Probably just do commcerial laundries. For most of human history there have been professional clothes launderers. You bag up your clothes at the end of the week, they pick up the bags, wash everything, and send it back to you the next day or whatever. It's been handled at all levels from individual mostly women doing laundry for clients to pretty substantial operations serving large numbers of people at once.
Right now hospitals and hotels have laundry systems with pretty high throughput. It's very doable and largely a solved problem.
Yeah, pretty normal people. Doing laundry by hand is really labor intensive and you have to have fuel to heat water. It was worth it for relatively poor urban people to have someone do their laundry for them in many times and places. Like economically having one person heat a whole bunch of water at once just made more sense. If you did it at home you'd have to do laundry plus all your other daily tasks.
During the colonization of the American West, who did your laundry mostly depended on your marital status. Since laundry was "women's work", bachelors wouldn't do it. But there weren't a lot of women around during the early era of colonization, so you got Chinese immigrants (largely from Hong Kong) who would establish these commercial laundries to cater to all the single men who couldn't or wouldn't do their own laundry (it was also very time-consuming and arduous work). American racism against Chinese immigrants who held these jobs led to things like the avowedly leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which was a labor organization that fought to keep these jobs legal.
There's variety within any profession like this, at many points in history it hasn't been the norm for normal people in urban settings to cook their own food or have cooking facilities at home, instead they purchased food from people whos job it was to cook.
But there would still be a difference between a business serving everyday people and personal chefs/cooking staff.
Laundromats are fine, but actually, I could imagine there being a launderer that collects bins of laundry at a municipal level like they already do for garbage (and recycling and compost in some places!)
The laundry collector can be a community hero much like the garbage collector, with good compensation for their time doing a dirty and socially necessary job.
What's your experience? I've been washing my clothes mostly always in laundromats for 20+ years. They are not fine.
You need to spend so much time either hanging around or going back n forth. Every week I spend 1-3 hours of time that I wouldn't have if I had an in-unit washer/dryer.
Lots of maintenance/equipment problems
Uneven availability of machines --- you can show up and have to wait around because someone else came and filled every single machine at once
Problems like the last person used bleach and it didn't rinse properly so now there's just bleach and your clothes get ruined
machines are really limited in their settings, don't allow the freedom to add things at different parts of the wash, let is soak for a bit, or other things you can do with a normal domestic unit
people are always there with all their bed bug stuff
Some places in the US have what are called "wash and folds" where your drop off your laundry and they'll do it for you, usually charging by the pound. You pick it up folded.
Even some dry cleaners will do this.
Obviously more expensive than a laundromat, but, as always, it's a question of how much you value your time.
I'm in a rural area so the traffic to laundromats is pretty low; my experience probably doesn't match the typical one! The machines all worked, there were rarely more that one or two people, etc.
Yeah, the time lost to laundry in of itself is a pain. I could bring a book, but I still gotta carve out a block of time to do me and someone else's laundry. I gotta do it often as well, since I got a messy job and not a lot of clothes. I mean, I got a lot of clothes but it's hard to find the time to break out my sewing kit and fix up some of my pants.
Communal laundry rooms with washers only, one room with several machines per floor in the commie block. The machines are owned in common by everyone in the building. Everyone has this kind of dryer in the bathroom.
They're not in use most of the time when everyone has one, so we're overproducing washing machines just so people can have them privately in their homes.
I'm not using my chefs knife most of the time either, but I sure as fuck am not going to walk to the community chef knife repository every time I want to use one.
My shower only sees 10 minutes of use a day, do I need to remove half of my bathroom and share with a dozen people so we aren't over producing fiberglass showers?
How about my vacuum? I only use that about once a week, probably shouldn't even own one of those either. I'll just pop on down to grab a vacuum when someone else isn't using it, maybe make a schedule for who gets to use one and when for max efficiency, like a vacuum library.
It's not like they wear out sitting there for a week, they wear out when they get used. I would agree that the race to the bottom in quality is bad, and more people should have durable repairable machines that don't hook up to the wifi, but I don't think that a non-consumable utility like a washing machine is bad for people to own and use.
As to washing up! Where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of this long and dirty work, that is usually done by hand, solely because the work of the domestic slave is of no account.
