there’s a guy that i’m mutuals with on other social media who’s on the young side, like just out of college, and he’s figuring out what he thinks about politics. he’s pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he’s definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he’s critically engaging with stuff well.
however, it seems like he’s seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx’s writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people’s experience.
The coffee beans and hot water don’t turn into coffee without the barista’s labour.
The existence of instant coffee doesn’t make it unnecessary labour: in the case of instant coffee the work was done earlier.
The fact that I can brew my own coffee doesn’t make it unnecessary or unproductive labour either. It’s production whether I do it or pay a barista to do it.
And it’s not unskilled labour: if the coffee machines in any of the coffee shops I go to were self-service, they’d break down within hours from misuse. And when you have a really skilled barista, you can taste it.
You should tell your mutuals-with acquaintance that whoever’s insisting to them that baristas are unproductive ought to be chewing coffee instead of drinking it.
But have you considered that some baristas have pink hair? That makes me mad so they must be unproductive.
Barista or barber or clerk or driver aren’t a fucking landlord but some of those people want to treat them just like that. This isn’t even blue collar reductionism (which is usually also coming from the chudlike unionists lacking theory), it’s pure madness. Though maybe it’s their kind of a roundabout way to arrive at communism (primitive) after everyone would do just a strictly productive jobs causing supply chains to collapse in few days and remnants of humanity getting back at subsistence farming within a year, at least if we ignore the roving cannibal gangs and slaver warlords.
Also, Marx’ distinction of productive and unproductive labour isn’t a moral one, but rather a strictly material one. Marx distinguishes between productive and unproductive labour strictly along the lines of whether the product of said labour turns a profit for a capitalist. Thus, the exact same labour process with the exact same resulting product can be both productive or unproductive, its categorisation is entirely determined by whether the product is a commodity or simply remains a good.
In your example, the barista making your coffee would be productive labour, whereas you making the coffee yourself would be classified as unproductive.