https://twitter.com/FoxGGreen/status/1550181570421706753
Baristas also deserve to be hand fed by an influencer looking to make 5 trillion views from charity porn.
If being a barista was completely superfluous to running a coffee shop, why would companies like Starbucks even bother hiring them then lmao.
It's pretty obvious these patsoc losers are trying to abuse Marx's concept of productive and unproductive labor. But productive labor as understood by Marxists within a capitalist society just means labor that contributes to the surplus value of the particular commodity being sold. A commodity is a good or service that is for sale on the market, meaning the production of a commodity is not just the physical manufacturing of a good but the distribution of the good in the market as well. To use an often quoted example, someone who carves a wooden chair for personal use hasn't created a commodity because the chair is only for private use. It's only when they place the chair on the market for sale, be it a physical store or an online store like Amazon, that the chair becomes a commodity.
From this lens, baristas obviously perform productive labor because not only do they produce coffee drinks from various ingredients, where the exchange value of the final product is greater than the sum of the exchange value of the constituent ingredients, but the baristas are also the final step in distribution of the drink within the market by virtue of directly interacting with customers. Even ignoring the part where baristas perform socially necessary labor through the production of drinks, without baristas, the drinks would all be sitting in a fridge outside the reach of customers. Within the framework of capitalist property rights, customers can't just walk into the back of the shop and take it out of the fridge, meaning those drinks, by being barred from customers and the market, aren't commodities yet.
Within a business firm, actual unproductive labor from the prospective of capitalists is HR or the accounting department or internal counsel because none of them directly produce surplus value of the commodity. It doesn't mean they aren't necessary or useful to the business. Even if they don't directly produce surplus value, Starbuck's accountants might save the company millions of dollars by exploiting various bullshit tax loopholes and Starbuck's lawyers might save the company millions of dollars for successfully defending the company in court.
:order-of-lenin:
Shit like this is why I love this site, I click a topic to just get angry at Starbucks and walk away with more Marxist education. :fidel-salute:
This site is like a stand-up comedy open mic night at a communist bookstore.
Fuckin great materialist analysis comrade
:fidel-salute-big:
Going to my neighborhood PatSoc cafe, where we put on hardhats and sing the pledge of allegiance at coffe beans until they turn into lattes.
We grind the coffee beans by hitting them with sledgehammers and pickaxes.
Not truly a friend of proletariat unless your stirring your coffee flavored dessert drink with a greasy wrench.
What the fuck of course Starbucks would cease to exist without baristas :galaxy-brain: tf is supposed to happen at a Starbucks without baristas?
They want to replace them with robots. Turn Starbucks into a walk-in vending machine with a WiFi spot. If they do that, they’ll lose a huge chunk of their customer base- but a fraction of billions is still billions.
The ever-present false threat of automation as a form of labor discipline
:citations-needed:
praying for the delware court to force elon to buy twitter only for him to shut it down out of spite
going to incredible lengths for the bit if true
edit: made a dunk tank thread for this because lmao
I'm convinced patsocs are just feds trolling us at this point
Real “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference." vibes going on.
add more use value
You can't add use value because use value isn't quantitative. That's literally the main difference between use value and exchange value lol. You can certainly change use value, and change in use value is contingent on change in the physical properties of the commodity.
i simply chew my coffee beans since they are identical to a cappuccino
Ok but unironically stuff like chocolate covered coffee beans are good, as long as the chocolate's just a thin layer instead of a big ball with some bits of coffee bean in it.
Patsocs are what you get from DSA types that just wanna be super lib and skim Marx so they sound fancy, but are sick of getting dunked on for being lib so they create an entire fantasy world where they are a hair's breadth from fascist but call it socialism.
Without the baristas you can enjoy eating plain coffee beans
Of course Starbucks ceases to exist if the laborers that transform shitty burnt coffee beans into sugary monstrosities cease to exist
I could have made the coffee myself if I wanted to. Therefore, your work has no value.
Unless Starbucks wants to exclusively sell canned caffeine beverages then yes they do need barstas...which is why they fuckin hired them in the first place
What? No, dipshit, if you get rid of your fucking workforce that actually produces wealth then what's fucking left? A supervisor or manager to try and keep the store functional? A bunch of middle-management pencil-pushing dweebs that send each other spreadsheets of numbers of this and that? Upper management clowns and department heads whos entire existence is to sit in meetings letting their eyes glaze over watching powerpoints?
You get rid of the foundations of a business, then the bureaucratic house of cards will tumble down
They literally think an automated coffee machine can do a Barista's job. That sound you can hear is the entire population of Melbourne (a city that ran Starbucks out of town because it was worse than the worst coffee you can conceive of getting there) laughing at them.
No, but they think if you just put a row of hospital coffee machines in place of a Starbucks that's the same thing.
Like...I'm pretty pro automation but they've clearly never drank coffee before.
