Requiem for the Baristas

Is the Starbucks Barista Who Sold Me My Latte a Proletarian?

Over the past week there’s been a great deal of what passes as controversy among insanely niche twitter left circles. That is, whether or not Starbucks baristas are real workers. Anybody who gives more than thirty-five seconds of thought to the question will come up with the correct answer. But thirty-five seconds is a little too much to ask from a certain clique of twitter users. According to twitter poster Logo_Daedalus, Amazon workers are proletarian whereas Starbucks workers are not. Logo’s reasoning for why this is so comes down to society “needing” Amazon workers and “not needing” Starbucks workers. 

It would be very easy to laugh off this kind of sentiment for largely-intuitive reasons. Namely, that Starbucks workers obviously depend on wages to survive and are therefore workers by even un-Marxist conceptions of the working-class. But this argument deserves a response for two reasons: one, the conception of the working-class as being largely cultural is a widespread view among American reactionaries; and two, because a response will bear a constructive lesson in the Marxist framework of proletarians and the manufacturing of value. This essay is less for presenting a new application of Marxist theory as much as it is a simple lesson for my followers unfamiliar with Marxist analysis. The end goal of correcting flawed arguments like this is important if our mission is to gain a clearer understanding of reality and therefore the means by which we can build organizational power among workers.

We start first with a simple question. Just what is a worker? Broadly speaking, a worker is anybody who acquires the means of subsistence (food, shelter, healthcare) by selling his labor-power as a commodity in return for wages (money) which he needs in order to buy the means of subsistence.

And what is a commodity? A commodity is generally any item or service produced with the intent of sale on the market. The capitalist comes to market as a buyer and the worker a seller. The worker needs money to purchase the means of subsistence. So what does the worker sell? His labor-power. Crucially, the worker sells his labor-power, but not his labor. While labor is the act of working itself, labor-power is the worker’s capacity to labor; in other words, the worker is selling his time, or potential to labor. The worker sells his labor-power as a commodity to a capitalist in exchange for a wage sufficient for him to continue selling his labor-power another day. 

Within the sphere of production, the capitalist assembles together all the commodities he purchased from the market: raw materials, tools, machines, and labor-power. After producing his commodities, the capitalist walks out of the sphere of production and into the sphere of exchange to sell his wares. But something peculiar has happened. The capitalist has somehow left the market with more money than he had in the first place. In other words, the capitalist ends up with a profit. But how?

It’s because labor-power is a very special commodity. Labor-power is the one commodity in the world that can create more value than it itself is worth. 

What’s that mean? Well, let’s say a Starbucks barista is hired for ten hours to produce cups of coffee for a day’s wage of $70, or $7 per hour. Five hours into their shift, the Starbucks barista produces and sells 14 cups of coffee worth $5 each for a total of $70. Just halfway through their shift, the Starbucks employee has sold a number of cups of coffee whose total value equals their total wage for their day shift. 

Now, does that mean they get to go home? No. Remember, the capitalist bought the worker’s labor-power, their capacity to work. That barista’s ten hours, and by extension every commodity they produce, belongs to the capitalist. This means the barista still has to keep making cups of coffee until their shift is over, even though halfway through they’d already produced enough cups of coffee whose total value equals that of their day’s wage. The commodities produced and sold at and above the value of the worker’s daily wage (the value of their labor-power) is called surplus-value. 

The rub of it is that the capitalist hasn’t stolen or done anything immoral in the eyes of the law. Everything that took place was legal. The worker and the capitalist met each other in the market as equal bearers of commodities. The worker exchanged their labor-power for the capitalist’s money. The worker is not entitled to the surplus-value they produced during the time they were working for the capitalist. In the same sense that an apple seed you purchased is entitled to the apples it later produces just because the apples are worth more than the original price of the seed. Those apples belong to you just as the worker’s produce belongs to the capitalist. This is Marx’s great scientific discovery of the capitalist mode of production.

Now, this commodity called labor-power, what we call living labor, needs to be mixed with a few other commodities before it can produce commodities and thereby surplus-value and thus profit. These other commodities are called dead labor. They’re called dead labor because they (the tools, the machines, the coffee beans) are the products of past labor made inanimate. Though the coffee beans come to the barista as just coffee beans, those coffee beans are the product of a coffee planter’s past labor. 

