https://twitter.com/C2ooth/status/1549750930194796544
i legitimately don't understand this. like 'producerism' is certainly a thing (an incorrect thing) and many jobs don't in fact produce a product...
but baristas literally do. chefs do. take food ingredients and make a food. thats production.
I have to repeat this a lot right now, but this is what embracing CHUD culture war politics does to your brain. Claiming to be "communist" then hating on the blue-hairs (or w/e) until you bend yourself in half and become anti-communist.
:this:
The most successful trick for the right is turning working class from a material, class condition into a culture and an aesthetic. No longer defined by labor, but instead by what you consume, what skill you have, what dialect you speak, how you do your hair, etc etc.
it's the logic that gets the BBC to interview landlords as working class based on them having regional accents
For some reason this comment just made me feel hopeless, like we are at this point where the culture is so far removed from materialism, and have been for so long that most of us only shed that layer of stupidity through continuous self deprogramming over the course of years.
certain jobs are just inherently 'woke' and therefore not prole? and this is based on like, a large company occasionally covering their ass with pride statements and putting 'dont harrass queer people' in HR guidance?
or am i off base... do the liberals who shop at starbucks make the service people not prole
I mean maybe it's because coffee companies love woke messaging, but the whole "people who are baristas are wannabe creative writers and liberal arts college students with no prospects" is a very old stereotype at this point
but what does a person's educational backround have todo with the nature of work? and its not like people with good Bootstraps backrounds cant work there?
sorry im going all over its just wild to encounter genuinely confusing political currents, i try to understand & parse as best i can
They have a CHUD hatred of stereotypical "woke college student baristas" "playing the victim" and are using it as an excuse to dismiss a real unionization drive, by cloaking it with "sympathy" for Third World agricultural workers
Their culture war-driven hatreds have trumped the principle of solidarity and reveals their true politics
American culture wars make no sense and these broscialist weirdos are just amplifying it. There's a stereotype that Starbucks baristas are highly educated, yet unwilling to do "real work" like construction, manufacturing, or agriculture. The average chud will believe a pool supply company owner who drives an expensive Ford truck is more working class than a Starbucks barista with blue hair who lives in a large city.
It makes no sense at all and is some kind of aesthetics battle. The easiest way for me to frame it is just white patriarchal heteronormativity. Some jobs are manly, some jobs are gay. If you work around dirt and lift things, then you're manly and straight and cool. If you have a gay liberal arts degree and do gay things like make coffee, then you're gay and you don't have a real job. That's honestly as far as it goes for the average American.
American culture wars make no sense and these broscialist weirdos are just amplifying it. There’s a stereotype that Starbucks baristas are highly educated, yet unwilling to do “real work” like construction, manufacturing, or agriculture. The average chud will believe a pool supply company owner who drives an expensive Ford truck is more working class than a Starbucks barista with blue hair who lives in a large city.
Yeah, people are lining up for a job where you stand 10+ hours a day getting yelled at by boomers because you spelled their name wrong.
Here's one of the best breakdowns of right wing faux-populism if you're interested.
Claiming to be “communist” then hating on the blue-hairs (or w/e) until you bend yourself in half and become anti-communist.
ugh, i was guilty of this a couple of days ago and I regret it. Also, as a former dishwasher I might or might not have half-jokingly called for the gulag of all waiters and front house staff at certain points in my life.
What can I say, reactionary sentiments are convenient, easy to grasp, and alluring if you don't keep mind of them.
From what I understand (I've never actually worked in food service) grudges between kitchen staff and front of house workers are very common and seems like easy prey for the boss to stoke divisions. Little different from the age-old divisions between "skilled" and "unskilled" workers - the nature of division of labor in capitalist enterprise often means some workers have more privileges in the workplaces than others. It's only natural - not something to be ashamed of but more something to be recognized and overcome.
Yeah its like that everywhere ive worked where there is a division of foh and boh. A lot of the time its not too serious and everyone gets their shift drink and bitches about the managers and owners together
Reactionary sentiments are extremely convenient because they don’t ask you to re-examine any internalized bias you might have.
The important thing to remember is we all have varying degrees of these prejudices. The work is in dismantling them and killing the pig in your head.
So yeah, props for identifying you were doing that shit and then owning it.
These divides are also functional. If workers are at each other's throats then that means we aren't organizing with each other to advance our shared interests.