There is also the hyper specific orders that people get. I'd love to see an automated machine pump out some of the crazy shit that people order at starbucks. Or the anal fucks that go apeshit over the tiniest bit of foam. Barista is hard job and machines are too simple for what people want. People don't even know how to order and they want to take out the humans helping them! And the taste ofc
Oh, I've tried to order a Flat White at a stopover in Canada and it's not a great moment for me or the Barista (nor is it remotely their fault I want a failed cappuccino as a drink).
Australians are famously anal over coffee, more so than Viennese or Italians.
That coffee grinding noise off in the distance is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Wild how Emptying the Cities is a pretty common Amerikkkan conservative position now
Just have self-serve espresso machines, those don't require "skills" to operate, right?
Half these motherfuckers who talk about “real, meaningful work” work at Megacorp #262782 staring at a screen all day, doing a bullshit job where they’re hyper alienated from their labor and therefore need to fill this void by consuming the aesthetics of the “real working man”
Also this fuckers gonna draw a line in the sand about “real labor” when he makes YouTube videos
another hard day of honest proletarian toil down in the theory mines defending my beloved great satan against the malign bourgeois influence of minimum-wage starbucks workers
i mean most service industry jobs are bullshit and we'd be better off giving them college educations for free so they can do something else that develops us towards the next stage of economic development
like, waiters/waitresses is a bullshit job. why cant i just go pick up the food from the kitchen myself? plenty already do that
ok, so theres a restaurant where you can go up to the trough and grab food that you want and go to cashier and then they ring it up. thats one solution and was basically how all restaurants were ran in czechoslovakia during socialist times, they were run like cafeterias. sometimes in simpler restaurants the cook and cashier were the same. what is unnecessary is having 20 waiters to handle 60 tables or whatever when you could just have a cashier or two. its common for most big chains to have a lot of waiters like that.
there are other methods, like you can just check in as soon as you enter a building and get the food yourself. this has become common in a lot of areas so you can spend your cash on kitchen staff to improve food quality. also common at all you can eats.
in czechoslovakia cafeterias were super fancy, not typical cheap fare like you get in usa commonly. for allergies you could order direct but most people are fine with what is on the bar so it cuts down on work for the kitchen staff. had a long talk with my grandma about this subject once actually
and yeah it is possible to order via phone, theres this one place i go to ran by a small family from rural china and you can call them up and theyll leave a box with your name on it near the door. you pick it up and leave cause theyre covid conscious. i asked them about how many meals they make and they said they get hundreds of orders per day and can handle it with just 2-3 people because they dont seat people
yeah my grandma said she went to one cafeteria and it was sort of like a pub / cafeteria where you could hang out after work / on downtime and it was walking distance from the fertilizer plant she worked at. built a sense of community. was extremely fancy, had nice lighting, hardwood floors, you can get to know the chef and staff because they arent working all the time because they make most food in bulk not to order. people would buy the staff alcohol all the time at the end of the day in the pub part because it was cheap. stops alienation from happening, food was good and affordable. it was built inside a nice scenic little park with a pond and a bunch of picnic tables. very popular with the workers nearby and my grandma was on a first name basis with maybe 200 people because of this?
I've been to restaurants where you go up to a counter place your order and then later they yell when your food is ready for you to get it
what are the other bullshit ones?
waiting is the only one i can think of that isn't strictly necessary
at least without big leaps in automation:thinkin-lenin:
greeters at grocery stores. cashiers. you can basically just have one person make sure that people use terminals correctly, essentially cutting the employment needs for a store by like 20/1. theft from using terminals wrong is negligible in comparison to profits from saved labor in that system. some things, like uber eats and pizza delivery, are only a thing because everything is so spread out that people dont want to drive an hour to go somewhere. if you make grabbing food a short walk it no longer exists. a lot of service jobs can be based around navigating bureaucracies and middle men. car salesmen or real estate agents, for example. these can be gone with systemic changes.
there are a handful of jobs that you probably can't automate at our current level of development of course. kitchen staff, cleaning staff. youre gonna need these no matter what. robots can make those jobs easier right now but it doesnt get rid of them. customer service is also likely unavoidable, though a lot of it can be automated with a sophisticated enough robotic q&a. some people claim transportation industry is also a service industry, if that were the case you could just invest heavily in trains and cut something like 3 million jobs from tractor trailer drivers if you have good infrastructure set up.
I strongly prefer the more cafeteria-style self-waiting. I don't actually want someone bringing me water and shit. The person doing that should be able to live without this (usually) pointless servitude, I'd rather they get paid to fuck around and do whatever they want, at which point they'd probably do something really cool after a few years anyways (or not, don't care).
But at least these service jobs aren't making the world worse. The insurance industry generally, and for medicine specifically, can die in a fire.
I wish the best for the Starbucks union, but I'm strongly opposed to their corporation. I only get my coldbrews from establishments that welcome refugees like Playground Coffee in Brooklyn, NY.
oh look, this person is an american patsoc clown who doesnt understand the word proletarian :shocked-pikachu:
