To put it crudely, it's the employers way of saying to the employee, "You are my little punk b#tch, now get to work and don't rest, be constantly productive... Work, work, work!"
one's not a punk b#tch because of conforming to a dress code while at work, per se. but one is most certainly a punk b#tch by willingly entering into a business relationship in which they are giving the vast majority of the fruits of their labor to some freeloading shmuck who's enabled and protected by property laws. i am one such punk b#tch, in fact, who might as well say to his employer 'yes, hi. if you would be so kind as to let me build this five thousand dollar deck, give me only three hundred and twenty dollars, keep all the rest, and still pretend to be dissatisfied so to discourage me from asking for more of my own money via a raise, i would sure appreciate it, because i'm a punk b#tch. oh, and if you could contribute absolutely nothing to the labor required to build the deck, that would be even better. i'd like to do every bit of the work in exchange for the smallest fraction of the profit. the smaller the better. you know what? just let me do it for free. fuck it.'
no seriously though, have you ever noticed the hidden premise behind the capitalism banner? check this out. it can absolutely
not be a system that encourages everyone to accomplish it... because if everyone did, it couldn't work. there
has to be an exploited class in order for it to function. well that or it would devolve back into mercantilism... and that certainly ain't happening. so what does this seemingly innocuous fact mean? any profound philosophical wisdom to be gleaned there? i think so. capitalism is intrinsically immoral (or amoral, for the honest ones... but those are extremely rare. you'd have to go full stirner to be so) because it demands that its highest ideal
not be realized by everyone. and when that happens, you have an ethics that everyone cannot share... as material relations are embedded in any system of ideals, and vice versa, so that if a particular kind of ideal cannot be realized by everyone engaged in those material relations, the entire system of ideals cannot apply to everyone.
but to the capitalist's advantage, the 'philosophy of ethics' is such an obscure subject to begin with, that just about anything can be either overlooked or made believable. that's why, say, something like what weber called the protestant work ethic, has prevailed in the west for so long. such a super-narrative is able to conceal a fundamental flaw in itself that, if recognized, would bring the whole thing down in flames.
now it would be one thing if the state did not criminalize the individual who refused to sell his labor and decided to leave society, claim a patch of woods, and build himself a hut. but you can't do that because you'd be 'trespassing'. so then you shack up in a homeless shelter and eat at the soup kitchen. now you're a parasite just like the capitalist. fuck, you might as well start your own business, in that case, right?
the fact is, in the world today you are forced to become either a parasite, a punk b#tch, or a frickin' vigilante anarchist renegade.
i quite agree with your assessment of the jeans. i don't ever wear em... i'm a sweat pants guy. got a pair for every day of the week. but denim, being such a durable and easily made material, is and was made popular by that fact alone. it was only later that such pejorative associations in/for class identity began to form in society. but that comes with the territory. commodities, especially clothes, are not simply objects in a free market; they acquire all kinds of imaginary 'metaphysical niceties', as marx called them, which become arbitrary signifiers for wealth and class.
think about a diamond. a chunk of pressurized coal that costs 23,000 dollars. pressurized coal, dude. oh but wait... a diamond represents all kinds of symbols and metaphors that we can give poetic meaning to; crystal clear with perfectly faceted symmetry, no messy lower-realm material blemishes or disorganized, disproportionate geometric shapes, full of light, no dangerous, frightening unpredictable darkness. hard, long lasting, millions of years old... like our love for each other. gosh i love you so much and what better to express this than...uh, a chunk of carbon i guess?
fuck your diamonds and fuck your jeans, erik redbeard. i hope you didn't just get a job that you have to wear jeans to. nobody just makes a random post about the plight of wearing jeans to work unless they just got a job like that. this isn't one of those random thoughts that one thinks 'hey, i think i'll post this thought at a philosophy forum.' it was just discovered that there's a helium shortage on earth. now why wasn't
that your random thought, instead?
no, i think something's up. i think you're wearing jeans (and probably diamonds, too). unfuckingbelievable.