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?
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.
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.
they 100% haven't read Marx either
:data-laughing:
Diogenes holding up an empty Starbucks cup and proclaiming, "Behold! A coffee!"