Is there literally any kind of Marxist basis for this asshole's position? Baristas grind up beans and add hot water and hot milk, and thus their labor turns the coffee beans and milk into a commodity. It's textbook extraction of surplus value. Am I missing something there? Is it because the beans and milk are also commodities, or what? Can someone explain this to me?
Man reactionaries are so obsessed with barristas its insane
Honestly convinced that it’s because the stereotypical barista looks like what they imagine coasties look like
And yet they keep going to cafés apparently anyway
Addicted to stress chemicals. They go to Starbucks, get pissed off about the existence of service workers, and then revel in the chemical haze of outrage.
The only true proles are middle aged white rascists who work in factories that barely exist in the US anymore - some patsoc, probably
It’s incoherent splitting along cultural lines with no basis in Marxism, ie splitting and wrecking
I think it's also tailism but a weirdly degraded form, cause it's not just chasing public opinion of the whole masses and instead chasing public opinion of one particular section of the working class (namely, chuds).
They haven't actually purged themselves of anti-communism. They're what happens if you wanted to be a communist because you see how shitty capitalism is but also simultaneously believed every anti-communist lie told to you by the US government/media. They're not willing to let go of the anti-communism so they try to distort Marxism around that to end up with this nonsense above.
Proletarians are proletarians because they only have their labor to sell. It's their relation to capital, not the form of work they do within capitalism that makes them proletarians. Also the meme assumes that coffee defys the laws of thermodynamics and is made from nothing.
This is like saying an apprentice carpenter is not working class because they're merely putting together finished materials, and really the sawmill operator who created the lumber is working class.
Proletarians are proletarians because they only have their labor to sell. It’s their relation to capital, not the form of work they do within capitalism that makes them proletarians
You'd think a bunch of self proclaimed Marxists would understand this and yet...
Really demonstrates how important it is to deconstruct internalized bigotry and bias.
Historically speaking in the lines of Marx and Engels:
It is the worker/labourer which is doubly free, free of property (to draw rents from) as well as free to chose its work (unlike a serf or slave who are bound by law to set places determined by others and who are kept there by the power of the state).
The industrialization lead to concentration of workers and jobs where the workers themselves are very easy to replace. This mass of exchangeable and precarious people formed the proletariat in the industrial halls (Note: Does exchangeability remind you of gig work and alike?).
The term proletarian became synonymous with working class people / members of the working class over time.
Also the meme assumes that coffee defys the laws of thermodynamics and is made from nothing.
:data-laughing:
Diogenes holding up an empty Starbucks cup and proclaiming, "Behold! A coffee!"
"Being a worker is when you're a white straight man in overalls who hits metal with hammers in a steel mill for a living."
- Karl Marx, "How to tell real workers from blue haired woke SJW's", 1883
Nah, baristas would still be workers under a Confucian framework because they transform already preexisting material into something new, in this case transforming coffee beans into a beverage. It is no coincidence that the word gong, which used in this context means craftsmen and artisans, means work or worker in modern Chinese. "Working class" in Mandarin is gongren jieji, "labor party" is gongdang.
No basis, if there was then anybody who didn't actually make a thing would fall into this category.
Delivery driver? Fuck you bourgie. :bateman-ontological:
Stocker in a grocery store? Fuck you bourgie. :debate-me-debate-me:
Cashier anywhere? Fuck you bourgie. :maybe-later-kiddo:
Any job that has you filling out paperwork about a thing but not actually making a thing? Fuck you bourgie. :youre-laughing:
Its all nonsense.
Unexamined misogynist conception of work romanticizing the working class as traditionally masculine jobs and reactionary anger directed at traditionally feminine/androgynous jobs.
From Bullshit Jobs
But even when it comes to factory labor, there is something of a darker story. The initial instinct of most early factory owners was not to employ men in the mills at all, but women and children: the latter were, after all, considered more tractable, and women especially, more inured to monotonous, repetitive work. The results were often brutal and horrific. The situation also left traditional male craftsmen in a particularly distressing situation; not only were they thrown out of work by the new factories, their wives and children, who used to work under their direction, were now the breadwinners. This was clearly a factor in the early wave of machine-breaking during the Napoleonic Wars that came to be known as Luddism, and a key element in allaying that rebellion seems to have been a tacit social compromise whereby it came to be understood that it would be primarily adult men who would be employed in factory work. This, and the fact that for the next century or so labor organizing tended to focus on factory workers (partly simply because they were the easiest to organize), led to the situation we have now, where simply invoking the term "working class" instantly draws up images of men in overalls toiling on production lines, and it's common to hear otherwise intelligent middle-class intellectuals suggest that, with the decline of factory work, the working class in, say, Britain or America no longer exists-as if it were actually ingeniously constructed androids that were driving their buses, trimming their hedges, installing their cables, or changing their grandparents' bedpans. In fact, there was never a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Karl Marx, or Charles Dickens, working-class neighborhoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs "productive"? In what sense and for whom? Who "produces" a souffle? It's be cause of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value; but doing so blinds us to the reality that most working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women's work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects, than it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things.
I work in a factory, and if you don't think barista work is basically the exact same thing as food processing, metal working, or creating a fucking baseball, I have a curb I want to introduce your teeth too.
:uncle-ho-2: was a pastry chef on a ferry in europe before he lead the liberation of Vietnam. do not underestimate the revolutionary potential of the treat engineer
Yeah he was also a founding member of the communist party of France too.
The word merely in "they are merely agents of circulation" is doing a lot of work lol. Yeah, they're adding value. It's going from grounds to finished coffee and some minor book keeping through the cash register. Does anyone argue railway workers aren't proletariat because they merely move commodities from one place to another?? How are service workers more "agents of circulation" than the Amazon truck driver?
saying that doctors and teachers are not working class
I think they also believe this
This is not even Marx, this was the basis of 19th century classical liberal economics upon which Marx built his thesis on.
Adam Smith observed three economic classes: those who earn money through rent (landlord), those who earn money through profit (bourgeoisie), and those who earn money through the wage (proletariat).
Making linen into coats is labor but making beans into a drink isn’t?
Making a drink using seeds from the triticum genus: Worker
Making a drink using seeds from the coffea genus: Not a worker
posting Sam Elliot memes unironically
The sentence is death. :brace-cowboy:
Is there literally any kind of Marxist basis for this asshole’s position?
no, proletarians are simply those who have to sell their labour to live. And even if this guy was right, and baristas were not proletarians, who cares?
-
No, there's no Marxist basis for this.
-
If "agents of circulation for the Suplus[sic] value" do not count as labor, then truck drivers and rail workers don't count as labor. But those jobs are masculine-coded, so there's no way this guy would ever use this same nonsense argument against them.
This exactly. "Feminine" jobs arent prole enough for this reactionary
Fucking bingo. At the risk of triggering a round of flintstones characters spamming slurs, the reason they see baristas as not creating value is that they see pumpkin spice lattes as having negative value compared to the beans and laborpower used to make them. You know, because that’s a woman’s drink /s
-