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For hundreds of years, the Arabica coffee, a tropical shrub with glossy 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 legend says he noticed that his animals were playing and staying up all night if they were bitten by its fruits.
And in the years since people knew that coffee could do similar things to them, this plant has done a great favor to our human race, and we have repeated it for our role, giving it more than 27 million acres of natural environment around the world, and 25 million families were appointed to take care of it and fertilize it a farmer, and then we commodified it and it became one of the most valuable traded crops around the world.
This is not a bad thing for a shrub that is not edible, is not endowed with beauty of a particular kind, and is not easy to germinate.
Coffee owes its global rise to an evolutionary accident. The chemical compound that the plant makes to defend itself against insects alters human consciousness in a way that appeals to us, and makes us more active and industrious workers, and undoubtedly better workers.
That chemical compound is caffeine, which is currently one of the most famous drugs that affect the human mind, which is used on a daily basis by 80% of humankind, and it is also the only drug that we routinely give to our children, through soda.
Together with the tea plant, which produces the same compound within its leaves, coffee helped shape exactly the kind of world it needed to thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, ringed by global commerce, and dominated by a species that can now barely get out of bed without its help.
This "civilized stimulant drink" has also freed our bodies from complying with the alternations of day and night, contributing to the ebb and flow of fatigue so that we can work for longer and longer hours (networking sites)
The effects of caffeine overlapped the needs of capitalism in many ways;
Before coffee and tea drinks entered the Western world in the seventeenth century, alcohol - which was more revered than water - was the drug that monopolized and manipulated the human brain.
This may have been acceptable, if unwelcome, when work meant exerting physical energy outside, beer breaks were common, but the effects of alcohol became a problem as machines and mathematics were gradually incorporated into the work.
Then coffee spread, a beverage that was not only safer than beer and wine, as among many other things the water in which it was made had to be boiled and sterilized, but it also turned out to increase performance and endurance.
And in 1660, a few years after the spread of the coffee drink in England, one observer writes:
“It is really clear that that coffee drink has pumped more blood into the veins of nations, while many misdeeds, licentious people, and others have been drinking their morning doses of beer, beer, or wine, with what it causes to go mad, which made many of them Unqualified to work, today they are good men thanks to this civilized stimulant drink.”
But this “civilized stimulant drink” also freed our bodies from the alternation of day and night, contributing to an ebb and flow of fatigue so that we could work longer and longer. Along with the invention of artificial lighting, caffeine made the night even darker by capitalism.
It is probably no coincidence that the invention of the wall clock coincided at roughly the same historical moment in which tea and coffee were discovered, when the work was moved inside closed doors and reorganized around the clock axis.
coffee and capitalism
We find the interweaving of coffee and capitalism in the recesses of a totally captivating book by historian Augustin Segwick, his first book, The Land of Coffee: One's Dark Empire and Each Other's Favorite Drug.
Segwick's narrative centers around James Hill, an Englishman born in the slums of the industrial city of Manchester in 1871 who, at the age of 18, set sail for Central America to make his fortune.
There, he built a family coffee dynasty by redesigning the Salvadoran countryside in the manner of factories in the city of Manchester, and Hill became head of one of the "forty families" that were driving the threads of political and economic life in El Salvador for a significant part of the twentieth century, and by the time of his death in 1951, it was His 18 farms employ about 5,000 people and produce over 2,000 tons of export coffee beans extracted from over 2,500 acres of rich soil above the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano.
“What does it mean to relate to people and places so far from us through the objects of everyday life?” asks Segwick in the first pages of his book, which offers a distinctive examination of this question, by drawing the lines that connect these objects together that were previously glaringly obscured.
The filling of those coffee cans was peppered with a variety of brutality;
Because coffee cultivation requires a large employment of labor, for the purposes of cultivation, pruning, picking, and then preparation, the success of the farm owners depended on finding enough rural residents willing to work.
The fundamental question for anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, as Segwick reminds us, has always been, and always will be, "What motivates people to work?"
Slavery provided a panacea for coffee growers in Brazil, but by the time Hill reached El Salvador, in 1889, slave labor was no longer an option.
As a clever and hard-hearted entrepreneur, Hill understood that he needed wage labor, much of it, and as a man in Manchester's slums, he knew the best answer to the question "What drives someone to work?"
Very simple: hunger.
the invention of 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. Among the most fertile in the length and breadth of the country, and this had to change if these people were to work in the export of crops.
Thus, as required by the orders of the coffee plantation owners and behind the facade of "development", the Salvadoran government launched a program of land privatization, forcing the Indians either to move to more marginal lands or to find jobs in the new coffee plantations.
In fact, the choice at first was not too extreme, as even the newly planted coffee grounds still offered many free foods to pick up.
The “food veins”—including cashews, guavas, papaya, figs, dragon fruit, avocados, mangoes, bananas, tomatoes, and beans—pumped food throughout the coffee plantations, and wherever there was food, however little, there was the freedom to leave work, writes Segwick.
The farm owners’ solution to this “problem” - the problem of nature's generosity - was to remove any plant other than coffee from the landscape, creating a mono-totalitarian agriculture, with a singularity that exceeded any stage in history in which the growth of anything else was forbidden.
“What was required to direct the will of the El Salvador people towards coffee production, besides privatizing the land, was for the farm owners to produce the same hunger,” says Segwick.
James Hill calculated that the workers would come faster and work more diligently if he paid them part of the day's wages in cash—15 cents for women and 30 cents a day for men—and paid the other part of the food: breakfast and lunch, which consisted of two tortillas covered with white bread. The beans are not enough for each loaf.
This local diet was as monotonous and bored as the landscape.
Thus, Hill turned thousands of daily subsistence farmers and foragers into wage labourers, extracting quantities of surplus value that would be the envy of any Manchester factory owner.
Of course, the whole concept of surplus value that Marx formulated, as Segwick points out, stemmed from Marx and Engels' analysis of industrial capitalism in James Hill's hometown, Manchester.
Communism was another product exported by Manchester that also found its way to Santa Anna, where communism arrived in the Great Depression, when coffee prices collapsed and unemployed workers could no longer get their food from working the land.
It turns out that leftists are also capable of "turning hunger into a source of power."
The climax of the Segwick narrative comes from the early 1930s, when thousands of mozu, organized and directed by local communists who had spent time abroad, rose up against the coffee barons, taking over farms and occupying town halls.
coffee revolution
The revolution continued, at least until 1932, when the government of El Salvador, succumbing to the command of the coffee plantations again, launched a brutal rebellion campaign, arresting anyone who could bear Indian features, rounding them up in town squares and executing them with machine gun fire.
The government's campaign against the coffee workers became known as "Lamatanza" - the massacre - that the Salvadoran countryside commemorates.
When El Salvador rose up for the second time after half a century, the coffee barons were under siege again, and James Hill's grandson, Jimmy Hill, was kidnapped by rebels for a ransom of millions the family had no shame in paying.
Press reports about the events of January 22, 1932 in El Salvador (communication sites)
I make Segwick's story seem more graphic than it really is, for although his analysis of the political economy of coffee owes a great deal to Marx, his literary talent and prolific research together constitute a saturated reading experience crowned by narrative surprise.
Segwick has a gift for brilliant digression and sudden, picturesque transition, to and fro between El Salvador and the wider world, where coffee was being consumed in ever-increasing quantities.
He was distinguished in dealing with the marketing of coffee among Americans, through independence, when the country was freed from the habit of drinking English tea and drinking coffee turned into a patriotic behavior, and then he explains to us how the coffee drink was promoted in the American continent less as a delicious drink or a pleasurable experience and more as a means serve a specific purpose;
So that they are 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 contained virtually no calories could nonetheless become a source of energy for the human species, or what appears to be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
Coffee had an extraordinary ability to generate surplus value, not only because of its production but also because of its consumption, as the history of the "coffee break" shows.
Segwick tells the story of a small Denver tie manufacturer, Los Wigwam Weaving.
When the company lost its best young male loom operators to the war effort in the early 1940s, owner Phil Greenitz hired older men to replace them, but who lacked the skill needed to weave the intricate patterns of wigwam ties, so he hired women of the same age. Old age, though they could produce ties of his own, lacked the fortitude needed to work full-time, when Greenitz called a company-wide meeting to discuss the problem, the suggestion came from his female employees: Give us a 15-minute break twice a day with coffee.
Discover drudgery
Greenitz founded the coffee break and soon noticed a change in his female workers, women began to do as much work in six and a half hours as the older men did in eight.
It is true that Greenitz made the coffee break mandatory, but decided that he was not obligated to pay his workers for the half hour they took.
This led to a lawsuit from the Department of Labor and, eventually, to a 1956 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals to introduce the coffee break into American life.
The court held that since the coffee break "enhances more efficiency and results in greater effort", it was as beneficial to the company as it was to its employees and should count toward working time.
As for the phrase "coffee break", it entered the spoken dictionary through a media campaign in 1952 by the "American Coffee Bureau", a trade group organized by plantation owners, and their famous phrase says:
In the last pages of the book, Segwick attempts to work out in numbers exactly how much value a pound of coffee can give employees (or, in other words, extract from employees), using Los Wigwam and Hill Farms as examples.
It is estimated that it takes an hour and a half of labor to produce one pound of coffee for a Salvadoran worker, which is enough to make 40 cups of coffee, or provide two coffee breaks for 20 Wigwam employees, which Greentz calculated would result in an additional 30 hours of work.
In other words, the six cents Hill Farms paid for an hour and a half of work in 1954 added $22 and a half of value to Phil Grentz's pockets, and this chemistry reflects both the distinctive properties of caffeine and the harsh realities of exploitation.
But the symbiotic relationship that capitalism and coffee have enjoyed over the past centuries may be coming to a sad end.
Arabica coffee is a picky plant, preferring to grow in the smallest possible range of conditions: sunlight, water, a dry environment, and even altitude should also be available, and there are few places around the world for coffee production, as climate scientists estimate that half of the area that currently produces coffee from Acres, and even a larger share in Latin America, will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately threatened by climate change.
Perhaps capitalism kills the goose that lays golden eggs.
But capitalism won't survive. Business owners who are now giving their coffee break may soon be distributing synthetic caffeine pills, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
This may offer the employer a number of advantages;
Because the beans are less expensive than coffee, and less messy, and because they only require seconds to ingest, the coffee break itself would no longer be necessary, given that the company would have every excuse to reclaim the 30 minutes that US courts granted workers 64 years ago.
The fate of El Salvador's coffee workers is likely to be much worse, but food veins may well be flooded again with the collapse of coffee plantations.
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This report is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the site of Maidan.
Translation: Farah Essam.