There’s a post going around about how colour has gradually drained from our daily lives. Many have pointed out that this is a symptom of capitalism, and the need for products to be saleable to the broadest spectrum (pardon the pun) of consumers, thereby removing any aesthetic idiosyncrasies like ‘not being grey or beige’. I wanted to point out something further though.
Greyness has always been used as a threat by anti-communist propaganda. A report from the BBC recalls that the Eastern Bloc was ‘grey, regimented and plagued by shortages’; Polish defector to *checks notes* California, Czesław Miłosz, wrote in his 1953 anti-communist study that ‘The chronic lack of consumer goods renders the crowds uniformly gray and uniformly indigent.’ And yes, this is all very connected to consumer goods. Imagine, if indeed you can, the same shitty, overpriced cafe on every street corner, no matter the city, always the same, always bland, always brutally exploitative to workers. The nightmare of collectivisation! But those were different times. Thankfully we in the noble West can today enjoy ice cream from Walls, Miko, Ola, Algida, Streets, and even Good Humor!
But back then, bootlickers advocates of capitalism cried out, if we sacrifice our right to brutally exploit disenfranchised classes rugged individualism for the sake of collective prosperity, then we’ll lose our very individuality, and become mere drones serving the totalitarian state! Red scare iconography used to feature lots of grey Nehru jackets and imposing brutalist architecture (both of which are fucking rad honestly so I don’t know how that was meant to scare us anyway) to represent mindless conformity and submission to absolute communist power. Yet now we somehow see graphs like this:
So what gives? I’m reminded of a tweet from a short, half-Irish and half Jewish (but secular), dark-haired light-eyed former child star…
Meanwhile in real, existing socialist countries we see vistas like these:
And let’s not forget the hayday of signature artistic styles of the Eastern Bloc, socialist realism and socialist modernism:
Imagine living in a world so drained of colour and culture! Who could survive such a cold, monotone existence but the, err, Reds. Think of these dystopian images next time you enjoy your Starbucks™ coffee on one of your plentiful breaks from work at the luxurious capitalism retailer, and rejoice at the freedom of choice our glorious leaders have handed down to us in their world-beating beneficence.
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