Value, so far undefined, is effectively congealed labor. Value is the actualization of labor. The measure of value is labor-time i.e. the time which it takes society on average to produce and furnish a specific commodity. The value of a commodity being the average amount of time it takes to produce cannot be over-emphasized. The socially-necessary labor-time to produce a cup of coffee does not just include the time it takes for the barista to make the coffee. It also accounts for the average time it took to grow and pick the coffee beans, to transport the beans, to process the beans, to sort the beans, etc. This means that not only the barista’s average amount of labor-time, but also the average labor-time of every single worker involved in the manufacturing process is encoded into the price of that $5 cup of coffee. 

This also means that as productivity i.e. the capacity of a worker to produce more in less time, increases, that means the value of a commodity decreases. This is because less labor-time is encoded into the commodity and is therefore less valuable. This is why even though the price of a t-shirt may fluctuate it will never be higher than the price of a 2005 Toyota Camry. Why? Because the socially-necessary labor-time to produce a t-shirt is generally far less than that of a 2005 Toyota Camry. Hence, the value of a cup of coffee will decrease if the production process becomes more productive. This can come about through the introduction of either sophisticated labor processes or of machinery into the production process: for instance, machinery introduced into coffee bean farming may make it easier to pick more coffee beans with less effort, meaning that less labor-time is encoded into each coffee bean, making coffee beans less valuable, and thereby making a cup of coffee slightly less valuable.

Of course, our model is incredibly simple. We’ve so far assumed that the prices of commodities equal their values, which they never do. We haven’t talked about the countervailing factors that often maintain the price of a commodity even when its manufacture becomes more productive and therefore less valuable. We could talk all day about the Labor-Theory of Value, but what we’ve written so far is sufficient for our purposes. So why is this talk of value so important? 

Because a Starbucks worker is fundamentally the same as an Amazon worker. I’m not just talking here about their reliance on selling their labor-power to survive. I mean that a Starbucks worker and an Amazon worker both engage in real commodity production i.e. the production of tangible commodities whose total value exceeds the value of their labor-power. 

One may think this absurd. And this absurdity probably comes from two levels. The first level being functional; and the second being aesthetic. 

To begin with the functional, at first one may think intuitively that, surely, the Amazon worker is fundamentally different from a Starbucks employee. To which I respond that we must look beyond the aesthetics of both occupations and break them down into their skeletal forms. At root, both the Amazon and Starbucks worker are engaged in production. The former’s role is in the transportation and handling of commodities; the latter physically assembles different commodities into something new. The only difference between the two workers is where along the production process they’re situated. While the Amazon worker works at the logistical point of production, the Starbucks worker is employed at the point of production concerning manufacture. 

Don’t be fooled either, the Starbucks worker is in fact engaged in production. Think about it. All production entails is the multi-step process in which a commodity is produced. Just as your average blue-collar worker is presented with commodities in the form of machines and tools to assist in producing a finished commodity, the Starbucks worker takes the commodities presented to them in the form of coffee beans, vanilla, toppings, paper cups, straws, and machines, and with those commodities produces a new, finished commodity ready for sale. 

Essentially, both workers are presented with commodities in the form of dead labor and soak this dead labor with their living labor to produce something new. If we wish to take this a step further, the Starbucks barista is more directly involved in manufacture than the Amazon warehouse worker. After all, unlike the Starbucks barista, the Amazon worker is not presented with raw materials with which he uses to produce a new commodity. The warehouse worker doesn’t visibly transform the commodity. Does that mean they’re less involved in production than the Starbucks barista? No. Because the Amazon warehouse worker does transform the commodity. They spatially transform it. As Marx writes in Volume 2 of Capital, transportation is an essential part of production; after all, how can one make use of a commodity if it’s twenty miles away? I say all this not to delegitimize the work warehouse workers engage in, but to demonstrate that these differences between the Starbucks barista and the warehouse worker are more aesthetic than substantive. All in all, both workers are individuals who have to sell their labor-power in exchange for a wage. Both produce a number of commodities whose total value exceeds the value of their labor-power. Both are directly involved in production. And both produce surplus-value. 

Now, the absurdity of the aesthetic position is easier to refute but harder to dislodge. Simply put, it is clear that the Amazon warehouse worker and the Starbucks barista are fundamentally the same inasmuch as 1) both must sell their labor-power to survive 2) both are engaged in real commodity production albeit in different parts of the chain and 3) both produce surplus-value. However, very little of this matters if all we care about are aesthetics. Somebody is a proletarian if they appear to be engaged in “useful” labor i.e. produce real commodities. This conception strangely excludes service workers who literally operate tools and raw commodities to produce finished commodities and includes traditional workers engaged in traditionally masculine labor such as loggers or assembly-line workers. 

