I agree with the central point the author makes: Starbucks baristas are indeed engaged in productive labor when they make coffee drinks for customers. They do, in fact, produce surplus labor value. As do many workers in the service sector, for that matter. This includes fast food workers and many or most other workers employed in food service. It could also be argued, just to provide one other example that comes to mind, that grocery store stockers produce surplus labor value through the act of transporting groceries from the loading dock (and from the freezers and stock rooms) to the store shelves.
A shortcoming with the analysis in this article is that the piece has nothing to say about variations in the amount of surplus labor value produced by different segments of workers.
The thing to emphasize is that the amount of surplus created by Starbucks workers (or fast food workers) — or, to put it another way, the rate of exploitation in these sectors — is quite low. (In business parlance, it would be said that these are “low-margin” industries.) By comparison, industrial workers — particularly those employed in heavy and capital-intensive industries — tend to produce a tremendous amount of surplus labor value. This stems from the extremely efficient and capital-intensive nature of production processes in manufacturing.
Just to provide a case in point:
In September 2021, a group of industrial workers at the Dairy Farmers of America plant in Ventura, California voted in an NLRB election to unionize with Teamsters Local 186. The plant employs around 50 workers who “make Starbucks premade coffee products sold in retail stores,” according to the union press release. While I don’t have the statistical information relating to production volumes in front of me, I think it’s safe to assume that the workers at the Dairy Farmers of America plant in Ventura produce far, far greater volumes of drinks — and far greater amounts of surplus labor value — than their fellow workers employed in Starbucks coffee shops. This stems, again, from the capital-intensive, highly-efficient nature of the production process in such segments of manufacturing.
It is on this basis that industrial workers tend to have much more power than our brothers and sisters in retail.
It occurs to me that this line of analysis will be important in order to understand the developments that take place in the union movement that’s currently unfolding at Starbucks coffee shops.
Hello! Thank you so much for your comment. This is probably the most thoughtful critique I've read of my essay either on here or twitter, and so am grateful for your constructive feedback and thoughtful points. I wholeheartedly agree with you with respect to different workers producing different rates of surplus value. After all, Marx makes a lot of hay out of the different rates at which capitalists can exploit their workers, and these rates are where many of the great battles between Capital and Labor have been fought over the past two centuries.
If interested, I highly recommend Beverly Silver's "Forces of Labor," where she devotes an entire chapter to why certain segments of the production process tend to be more successful than others in attaining their concessions. For instance, Silver writes about how though the Manchester textile workers were extraordinarily militant, many of their strikes were unsuccessful. The constant factor in the strikes that succeeded were in general strikes or in coordination with workers in other parts of the production process. The reason for why textile workers were generally unsuccessful outside of these conditions was because the factory owners found that they could stockpile a portion of the workers' product so that whenever they decided to go on strike, the capitalist had a reserve of product that often outlasted the strikers.
To respond to your point about the shortcoming in my piece regarding the variations in exploitation, I do agree with you. If I were to compose my essay again, I would've at least expanded a little on how rates of exploitation can and do vary across branches of industry. What I would say in my defense is that the object of my essay was less concerned in establishing the differences between baristas and factory workers (of which there indeed are many) as much as it was with insisting on the core similarities. Specifically, my argument was in direct rebuttal with that of Logo's, who insists that baristas are not *real* proletarians. I think this is perhaps the most urgent matter to address as this is a widespread view among many reactionaries and post-leftists. The notion that baristas are not productive or "real" proletarians has high stakes not only for Marxist analysis but also on worker organizing in general.
However, it appears that we both agree on this point, and so I take your critiques with humility and gratefulness. You (and in fact Marx) are indeed correct in pointing out the different rates of exploitation and surplus extraction across industries and occupations. I neglected spending time elaborating on this because I believed addressing the idea that baristas are somehow not producing surplus value to be more urgent in consideration of the stakes involved. Once again, thank you so kindly for the critique, and I hope to hear more of your thoughts in future essays I plan to publish on here!
I’d be very interested to hear both your thoughts on what the organizing relationship between high rate of exploitation, low rate of exploitation, and socially necessary workers should be like
Jules, this is excellent. I only have a superficial exposure to Marxist economics and analysis, but this was easy to read and made ideas I've come across quite clear.
Can you elaborate on how the idea of PMC plays into all of this? I'm not really familiar with Ehrenreich's definition, but I'm unsure of how middle managers and C-suite executives who rely on high wages fit into the Marxist model.
Thank you kindly! Personally, I found reading Marxist historians (or at the very least those primarily concerned with economic and social trends) to have been incredibly helpful in internalizing many of the principles Marx lays out in his writings.