But class interests have very little relation to the type of work you do. The proletariat is the part of society who owns no meaningful amount of capital of their own, who owns no land, no economically relevant tools/equipment, and no raw material/inputs to production that would allow them to participate in economic activity independently in a way that would allow them to sustain a decent living. The only thing they have for sale that is of economic relevance is their time, their body, and their labor, and therefore they are the part of society who is forced to sell themselves piece by piece and hour by hour in order to secure a living.
That is the shared circumstance that we find ourselves in as workers. The type of work we do isn't particularly relevant to class interests, because for the most part the type of work that is offered to us is outside of our control. The part of society who owns capital and who purchases our labor to operate that capital is who is deciding what work is being done, who is deciding how our labor is organized and which priorities our labor is being used to pursue, and who ultimately has the final say in what the conditions of our labor will be and how it will be compensated. So even if you could identify a job that is bullshit, or workplace dynamics that make your life more difficult in the case of BOH FOH feuds, it still isn't helpful to direct your ire at the workers in those positions because what jobs are offered for them to make a living and how the workplace is structured are out of their hands.
I doubt I'm saying anything here that is a revelation to you, I just wanted to take your comment as an opportunity to present these ideas in one place. Our critique/opposition to capitalism comes from the fact that those who own capital have a nearly unchallenged and unaccountable control over our lives and how our society and our labor is organized. Our plan of action for changing this situation must involve mass action and mass organization with the people who share the same circumstances we each find ourselves in. Capital only has power over us as individuals, but capital is completely worthless without our collective labor bringing production to life. Without our labor, the capitalist only has a dragon's hoard of depreciating assets and economic liabilities. Our leverage to wrest control of our lives and our labor away from unelected and unaccountable capitalists would be indomitable if only we manage to put up a united front. Which is why it is so important to do what you have done and put aside petty feuds between your fellow workers and choose solidarity instead.
Literally "raw" materials. It's more of a "productive" job than a forklift driver.
Watch the video clip, I think the sheer size of his kitchen really makes this, lol. "You're not exploited" I cry as I make a multi-day trek from my marble counter island to my utensil drawer. Dude lives in a suburban mansion and calls fucking Starbucks workers entitled.
Maybe. I hate to bust it out, but imagine being such a cuck that you shit on your fellow proles who work for better conditions, saying things aren't that bad from someone else's house
Also, he is literally not being exploited by making coffee at home, as there is no work value exchange going on? Unless he is making hundreds of cups of coffee and selling them in his house? (And even then there is no wage labor relationship, he owns the means to his production)
These fucks literally can't fucking understand numbers. Maybe it's because decimal numbers are Indian and they're just too fucking spicy for them?
This bitch thinks that because he was able to make coffee for 1 PERSON 1 TIME a day, that making coffee for 250 people in a day, for a reward of $90, and having to pay $80 of those dollars for your daily rent, is "totally fucking doable and stop whining"
freaks like this need to forcibly experience MLK smiling meme, and whenever they slow down they get whipped in the ass extra hard
Making coffee for myself one time with no deadline or stress is the same as making a no whip no frap macchiato triple shot for the lady who is screaming about how I'm taking too long and watching me the entire time, while getting paid 15 bucks an hour and with 30 people in line behind her :very-intelligent:
:eric-andre: How could you say something so controversial and yet so brave
:very-intelligent: you can just use :ukkkraine: they’re basically the same country anyways
yeah the true communist position is that both sides are dumb and evil for dragging the working peoples of Russia and Ukraine into this bulshit
Worst is 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 . If you really want to rot your brain, throw in an Orthodox cross
you would think that if you made an account on that site to show off you would at least lie and say you've read a bunch of theory.
bullshit jobs
This is actually extremely troubling. Their poisoned brain drew a radically different conclusion from what Graeber intended
:graeber: "Lots of office workers feel that their jobs are meaningless"
Patsoc weirdos :so-true: : "Ah, so we should liquidate the unproductive workers!"
Getting online, picking"barista" as the thing I currently hate, and absolutely clogging the Tubes with endless memes about how much I hate them.
Definitely not a Hail Corporate moment.
Marxism is when you're class reductionist and the more class reductionist you are the more Marxist it is.
I think they associate them with blue-haired liberal feminists. Obviously class traitors.
The majority of blue haired people I know are queer and/or hella leftist. Not sure where the stereotype of that being a lib thing even comes from.
