I'd make coffee for my comrades, my fellow, caring compatriots and their kin, just as I do for my family. Hell, I'd make about a hundred dozen pupusas with some salsa and curtido for my comrades if I could (I really wish I could).

These people see working these barista jobs as unfathomable since they and the exploitative class have dragged the reputation of the service worker through the mud as much as they've done their wages.

But I'd wager that some folks would love to open a restaurant or cafe or lounge with good friends, build an inviting place of rest for their community if they weren't at the whims of the capitalist looking to extract every last cent out of patrons and every last hour of labor from the workers, all without factoring socialization, and extending decency and kindness unto others into their practice.

They have such a twisted perception of this type of labor but because of the reality they're subjected to under the ruling dictatorship of capital, they can't separate work from the value it produces in terms of money. It's always about money for these people, but that isn't a mistake. The idea of seeing use-value instead of profit-value in things is such a foreign thing to those living with the corruption of bourgeois education. Take a car, for example. How many times you'll hear "you're better off just buying a new one; replacing xy and z plus the labor to put it all together would be unreasonably expensive. Just send that thing to the junkyard!". What if I have sentimental attachment to that car? But how we feel is never important. The human part of us must always be stripped away from these decisions. But sadly, we really are in a bind and we must make the most reasonable choice given our circumstances. Even as a kid, this type of thinking always made me sick, and at this young point in my life, I was decades from ever having read any Marxist theory.

Coffee, pastries, or any sort of good that would bring us so much enjoyment are always given so little value through the lens of the twisted, capitalist worldview. Even the labor to create these things. To think of the centuries of human development, experimentation, experience, and culture that have contributed to the existence of these simple pleasures only for them to have someone say "who the hell wants to do THAT job!? Not me!" leaves me with a deep sadness.

I want there to be coffee brewers, pastry chefs, cooks, and all those laborers who create these simple marvels that undeniably bring us so much joy. And I want them to be liberated from the backwardness, selfishness, and ingratitude that capitalism foments among people.