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Nearly every denizen today of industrial societies has ready access – usually in our homes – to these cleansing machines. Automatic clothes washers and dryers such as these (along with inexpensive detergents, bleach, and fabric softeners) enable us to recycle our clothing over and over again for sanitary and attractive reuse. And note that the clothes that we moderns wear are made of machine-woven fabrics that, unlike the crude homespun that our pre-industrial ancestors wore, withstand well being vigorously washed in these machines with effective detergents.
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How mundane such appliances are! (Or so people ignorant of history and economics suppose.) But in fact these machines – their existence and their affordability – are marvels brought to us by entrepreneurial, bourgeois, innovative markets. They are among the countless means by which our world is cleaned by capitalism.