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
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.
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:
“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.
