> The massive variety of clothing styles available to nearly
> everyone-- a variety that's pretty much unparalleled in human history,
> by the way-- is derided as just another corporate yoke, just another
> variety of Mao jacket or prison oranges imposed by malevolent corporate
> masters to enforce conformity. This means that the mass of citizens can
> be ridiculed as mindless, conformist sheep, unaware of what's _really_
> going on.
No, it just means that the protest against reification is itself subject to reification. The ideology of pluralism vs. conformity is itself a piece of reactionary thinking, a.k.a. market fundamentalism. Any really radical critique has to push beyond both poles of the binary, i.e. setting the realm of consumption towards production, finance, and distribution, the way the anti- sweatshop movement has done -- e.g. going from the malls of the metropoles to the textile mills of the periphery.
-- DRR