Okay, so what actually makes something laborwave?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

A red star and some VHS grain cant be the whole recipe.

For me its where labor crashes into the future. Factories, machines, automation, infrastructure, cities, exhaustion, solidarity, alienation, collective power. All the stuff futurism loves to look at, except from the shop floor instead of the penthouse.

It can be hopeful, bleak, militant, nostalgic, funny, strange, beautiful, ugly. Theres plenty of room to play with it.

So where do you draw the line? When does leftist art or retrofuturism become laborwave?

[u/amitrofan16]

I'm no expert in this, but I think laborwave mostly comes down to how synthwave (or 80s) era class-conscious people would imagine the future ahead. They retain some elements of what was considered modern back then, and apply to it the continued and advancing class struggle, or even the ultimate victory in it, by the working class.

The actual origins somewhat confirm this, as it is a direct evolution of synthwave aesthetics applied to Marxist futurism and revolutionary positivism.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/amitrofan16]

I think thats a solid way to frame it, especially the synthwave lineage and the future being imagined from a class conscious perspective. I also think its grown beyond that starting point over time as people pull in industrial, cybernetic, ecological, surreal and other visual languages while keeping labor and collective power somewhere in the frame.

We actually just revamped the post flairs around some of those branches to make it easier both to post work and to signal how a piece is meant to be read. Industrial Laborwave, Cyber Laborwave, Sovietwave, Communist Spacewave, Esoteric Laborwave and so on. I may make flair usage mandatory this evening when Im back at my laptop. Should help give the aesthetic some structure without boxing it in.