For hundreds of years, the Arabian coffee, a tropical shrub with shiny green leaves and decorated with crimson fruits, was an unknown plant outside the Arab world and Ethiopia, where it was discovered in the ninth century by a shepherd who says legend that he noticed that his animals are having fun and staying up all night if they borrow from Its fruits. And in the years from the moment when people knew that coffee can make similar things for them, this plant provided a great favor to our human race, and we echoed it known to our role, giving it over 27 million acres of natural environment around the world, and it was appointed to nurture and fertilize 25 million families As a farmer, we then commoditized it, which became one of the most valuable crops in circulation around the world. This is not a bad thing for a bush that is not edible, does not contain a special kind of beauty, nor is it easy to germinate.
Coffee owes its global rise to a developmental accident that happened by chance. The chemical compound that the plant makes in defense of itself against insects changes the human consciousness in a way that we like, makes us workers more energetic and toil, and undoubtedly better workers. That chemical compound is caffeine, which is currently one of the most popular drugs that affect the human mind, which is used daily by 80% of the human population, and it is also the only drug that we give to our children routinely, through a soda drink. Together with the tea plant, which produces the same compound within its leaves, coffee has helped shape the kind of world that it specifically needs to thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, surrounded by world trade, and dominated by a type of creature that can barely now get out of bed without its help.
The effects of caffeine have overlapped with the needs of capitalism in many ways. Before coffee and tea drinks entered the Western world in the seventeenth century, alcohol - which was sanctified beyond the sanctification of water - was the drug that manipulated and manipulated the human brain. Perhaps this was acceptable, if not welcome, when work meant putting physical energy outside, where beer was common, but the effects of alcohol turned into a problem when machines and mathematics were introduced to work little by little.
Then coffee spread, a drink that was not only safer than beer and wine. Among many other things the water that was made with it had to be boiled and sterilized, but it also turned out that it raises the level of performance and increases the capacity for skin and endurance. In 1660, a few years after the coffee drink spread to England, an observer writes:
“It is really clear that this coffee drink has pumped more blood into the veins of nations. Whereas many professionals, users and others have been consuming their morning doses of beer, beer, or wine, which causes it to go to the mind, which made many of them Not qualified for work, today they are good men thanks to this stimulating, stimulating drink. "
However, this "civilized stimulated drink" also freed our bodies from compliance with the consequences of night and day, which contributed to the emergence of fatigue for a long time so that we could work for a longer period and hours beyond. In addition to creating artificial lighting, caffeine led to the defeat of night capitalism and its darkness. It is probably not coincidental that the invention of the wall clock coincided almost in the very same historical moment when tea and coffee were discovered, when the work moved into closed doors and was reorganized around the clockwise axis.
Coffee and capitalism are intertwined in the secrets of Augustin Sjoyk's completely enthralling book, his first book, The Land of Coffee: An Empire of Darkness for One and Favorite Drugs for Others. Sigwick's narrative is centered around the character of James Hill, an Englishman born in the slums of the industrial city of Manchester in 1871, who at the age of 18 had sailed to Central America to make his fortune. There, he built a family dynasty of coffee by redesigning the Salvadoran countryside in a factory manner in the city of Manchester, and Hill became the head of one of the "forty families" that had been driving the threads of political and economic life in El Salvador for a significant period of the twentieth century, and by the time of his death in 1951, they were Its eighteen farms are responsible for employing about 5,000 people and producing over two thousand tons of coffee beans prepared for export and extracted from more than 2,500 acres of rich soil over the slopes of the Santa Anna volcano. For years and years, much of what Hill, or his workers, so to speak, will end up in what is today known as the dark red "coffee of the brothers Hill".
“What does it mean to connect with people and places far removed from us through the things of daily life?” Sejwik asks in the first pages of his book, which provides a unique examination of this question, by drawing lines linking these things together, which were blatantly hidden before.