In particular, industries associated with women and queer people.
I figured it out
- masons, 1st world farmers, fishers, etc tend to be whiteboy networks so they're all good
- coffee farms, tea farms, and other tropical products are managed by the good POC who stay in their countries
- retail workers, fast food workers, etc are staffed by POC in white-majority countries so they're bad
Class Exclusionism or something if you wanna draw up a new term for it, guys that make up arbitrary and abstract barriers between the "real proletariat" and "bourgeoise service workers" based on shit like how "hard" or "difficult" the work is, or if its "productive or unproductive" at a surface level.
I saw one of these guys say that being a delivery/transport driver is suddenly actual proletarian work but being a barista still isnt, suddenly its about fucking distance you transport the commodity I guess.
Yes and also your class is determined by your relation to vibes and aesthetics
is it class reductionism to arbitrarily invent a new class of less-exploited-but-still-wage-laborer to pretend they're not being exploited
Starbucks workers have to deal with a clamoring mob of sugar addicted large children, which I'd imagine is the main source of stress and inability to get a lunch break. I don't think I've ever seen a standalone store that didn't have a line of SUVs around the building at peak.
But this will totally be used against restaurant workers who have to put away bulk stock, wash like 3 weeks worth of household dishes in a single night (may god help you if there's cheese or sour cream in the sink water), scrape/brick grills, prep hundreds of pounds of ingredients, run and clean a deep fryer, follow FDA protocol, mop up vomit, get woozy/dehydrated because you can't get a lunch break, and still have to deal with a mob of sugar-addicted large children.
Same dudes that will say you’re dividing the working class if you dare to ask them to Introduce some intersectional analysis for poc comrades into their thinking bc it might make their mayo ass feel bad and then turn around and be like “lol service workers aren’t actually proles bc they don’t look like propaganda posters from 1940”
What if there was a plant called coffee, an industrial material called coffee, a consumer drygood called coffee, and a hot beverage called coffee
Wouldn't that be wild
No. Doing brute manual labor in a field or in a warehouse is proletarian. Doing brute manual labor in a restaurant is not. Don't ask me why it's 100% obvious why, and in fact it's offensive to even ask why. :brainworms: :lmayo:
no, words can only mean one thing ever and they can never change.
Do you think these accounts are hired by Starbucks to undermine unionization support?
Possibly. They have both a law firm and PR firm for union busting. The PR firm specifically targets the term "union busting" in online discourse
There are other patsoc or patsoc adjacent nerds on Twitter that don't get anything out of socialist readings except vibes and aesthetics. It's no surprise they run parallel to tradcaths and bronze age pervert types. Honestly learning about some of this stuff about the past couple months has been a nightmare. The left is in an incoherent state
Honestly they might be the exact same people as tradcaths and fash femboys and superstraights etc. It's a common trolling tactic to make sockpuppets to poison the well with outlandish, impossible constellations of :brainworms: and :galaxy-brain: takes. That then attracts real, very confused human beings that think the movement is organic and meaningful and parrot the obvious bait because it makes them feel good when they get 2000 angry retweets in an hour.
It's super easy and cheap to do, absolutely derails the conversation, and I don't know why we shouldn't do the same in reactionary spaces. (Other than risking :brainworms: and becoming weird post-leftist reactionaries)
But honestly beware of anyone claiming to be anything, that's a suckers game on the internet.
bronze age pervert types
getting conquered by brown people to own the brown people
I think they just like to think of themselves as leftists but have internalized some propaganda (maybe their material interests align with that propaganda?) and will defend their weird opinions to the death due to all the fucked up things algorithms do to the brain (contrarianism is good for engagement!)
I would like to destroy all algorithms. I'm sure there's no legitimate purpose for them and we should class them as Tier 1 Cognito-Weapons alongside advertisements and PR.
Based on the sheer size of the kitchen, I'm guessing it's a rich kid that thinks he's playing 18 dimensional chess and helping daddy do some union busting.
But maybe they hired some PR firm type company to do this shit for them.
Or maybe it’s just a regular old moron out there doing it in public for all to see.
Whether you think being a barista is "real labor" or however you define "proletariat", it doesn't matter one bit because there still exists the class conflict. Capitalism created baristas, capitalism created and maintains a level of unemployment and enforces the consequences of unemployment. Workers didn't create fucking starbucks.