In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which hot water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under these conditions the problem was a simple one, and a woman – Mrs. Cochrane – solved it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates or dishes, wipes them and dries them, in less than three minutes. A factory in Illinois manufactures these machines and sells them at a price within reach of the average middle-class purse. And why should not small households send their crockery to an establishment as well as their boots? It is even probable that the two functions, brushing and washing up, will be undertaken by the same association.
Cleaning, rubbing the skin off your hands when washing and wringing linen; sweeping floors and brushing carpets, thereby raising clouds of dust which afterwards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places where they have settled down, all this work is still done because woman remains a slave, but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely better done by machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into households, and the distribution of motor-power in private houses will enable people to work them without muscular effort.
Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for them, it is because they are not in general use, and chiefly because an exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to live in grand style and who have speculated on land, raw material, manufacture, sale, patents, and duties.
But emancipation from domestic toil will not be brought about by small machines only. Households are emerging from their present state of isolation; they begin to associate with other households to do in common what they did separately.
In fact, in the future we shall not have a brushing machine, a machine for washing up plates, a third for washing linen, and so on, in each house. To the future, on the contrary, belongs the common heating apparatus that sends heat into each room of a whole district and spares the lighting of fires. It is already so in a few American cities. A great central furnace supplies all houses and all rooms with hot water, which circulates in pipes; and to regulate the temperature you need only turn a tap. And should you care to have a blazing fire in any particular room you can light the gas specially supplied for heating purposes from a central reservoir. All the immense work of cleaning chimneys and keeping up fires – and woman knows what time it takes – is disappearing.
Candles, lamps, and even gas have had their day. There are entire cities in which it is sufficient to press a button for light to burst forth, and, indeed, it is a simple question of economy and of knowledge to give yourself the luxury of electric light. And lastly, also in America, they speak of forming societies for the almost complete suppression of household work. It would only be necessary to create a department for every block of houses. A cart would come to each door and take the boots to be blacked, the crockery to be washed up, the linen to be washed, the small things to be mended (if it were worth while), the carpets to be brushed, and the next morning would bring back the things entrusted to it, all well cleaned. A few hours later your hot coffee and your eggs done to a nicety would appear on your table. It is a fact that between twelve and two o’clock there are more than twenty million Americans and as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton, boiled pork, potatoes and a seasonable vegetable. And at the lowest figure eight million fires burn during two or three hours to roast this meat and cook these vegetables; eight million women spend their time preparing a meal which, taking all households, represents at most a dozen different dishes.
“Fifty fires burn,” wrote an American woman the other day, “where one would suffice!” Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if you like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal! Why fifty fires, when two people and one single fire would suffice to cook all these pieces of meat and all these vegetables? Choose your own beef or mutton to be roasted if you are particular. Season the vegetables to your taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a single kitchen with a single fire and organize it as beautifully as you are able to.
Why has woman’s work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think “of those kitchen arrangements,” which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge – woman.
To emancipate woman, is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the “emancipated” woman will always throw her domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.
It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.
Conquest of Bread, Chapter 10.2
This is a utopian answer, but you asked a utopian question. I couldn't find a Marxist who wrote about this.
absolutely a utopian question. thank you for the utopian (if 19th c answer).
“Fifty fires burn where one would suffice!” said some smart lady ?200? years ago. Foretelling climate catastrophes...
Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity
I don't think it has to be one way. Maybe some people have their own units, maybe other places have communal units, maybe certain places have industrial launderers. It'll depend a lot on the conditions specific to each location.
Personally I lean towards communal units with anything that only gets used once a week or less (and takes up space and/or a decent chunk of resources to produce). Boats, laundry machines, power tools, trucks, guns, whatever.
When I was a little kid it was explained to me that Under Communism this is how things worked. You don't even get your own clothes. Since I was a freaky little kid with a ....distinctive.... fashion sensibility it was horrifying enough.
Now that I'm adult and worn down by the world it doesn't sound like a half bad idea.
it doesn't suck that much, i could see people rotating out this task like any other chore. idk how necessary that would be though, im not sure how energy/water efficient washing machines are
you don't need a washer and a dryer in every unit, but you can have like 2 washers, a heated drying room with good ventilation and a tumble drier per, like, 20 units. a communal laundry room where you book a time slot like once every week or two weeks. very common in Scandinavian rental blocks.
This is the canal, just twisted around in one spot, you can stroll somewhere if you want to and come back or chat with your neighbors while they wash their crap.