"This doesn't tell me why you think washing clothes at some sort of public institution is preferable to washing my clothes at home. Nor does it address the question of cooking meals at home."
I'm with Carrol on this, if I understand him right.
The private sphere, home and hearth, is a relatively recent invention, in human historical terms, insofar as the greater part of productive life was socialised in the industrial age, leaving just those tasks of reproduction of labour power isolated.
If one were to redesign life from scratch, it is not obvious why each family unit (increasingly in London, with the growth of single living, each person) running their own electric motor to turn their clothes over in soapy water. After all, relatively few of us bake our own bread. In Britain government authorities only closed state-owned laundries in the 1960s - my one-time teacher, Ian Birchall protested throwing dirty laundry at the town councillors.
There is of course a proper resistance to incursions into the private realm by government authorities. We tend to jealously defend our private realm because it is the condition of personal autonomy. Any wholesale socialisation of the domestic sphere under capitalism would most likely be repressive, like the dormitories that South African labourers were forced to live in, away from their families, to work in areas covered by pass laws; or the organisation of leisure time by the Nazis.
On the other hand, private capital does increasingly socialise more and more of the domestic realm. Many more people eat out, or buy ready-cooked meals, or hire domestic cleaning services, or indeed, pay for laundry services. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050830/21f188f1/attachment.htm>