Present cotton farmers are forced to buy patented Bt cotton seeds, fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides. 90% of India’s cotton acreage is now controlled by Monsanto© seeds.  In 2004, 600 farmers in Andhra Pradesh committed suicide due to corporate-induced poverty, some, ironically, by drinking the chemical defoliant paraquat.

Low-paid, non-union women now work in the Indian knitwear & textile industries, supplying Walmart, Target, Sears and H&M.  Toxic dyes are dumped in rivers – red, yellow, blue and black, for crops, humans and animals to pick up.  Cotton exports like this export water too – just like export flower farming in Columbia does when you buy that cheap bunch in a grocery chain store.

XINJIANG 

China has turned Xinjiang into a ‘special economic zone,’ especially to produce cotton clothing in large factories and farms.  Cotton farming has desertified southern Xinjiang, drying up its rivers.  This is similar to what happened to the Aral Sea in the USSR / now Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan, which disappeared after intensive water-hungry cotton farming was initiated. 20% of world cotton came from Xinjiang in 2019.   According to reports, much of this labor is forced or required, though the factories and farms are called ‘vocational training centers.’

Some U.S. companies using cotton and clothing from this area are Badger, Adidas, H&M and The Gap.  In 1992 under Clinton, executives for The Limited, Kmart, The Gap & Spiegel testified to keep cheap Chinese cotton flowing – and it was done.  Given all this, do you think bought-and-paid-for textile departments in southern U.S. universities are studying hemp textiles, which, unlike cotton, use far less water, fertilizer, machines and herbicides?  No they are not… 

SYNTHETICS

RAYON

The first ‘synthetic’ clothing was made from rayon – essentially wood pulp and chemicals – but it got worse from there. Oil became the base of new fabrics – along with bright aniline dyes that stained rivers red, yellow and orange.  Rayon could be mixed with natural fibers like cotton to make blends.  As a ‘new’ industry, its workers were non-union, paid less and worked longer hours, nearly all in the U.S. South.  Cellulose also can make cellophane and acetate, but they all use carbon disulfide, a neuro-toxin.  Rayon workers, who were mostly women and girls, fainted, got Parkinson’s, nerve damage, personality changes, hallucinations and loss of libido.  They noted an increase in 'mental illness' around rayon mills.

Due to later studies, OSHA reduced the carbon disulfide standard to 20 ppm, a compromise but still too high, and still the standard in the U.S.  Officially in the EU and China it is 2 ppm, but in the global south it is still 20 ppm.   

The largest textile strike occurred in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was met by National Guardsmen, company thugs and right-wing militias, who eventually killed one of the leaders of the strike, Ella Mae Wiggins.  No memorial remains in Gastonia at the mill that was the center of the strike. Another 1934 strike in Greenville, South Carolina and the little town of Honea Path led to the murder of 7 strikers and wounding of dozens by the mill owner, who ordered his goons to use a machine gun.  The owner was also the town mayor and judge, typical in small towns.  No one talks about this strike either, nor was anyone prosecuted.  Union organizers in the South were then and still are treated like ‘carpetbaggers.’ Thanhauser details the proletarian feminism of other textile strikers and seems to be somewhat of a Leftist, though she does not openly condemn capitalism or embrace eco-Socialism.     

NYLON

Nylon was developed by DuPont and was made entirely with petroleum products.  It was soon followed by acrylic, polyester, spandex, Dacron, Orlon and fluorocarbon, along with hundreds of sub-varieties.  Bright aniline dyes were also developed out of coal tars, which involve chromium, lead, cadmium, sulfur, mercury, arsenic and formaldehyde, among other chemicals.  And then there is the recent development of omnipresent oil-based micro-fibers…  As is clear, any reduction in oil usage would require our petro-fabric clothing and carbon-based dyeing industries to be de-carbonized too. This will mean a huge change just in our dress. 

Nigerian Export Processing Zones

EPZs

Thanhauser describes how the U.S. domestic clothing and textile industries were consciously destroyed in order to ‘fight communism’ by sending these jobs to countries under threat like Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.  It was basically on orders from the State Department, but the manufacturers soon went along when it allowed them to leave unions behind and find cheaper labor.  This was the political origin of ‘off-shoring’ and tax-free, duty-free raw materials and cheap labor ‘export processing zones’ which supply the U.S. with fast fashion and clothing.  Brands like H&M, Macy’s, JCPenny, Kmart, Sears, The Limited, The Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Esprit, Adidas, Carhartt, Under Armour, PINK, Nike and L.L.Bean all use these EPZs.  In fact, probably every brand you can name does.

These EPZs were then promoted by the U.S. government in central America and the Caribbean (like Jamaica) during the 1980s - also it seems in the ‘fight against communism.’  Honduras, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, became a huge export hub and Thanhauser considers Honduras a case study.  Starvation wages, forced overtime, physical violence, mass firings, anti-unionism, child labor, death threats occur around these EPZs.  These might remind us of the old U.S. south, but now it’s the global south.  The wretched celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford even got caught using these EPZs, which are like secretive armed camps, guarded with razor wire.  As might be expected, corporate good conduct plans have changed little.   Choloma, Honduras is an EPZ example Thanhauser looks at, a gated enclave that functions as an extractive geography.     

Honduras had a coup in 2009 supported by Obama and Clinton, as the new liberal government threatened the local textile oligarchs.  The coup government presided over drug dealing, rapes, assassinations, murders and kidnappings, while gutting the welfare state. No wonder so many Hondurans tried to emigrate to the U.S.  Blowback! You want to stop desperate immigration?  Stop supporting climate change, capitalist extraction and vicious governments – but that is not the U.S. plan.  After the Dhaka Ran fire disaster in 2013 in Bangladesh where 117 died, 17 large U.S. firms still refused to sign an Accord on Fire and Building Safety.  Yet the U.S. government does not see their role as anything but enabling these criminal firms, usually with corporate trade agreements.

Hanhauser ends this chapter by talking about fast fashion outfits like Zara, Forever 21 and H&M, who stock new fashions in stores twice a week. An industry of young internet ‘influencers’ has grown up displaying these ‘hauls’ on You Tube, Tik Tok and Instagram, pushing this disposable junk as part of the slickest sales effort in history.    

The book is a lively, somewhat familiar tour of the world’s garment industry, its environmental, health, labor and financial effects.  It would be a great introduction for some, as it covers most of the bases. 

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Stitched Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion,” “Shopping World,” “Inconspicuous Consumption – the Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have,” “NAFTA 2,” “USMCA Fraud,” “The Marijuana Manifesto,” “The People’s Green New Deal,” “The Avalanche of Plastic.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

March 12, 2022