Filling these coffee cans was punctuated by a variety of brutality. Because the cultivation of coffee requires extensive labor manpower, for the purposes of cultivation, pruning and picking, and then preparation, the success of the farm owners depends on finding enough rural people who are determined to work. The fundamental question that anyone who accepts to become a shareholder of capital, as Sejwik reminds us, has always been and will remain, "What drives people to work?"
Slavery provided a satisfactory answer to coffee growers in Brazil, but by the time Hill arrived in El Salvador, in 1889, slave labor was no longer an available option. As an intelligent, heartless businessman, Hill understood that he needed wage labor, much of it, and as a son of the poor lane in Manchester, he knew the best answer to the question "What drives someone to work?" Very simple: hunger.
There was only one problem, that the rural people of El Salvador, the majority of whom were Indians called “muzuz” or “servants”, were not hungry, as many of them plowed small groves that were erected on communal lands near the foot of the volcano, and some were Among the most fertile in the length and breadth of the country, and that had to change if these people were to export crops. Thus, as required by the orders of the coffee plantation owners and behind the "development" front, the Salvadoran government launched a program to privatize the land, forcing the Indians to either move to more marginal lands or to find jobs on the new coffee plantations.
In fact, the choice at the beginning was not very extreme, even the newly cultivated coffee grounds still allowed many free foods to be picked up. The "veins of food" - including cashews, guava, papaya, figs, dragon fruits, avocados, manga, bananas, tomatoes, and beans - were pumping food around coffee plantations, wherever food was found, and whatever its shortage, freedom to quit work was found, says Segweek. The solution of the owners of farms to this "problem" - the problem of the generosity of nature - was to remove any plant other than coffee from the natural landscape, which created mono-total cultivation in one of which exceeded any stage in history where growth was prohibited for anything else. And when the avocado tree was accidentally spared in a corner of what was speculative, the farmer who was caught red-handed on charges of savoring his fruits was accused of theft and left beating if he was lucky, or he was killed if not, and so the concept of private property was imposed on the Indians.
"To direct the will of the people of El Salvador towards the production of coffee, along with the privatization of the land, it was required that the owners of the farms produce the same hunger," says Segweek. James Hill performed his calculations and found that the workers would come faster and work with more persistence if he paid them part of today's fare in cash - 15 cents for women and 30 cents per day for men - and paid the other part of the food: breakfast and lunch, which consisted of two pieces of tortilla bread that they covered from Beans can accommodate every loaf. This local food diet has reached monotony and boredom as much as the natural landscape. Thus, Hill transformed thousands of daily subsistence harvest farmers and feeders into wage workers, by extracting quantities of surplus value that would arouse the envy of any of the factory owners in Manchester.
Of course, all of the concept of surplus value that Marx coined, as Segweek points out, stems from Marx and Engels' analysis of industrial capitalism in the hometown of James Hill, the city of Manchester. Communism was another product exported by the city of Manchester, and it also found its way to Santa Ana, as communism arrived during the Great Depression, when the price of coffee collapsed and the unemployed workers could no longer obtain their food from work in the lands. It has been shown that the leftists are also able "to turn hunger into a source of power." The climax of the Seagwick narrative comes from the early 1930s, when thousands of bananas, organized and directed by local Communists who spent some time outside the country, rose up against coffee barons, seizing farms and occupying municipal headquarters.
The revolution continued, at least until 1932, when the government of El Salvador - subject to the command of the owners of the coffee plantations again - launched a brutal rebellion campaign, arrested anyone who could carry the features of the Indians, assembled them in town squares and executed them with machine-gun fire. The government's campaign against coffee workers is now known as "La Matanza" - that is, the massacre - whose memory the Salvadoran countryside commemorates. When El Salvador rose up for the second time in half a century, coffee barons were again under siege, and James Hill's grandson, Jimmy Hill, was kidnapped by the revolutionaries as a hostage in exchange for millions of ransoms that the family faced nothing wrong with.
I make Sejwik's story seem more graphic than it really is, even though his analysis of the political economy of coffee owes a great deal to Marx, but his literary talent and his mighty research compose together a saturated reading experience capped by the narrative surprise. Segweek has the talent of brilliant digression and surprisingly surprising transition, by shuttling back and forth between El Salvador and the wider world, where coffee was consumed in ever-increasing quantities. And he distinguished himself in his consumption of coffee marketing among Americans through independence, when the country freed itself from the habit of drinking English tea and turning coffee drinking into a national behavior, then explains to us how the coffee drink in the American continent was promoted less as a delicious drink or a more pleasant experience as a means Serve a specific purpose; So that it is a form of instant energy and a useful drug for work.
American scientists studied coffee extensively in the early twentieth century, seeking to understand how a drink that practically does not contain any calories may nonetheless become a resource of human kind energy, or what appears to be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Coffee had an exceptional ability to generate surplus value, not only because of its production but also because of its consumption, as the history of the "coffee break" explains.
Seagoy tells the story of one of the small necktie manufacturing companies in Denver, Los Angeles Textile Company. When the company lost its best young male loom operators in the war effort at the beginning of the 1940s, the owner Phil Greenitz appointed older men to take their place, but they lacked the skill to weave the intricate patterns of necktie and guam ties, and he hired women at the age of The elderly, and although they were able to produce neckties that meet his own criteria, they were missing the skin needed to work full-time, when Greenitz requested a company-wide meeting to discuss the problem, the suggestion came from his employees: let us give us a break of 15 minutes twice daily accompanied by coffee.
Greenitz established a coffee break and soon noticed a change in his workers, the women started completing the work in six and a half hours what the older men would do in eight hours. It is true that Greenitz made the coffee break mandatory, but he decided that he was not obligated to pay his workers for the half an hour they spent on the coffee break. This led to a prosecution from the Department of Labor and, ultimately, to a 1956 decision by the Federal Appeals Court to introduce a coffee break into American life. The court decided that, since the coffee break "enhances more efficiency and results in greater efforts", it was beneficial to the company as much as it was beneficial to its workers and should be counted as such from work time. As for the phrase "coffee break", I entered the spoken dictionary through a media campaign in 1952 by the "American Coffee Office", a commercial group organized by the owners of the farms, and their famous phrase says: "Give yourself a coffee break ... and see what gives you coffee in return."
In the last pages of the book, Segweek tries to determine by numbers how precisely the value of a single pound of coffee can give employees (or, in other words, extracted from employees), according to Los Weigam and Hill Farms as examples. It is estimated that it takes an hour and a half of work for a Salvadoran worker to produce one pound of coffee, and that it is sufficient to make 40 cups of coffee, or to provide two coffee breaks to twenty employees of the Weigam Company, which Greenitz calculated would lead to an additional 30 hours of work. In other words, the six cents a Hill farmer was paying for an hour and a half of work in 1954 were adding $ 22 and a half of value to Phil Greentz’s pockets, and this chemistry reflects both the caffeine characteristics and harsh realities of exploitation.
But the symbiotic relationship that capitalism and coffee have enjoyed over the past centuries is nearing a sad ending, perhaps. Arab coffee is a very picky plant, preferring to grow in the smallest possible package of conditions: sunlight, water, dry environment, and even altitude should also be available, and the places available around the world for coffee production are few, as climate scientists estimate that half of the area that currently produces coffee from Acres, and even a greater share of this in Latin America, will be unable to provide support to the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the most endangered crops by climate change. Capitalism may kill its goose that lays golden eggs.
But capitalism will not be able to survive, as business owners who now allow coffee breaks may soon distribute processed caffeine pills, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. This may provide the employer with a number of advantages. Because the beans are less expensive than coffee, less messy, and because it takes just seconds to drink, the coffee break itself will no longer be necessary, given that the company will have every excuse to recover the 30 minutes that US courts granted workers 64 years ago. The fate of El Salvador coffee workers will likely be much worse, but the veins of food may overflow again with the collapse of the coffee plantations.
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This report is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect Meedan.