Coffee and capitalism - the need for a humanistic model

File this under - why humanistic capitalism MUST become the norm.

Turns out - the story of how coffee became the drink of capitalist societies has everything to do with exploitation of workers.  And yes - every time I write that I think - wait - have I become a communist?  No. I have not. I am a humanist and I believe in the benefits of market economies.  The problem is and has been that our market economies are rarely capitalistic let alone humanistic.

The Atlantic magazine had a really interesting article by Michael Pollan reviewing a book by Augustine Sedgewick about Coffee and Capitalism. The book is called - Coffeeland. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/michael-pollan-coffee/606805/

What has coffee got to do with capitalism?  Well - workers would lag in the afternoon. Because - it's siesta time and our circadian rhythms naturally want to take a break and relax.

To fix that - workers decided they needed a coffee break and business owners agreed. Give people a break and allow them to take a drug - a stimulant and - magically - productivity in the afternoon increases. 

The problem is - growing enough coffee to keep workers working. Coffee is a stimulant. It allows owners to get more work out of their employees.

In order to grow coffee - they need workers and the places that grow coffee - turns out - the people who lived there - had no need to work for a coffee plantation. They were self sufficient in terms of food production.  In order to get locals to work on the coffee plantations - they had to impoverish the local population otherwise they had no reason to work on the coffee plantations. 

To do that - they privatized the land and instituted totalitarian monoculture - because as long as there was free food growing all around them - people had no incentive to work. Planned and intentional hunger was a pre-requisite for the coffee economy to function at all.  The result - brutal oligarchy in El Salvador (where a lot of coffee was grown), diminished eco-systems and exploited and starving people who were only starving because that is what the oligarchs needed to keep control of their workforce which had gone from sustainable ecosystems to exploited worker.

A Humanistic Perspective: 

A Humanistic vision for the economy is how do we help people flourish.  The answer - exploiting people not only isn't necessary - it's counter productive. Exploitation is only necessary if you want to control people and not share the wealth. It’s bad for people, it’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for the environment.

I have been a human rights advocate and worker - since I was in my teens and able to volunteer. What happened in El Salvador was brutal. And it was brutal because it wasn't a fair market economy. It was built by exploitation to sell a product to other business owners so they could exploit their workers.

We need to get the idea of exploitation as necessary out of our heads.  Capitalism is driven by demand. But it must be community demand. If an individual demands the right to exploit others to create personal wealth - understand - that person - is NOT a job creator. They are a psychopath posing as a business person. 

Imagine how different the world would be if humanistic economies were the norm. We would still have market economies. We would still have the innovations that market economies demand and therefore create. What we wouldn't have - is all this intentional and constructed suffering. 

Because honestly - if your business can only function if people starve - then something is wrong with your business.