You don't even have to be a prole to be on the proletarian side of class conflict. Look at the unhoused, disabled, even fucking basement dweller neets, none of these "non-proletarians" are exploiting you via rent or wage theft.
also baristas is a weird hill for them to have picked as they also go through a process of handling the beans to process them into coffee
a lot of baristas at indie coffeeshops will also even roast the beans.
Any service worker who also handles fractional product (coffee beans, dough, raw foods, etc.) Would be considered directly productive, as in they are working a physical thing with labor to turn it into another thing.
I can maybe see their argument working with table servers, but that just means they have a poor understanding of labor and the social content of it. Yeah service work is kinda bourgeois, but it's still social work. They're still adding value to the product (food and beverage) through their labor of social interaction and last foot transport of the food to the table.
Ideally these sorts of jobs disappear under communism and are replaced with more cooperative eating arrangements (canteens, community kitchens, cooperatives), but do they really think that the workers not being unionized will help with that? Labor is labor is labor, no matter what form it takes, if it's organized it has power.
:marx-goth:
-See this important equation: m=cc+cv=>m’=cc+nl+sl, m’-m=sl
-Yes
-so any one can be exploited, regardless their nature of work
-workers when drills and hard hats
:marx-joker:
:agony-limitless: every time I see this horseshit.
What's next, teachers don't need unions? Artists don't need unions? Fucking Christ.
There’s a small struggle sesh here every couple months where some weird nerd insists teachers aren’t working class lol
I mean it's like we are all workers and the job of solidarity is to raise everyone up because all work is meaningful, especially if we were to collectively work towards removedSC. These sickos want to make a class hierarchy of workers because they can't imagine one where the work of a janitor is as valuable as a teacher.
I'm pretty weary of calling something an op. Oh, I'm suspicious - perhaps even paranoid - about quite a lot of things. I just don't like to declare something without the certainty of evidence.
Howeverthis is an op
maybe not this post exactly; but this mindset, this trend certainly must have astroturfed origins be it public or private
the real "op" is that it's bait, trolling, inflammatory statements made for attention. whether or not they actually believe it or think they can justify it, they are saying it because they know it will get people to interact with them and make their little internet micropolitics seem very serious and dangerous and relevant to the labor movement.
the contradiction of the dunk tank is that we're doomed to always be giving power to the worst discourses imaginable. I've said before that COINTELPRO is obsolete because corpo social media performs the same function without any input from the enemy, turning its users' revolutionary potential against phantasms and conditioning them to seek short term emotional gratification, and like this is what i mean. it's interpassivity algorithmically tuned to capture every productive impulse and turn it into consumer metrics for advertisers.
like the fact that their arguments consist almost entirely of putting paper doll accessories on the soy wojak face should make it obvious: the point isn't to convince anyone, it's to get you mad. Like I'm scrolling their feeds and it couldn't be any more obvious that this is a game to them (which, yeah, it's twitter). I'm also discovering that apparently they count lesswrongers as their enemies too. pretty funny. it's like kids on the playground teaming up to throw acorns at each other, very important, intensely political stuff.
Liquidate all chefs and cooks. The true proletarian can just heat up a microwave burger while on lunch break at the boulder punching factory
They will be assembled at the microwave burger factory, duh...
BY BUFF GUYS IN HARD HATS
You know, I’m starting to think these guys are just really into buff guys in hard hats.
you joke but I know someone who had to wear a lot of that safety equipment in a warehouse shipping essential oils for various companies
Every patsoc is an op and if you ever run into one in an irl org ( :doubt: ) it should be purged with extreme prejudice.
they're just chuds pretending to be communists
they even know they're not communists lul
they’re almost always privileged cishet dudes who don’t want to address the systemic issues that help create and then reinforce capitalism.
they literally call themselves patsocs - anyone willing to do that is either fash or so ignorant of history that they literally don't know what national socialism refers to. always bash the third positionists, however much they insist that they're socialists.
So the lesson is:
Exploitation is when bareback and barechested
Not exploitation is when apron
:theory-gary:
exploitation is when job stereotypically held by men but bourgeoise is when woman (notably women have worked in factories since there have been factories as low wages have basically always meant 2 incomes are needed Engels wrote about this and how it means that amoung the working classes sexism where it occurs is less tied to income and more to the fact that men are typically physically stronger)
