#it’s unfortunate I’m cutting right to the conclusion when this has a whole big preamble about coffee and the emergence of ‘fair trade’ and

[steveyockey]

Consumption — ethical or not — is a one-sided category that’s mostly unfit for Marxist use because it isolates one moment in our social circuits, mystifying the connection between that moment and all the others: production, reproduction, extraction, waste. A Marxist analysis of the local Starbucks would see it first of all as a site of labor struggle between workers and owners, a view that’s more readily available now thanks to the efforts of Starbucks Workers United. We would also want to understand the chain’s position as a winner in a consolidating, globalizing market, and the particulars of how the firm has raised the level of exploitation in coffee-producing areas and its effects on migration. “Capitalism is always bad” may have been good enough to keep the fire alive, but with anti-capitalism blazing away, it’s not good enough now.

If we are engaged in a collective liberation project, then we can end the debates about the individual ethics of consumption and instead begin to develop a strategic, shared analysis of our movement’s needs. We should eschew super-exploitative gig platforms not because they’re morally dirtying but because a bunch of people who are psychically dependent on underpaid delivery workers for their basic needs are not going to overthrow capitalism. (Only a philosopher could believe the words on the package in which we’ve been sold cheap abundance are a bigger obstacle to revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness than the cheap abundance itself!) We should avoid ultra-processed foods not because they don’t have the right certification labels — sometimes they do anyway — but because they make us sick and our health is important. If we approach our needs as a strategic, collective concern, it’s not an objection to these “shoulds” to say, for instance, “Life under capitalism is so brutal that workers depend on consumer indulgences to get through the month,” or “Disabled workers have been forced to rely on capitalist products and services to survive in a hostile society.” On the contrary, that’s simply to reiterate the immediate need for different ways to live.

We shouldn’t take that Hawaiian vacation, not because it’s unethical by whatever philosophical standard, but because it undermines the struggle of Kānaka Maoli organizers who are in a specific and urgent fight for the future of their nation, which is part of the world struggle in which the “we” to whom this essay is addressed consider ourselves participants. We need to go see left-wing music and movies (and subscribe to small magazines, of course) not because otherwise we’re lamestream sellouts but because cultural products can ennoble or stultify and the ruling class would rather have us stultified. And we need left-wing cafes not so we can show off our unnecessarily expensive Veblen goods but because we need places where workers can read behind the counter and sneak free stuff to their comrades, where we can meet on purpose or by accident, where we can find help in an emergency.