I sort of worked backwards. I read Marxist historians, and then read Marx. The reason being that the language Marx employs in Capital can be a little obtuse. Not because it's complicated per se, but because he's writing in a tradition of Political Economy that nobody these days share. For instance, the Labor Theory of Value was something classical economists like Smith and Ricardo shared. However, if you start reading Volume 1 immediately, you can easily be confused when Marx starts tossing around terms like use-value, exchange-value, etc.
On the other hand, the problem with Marx is that everybody assumes everyone else has done the reading on him, and so primers tend to be very bad or distort what he's saying. So I don't want to say my journey was necessarily the most advisable one to take.
So, here's a *tentative* reading list of books I believe to be some of the best histories in explaining the principles Marx lays out in his political analysis through their application:
- Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert (Excellent history of cotton. Beckert utilizes so many Marxist terms I'm inclined to say he may be a closet Marxist)
- Capital Moves by Jefferson Cowie (This is the 80 year-long story of the RCA factory in its search for cheap labor. Cowie does an excellent job demonstrating how inherent within the factory is a transformative process that creates militants out of docile workforces after a certain period of time.)
- Labor and Monopoly Capital by Henry Braverman (Excellent book. It's about the process by which capital deskills workers through automation and taylorism, and how this process doesn't just impact blue-collar labor, but white-collar as well.)
- Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith (Another excellent work on outsourcing by a Marxist. There's a lot of rich application of Marx's thought here, as well as some very helpful explainers of concepts like the Law of Value.)
- Smart Machines and Service Work by Jason Smith (Very short but sweet book on how automation cannot save us in a system whose aim is profit. Does a great job pointing out the contradictions within capitalism and how capital is effectively its own gravedigger in the form of the destruction of the Law of Value as reflected in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.)
I had a VERY difficult time choosing which books to include since I didn't want to overwhelm you. Which should tell you how high quality these works are considering how awful the secondary literature on Marx tends to be even among Marxists. But I would say read like 3 out of the 5 books on this list, and then start reading Capital Volume 1. I cannot emphasize how important reading Marx first-hand is though. Do NOT neglect to do this and PLEASE get around to it eventually.
Anyways, I hope this is not overwhelming. There's no better time to get into Marx than now given how chaotic the political and economic situation is becoming. If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on twitter @CatholicClod. Good luck! :)
This is a very interesting article.
I agree with the central point the author makes: Starbucks baristas are indeed engaged in productive labor when they make coffee drinks for customers. They do, in fact, produce surplus labor value. As do many workers in the service sector, for that matter. This includes fast food workers and many or most other workers employed in food service. It could also be argued, just to provide one other example that comes to mind, that grocery store stockers produce surplus labor value through the act of transporting groceries from the loading dock (and from the freezers and stock rooms) to the store shelves.
A shortcoming with the analysis in this article is that the piece has nothing to say about variations in the amount of surplus labor value produced by different segments of workers.
The thing to emphasize is that the amount of surplus created by Starbucks workers (or fast food workers) — or, to put it another way, the rate of exploitation in these sectors — is quite low. (In business parlance, it would be said that these are “low-margin” industries.) By comparison, industrial workers — particularly those employed in heavy and capital-intensive industries — tend to produce a tremendous amount of surplus labor value. This stems from the extremely efficient and capital-intensive nature of production processes in manufacturing.
Just to provide a case in point:
In September 2021, a group of industrial workers at the Dairy Farmers of America plant in Ventura, California voted in an NLRB election to unionize with Teamsters Local 186. The plant employs around 50 workers who “make Starbucks premade coffee products sold in retail stores,” according to the union press release. While I don’t have the statistical information relating to production volumes in front of me, I think it’s safe to assume that the workers at the Dairy Farmers of America plant in Ventura produce far, far greater volumes of drinks — and far greater amounts of surplus labor value — than their fellow workers employed in Starbucks coffee shops. This stems, again, from the capital-intensive, highly-efficient nature of the production process in such segments of manufacturing.
It is on this basis that industrial workers tend to have much more power than our brothers and sisters in retail.
It occurs to me that this line of analysis will be important in order to understand the developments that take place in the union movement that’s currently unfolding at Starbucks coffee shops.
https://teamster.org/2021/09/workers-in-california-who-make-starbucks-coffee-products-vote-to-join-teamsters-local-186/
Hello! Thank you so much for your comment. This is probably the most thoughtful critique I've read of my essay either on here or twitter, and so am grateful for your constructive feedback and thoughtful points. I wholeheartedly agree with you with respect to different workers producing different rates of surplus value. After all, Marx makes a lot of hay out of the different rates at which capitalists can exploit their workers, and these rates are where many of the great battles between Capital and Labor have been fought over the past two centuries.
If interested, I highly recommend Beverly Silver's "Forces of Labor," where she devotes an entire chapter to why certain segments of the production process tend to be more successful than others in attaining their concessions. For instance, Silver writes about how though the Manchester textile workers were extraordinarily militant, many of their strikes were unsuccessful. The constant factor in the strikes that succeeded were in general strikes or in coordination with workers in other parts of the production process. The reason for why textile workers were generally unsuccessful outside of these conditions was because the factory owners found that they could stockpile a portion of the workers' product so that whenever they decided to go on strike, the capitalist had a reserve of product that often outlasted the strikers.
To respond to your point about the shortcoming in my piece regarding the variations in exploitation, I do agree with you. If I were to compose my essay again, I would've at least expanded a little on how rates of exploitation can and do vary across branches of industry. What I would say in my defense is that the object of my essay was less concerned in establishing the differences between baristas and factory workers (of which there indeed are many) as much as it was with insisting on the core similarities. Specifically, my argument was in direct rebuttal with that of Logo's, who insists that baristas are not *real* proletarians. I think this is perhaps the most urgent matter to address as this is a widespread view among many reactionaries and post-leftists. The notion that baristas are not productive or "real" proletarians has high stakes not only for Marxist analysis but also on worker organizing in general.
However, it appears that we both agree on this point, and so I take your critiques with humility and gratefulness. You (and in fact Marx) are indeed correct in pointing out the different rates of exploitation and surplus extraction across industries and occupations. I neglected spending time elaborating on this because I believed addressing the idea that baristas are somehow not producing surplus value to be more urgent in consideration of the stakes involved. Once again, thank you so kindly for the critique, and I hope to hear more of your thoughts in future essays I plan to publish on here!
I’d be very interested to hear both your thoughts on what the organizing relationship between high rate of exploitation, low rate of exploitation, and socially necessary workers should be like
Jules, this is excellent. I only have a superficial exposure to Marxist economics and analysis, but this was easy to read and made ideas I've come across quite clear.
Can you elaborate on how the idea of PMC plays into all of this? I'm not really familiar with Ehrenreich's definition, but I'm unsure of how middle managers and C-suite executives who rely on high wages fit into the Marxist model.
Thank you kindly! Personally, I found reading Marxist historians (or at the very least those primarily concerned with economic and social trends) to have been incredibly helpful in internalizing many of the principles Marx lays out in his writings.
I sort of worked backwards. I read Marxist historians, and then read Marx. The reason being that the language Marx employs in Capital can be a little obtuse. Not because it's complicated per se, but because he's writing in a tradition of Political Economy that nobody these days share. For instance, the Labor Theory of Value was something classical economists like Smith and Ricardo shared. However, if you start reading Volume 1 immediately, you can easily be confused when Marx starts tossing around terms like use-value, exchange-value, etc.
On the other hand, the problem with Marx is that everybody assumes everyone else has done the reading on him, and so primers tend to be very bad or distort what he's saying. So I don't want to say my journey was necessarily the most advisable one to take.
So, here's a *tentative* reading list of books I believe to be some of the best histories in explaining the principles Marx lays out in his political analysis through their application:
- Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert (Excellent history of cotton. Beckert utilizes so many Marxist terms I'm inclined to say he may be a closet Marxist)
- Capital Moves by Jefferson Cowie (This is the 80 year-long story of the RCA factory in its search for cheap labor. Cowie does an excellent job demonstrating how inherent within the factory is a transformative process that creates militants out of docile workforces after a certain period of time.)
- Labor and Monopoly Capital by Henry Braverman (Excellent book. It's about the process by which capital deskills workers through automation and taylorism, and how this process doesn't just impact blue-collar labor, but white-collar as well.)
- Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith (Another excellent work on outsourcing by a Marxist. There's a lot of rich application of Marx's thought here, as well as some very helpful explainers of concepts like the Law of Value.)
- Smart Machines and Service Work by Jason Smith (Very short but sweet book on how automation cannot save us in a system whose aim is profit. Does a great job pointing out the contradictions within capitalism and how capital is effectively its own gravedigger in the form of the destruction of the Law of Value as reflected in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.)
I had a VERY difficult time choosing which books to include since I didn't want to overwhelm you. Which should tell you how high quality these works are considering how awful the secondary literature on Marx tends to be even among Marxists. But I would say read like 3 out of the 5 books on this list, and then start reading Capital Volume 1. I cannot emphasize how important reading Marx first-hand is though. Do NOT neglect to do this and PLEASE get around to it eventually.
And finally, if you'd like to find a few shorter Marx pamphlets, check this out: https://jovial-perlman-b35199.netlify.app/
Anyways, I hope this is not overwhelming. There's no better time to get into Marx than now given how chaotic the political and economic situation is becoming. If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on twitter @CatholicClod. Good luck! :)