This conception falls apart given our above outline of the fundamental qualities that both the Amazon warehouse worker and Starbucks barista have in common. But let’s concede a little ground. What if we switched the warehouse worker with a worker more directly engaged in manufacturing like an assembly-line worker? 

Our position would still hold. Sure, one can argue that without the “actually productive” coffee bean pickers and the truck drivers transporting the beans that the Starbucks barista would be useless. This is correct. The barista would in fact be useless without those raw commodities needed to produce something new. 

But why is this not as true for the assembly-line worker? The assembly-line worker also can’t actualize his labor-power without the raw commodities that come further down the value-chain. Does that make him any less of a worker because they’re dependent on the dead labor of others? Obviously not. All political economists from Smith to Marx to Keynes recognize how necessary interdependence is for capitalism. In the parlance of Adam Smith, you can’t have a pin factory producing ten-thousand pins a day without a production process spread out among a large number of men performing relatively simple tasks. It is therefore absurd to claim that the Starbucks barista is somehow fundamentally different from an assembly line worker let alone an Amazon warehouse employee just because the former depends on those earlier back in the production process. 

But let’s give the opposition even more breathing room. What if Starbucks workers are not engaged in productive work? What if they actually don’t produce surplus-value? Would they still qualify as proletarians? Yes. Marx in Capital Vol. I distinguishes between certain kinds of workers: productive and unproductive. While productive workers are directly involved in the production process and add value to a commodity i.e. labor-time to the commodity, unproductive workers are only indirectly involved in the production process and therefore do not add value. As Marx writes: 

The extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc. (574)

One could therefore make the case that an assembly-line worker is productive because they produce surplus-value while an accountant for Nike is unproductive because they are not directly involved in the production process. However, the accountant is not useless just because they do not produce surplus-value; after all, accountants perform the crucial service of organizing the finances of a firm and navigating the tax code. We discover then that there are jobs that are unproductive because they do not produce surplus-value but are also socially necessary i.e. are important to the circulation of capital.

The point of this brief digression is to point out that though there are indeed different categories within the proletariat. There is active debate within Marxist circles regarding who does and does not qualify as productive workers. Many workers do in fact fall within a gray area. These workers include occupations as varied as teachers, lawyers, barbers, doctors, etc. The stakes of this debate are also high considering as many as eighty percent of Americans work in the service industry. So if proletarians working in the service industry cannot be revolutionary, this has tremendous implications for American labor organizing.

However, what nearly all Marxists can agree on is that Starbucks baristas, whether or not they are productive, are proletarians. Why? Because even if they do not produce surplus-value, they are at the very least compelled to sell their labor-power as a commodity on the market for a wage in order to survive. This is the most important point to be made here. Regardless of what so-called twitter post-leftists or national conservatives have to say about the dignity of working as a barista versus a factory worker, it is incontestable that both rely on selling their labor-power to survive and are therefore proletarians. If it were the case that all Starbucks employees own enough capital whose passive income is sufficient such that they no longer need to work then this would be a different matter. The average Starbucks barista makes $14/hour, which comes out to $29,120 a year if they work 40-hours a week. So it’s obvious here that Starbucks workers are proletarians whether or not they engage in productive labor. 

To conclude, it’s easy to laugh at somebody like Logo. To many his arguments are stupid, flawed, and even undeserving of attention. However, drawing attention to this kind of argument is important for the following reasons. First, this argument is not rare. It is in fact an argument shelled out by Republicans like Tucker Carlson and U.S. Senators like Tom Cotton. This is bad enough, but the danger of erstwhile leftists of being swept up in these stupid conceptions of the working-class is even worse. While these arguments deserve mockery, they also deserve substantive rebukes; not just to convince the other person, but also to convince others who may be listening. 

Secondly, these ideas offer great opportunities for demonstrating the applicability of Marxist analysis to the modern day. It’s very easy to handwave Marx as somebody whose analysis only applies to nineteenth-century European capitalism. But as we continue into the global crisis plaguing our political and economic systems, Marx has in fact stood the test of time. Utilizing Marxist analysis not only aligns us closer to reality, but also offers those unfamiliar with Marxist thought an introduction and perhaps invitation to learn more. At the very least, I invite Logo to pick up a copy of Capital and start reading; clearly, he needs it.