We should add a fourth revolution to the well-known political, economic, and cultural revolutions that ushered in capitalist modernity: a pharmaceutical revolution, which began innocently enough with a range of foreign drugs — coffee, tea, chocolate, and so on. This resulted in a multibillion-dollar regulatory structure tasked with adjusting individuals to their alienated living situations. Forget about "people's opium": genuine narcotics have done and continue to do more to maintain an increasingly delegitimized regime than any ideology.
The history of drugs, like broader cultural changes, provides a unique window into capitalism's inner workings, particularly the demands it places on its human subjects. Coffee, a stimulant that has been hailed by the ruling class since its introduction to the west, is perhaps the most revealing example of this allegation. The pursuit of surplus-value has profoundly influenced coffee production and consumption, and coffee use has developed people capable of handling the demands of modern working life. Coffee is the spirit of capitalism in brewed forms, passing through the veins of the modern world as well as the modern subject. Its past is linked to the rise of bourgeois business and its future is as dark as the horizon of contemporary society. In the 17th century, the average English family consumed three liters of beer per person per day, including children, and beer production was a routine part of household activities. To give "a feeling of how prevalent beer was in the seventeenth century, and frequently even in the eighteenth," historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch recalls "that breakfast as a norm consisted of beer soup," a concoction of beer, eggs, and butter responsible for Jordaens and Rubens' portly figures.
Coffee evolved from an unusual curiosity of the Orient to a pleasurable and convivial beverage about the middle of the 17th century. It possessed a powerful (albeit fictitious) feature that would determine its function in capitalist society back then, as it does today: the ability to sober. In terms of humour, alcohol made one "wet," with all that entailed; coffee, on the other hand, made one "dry," and the anti-erotic element was not lost on either its supporters or enemies. The emerging bourgeoisie admired the middle-class common sense and industry that the desiccating elements of coffee encouraged — in 1865, the French historian Jules Michelet wrote that coffee “illuminates the reality of things with the white light of truth” by substituting “stimulation of the mind for stimulation of the sexual faculties!” — while conservatives, such as the physician Colomb, feared the desiccating elements of coffee. In 1674, a broadside titled “The Women's Petition against Coffee” alleged that coffee “has so Eunucht our Husbands... that they have become as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts wherefrom that miserable berry is believed to be brought.” Soon after, the men responded, "Coffee collects and settles the Spirits, makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme, and renders it more firm and suitable to the Gusto of the womb, and proportionate to the female Paramour's ardours and expectations."
Regardless of sexism, coffee use seems to hasten the demolition of the ancient structures. Camille Desmoulins led a mob from a café to the Bastille two days later in 1789. A cafe was chosen as the location for the Boston Tea Party. In England, Charles II attempted to close the coffeehouses due to the seditious discourse they fostered, but was defeated due to pressure from the coffee traders. After attempting and failing to outlaw coffee entirely, Frederick the Great offered coffee roasting licenses only to the aristocracy and clergy in order to keep it out of the hands of unfriendly commoners. However, it was accompanied with the new suffering caused by the colonial period of capitalist modernity in the locations where coffee was grown. Slaves were imported to Java and Haiti by the Dutch and French, respectively, and by the 18th century, Haiti was one of the world's greatest coffee exporters (producing over half of the world's coffee) and slave importers (absorbing 30,000 African slaves per year). After the Haitian slave uprising in 1793, which resulted in the destruction of the estates, the focus of coffee production shifted to Ceylon, first under the Dutch and subsequently under the British. Ceylon's colonial coffee estates were the world's greatest coffee producers until "coffee rust," a fungal disease harmful to coffee plants, arose in the late nineteenth century, wiping off crops not only in Ceylon but also in India, Java, Sumatra, and Malaysia. (Although tea consumption increased dramatically in England beginning in 1700 due to the East India Company's monopoly, coffee rust is the reason that the world's biggest coffee aficionados in the early 18th century decisively accepted tea as their national drink in the 19th.)
The story of coffee in the twentieth century is an illuminating example of the interplay of capitalism's crises and regressive attempts to mitigate their effects, centered on three main characters (Brazil, Colombia, and the United States) but riven with subplots of more minor actors (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Uganda). Brazil was having a coffee overproduction issue around the turn of the century, so in 1906 the government began taking out loans to buy and stockpile beans in order to artificially raise prices, a technique known as valorization. The So Paolo Coffee Institute went bankrupt on October 11, 1929, after years of valorizing Brazilian coffee, sending coffee prices falling on the world's largest coffee exchange in New York. Not by chance, the stock market fell two weeks later due to the worldwide importance of coffee in international business. With 26 million bags of coffee in storage (one million more than had been eaten internationally the previous year) and coffee prices in freefall, Brazil embarked on a program that would be an everlasting and beautiful illustration of capitalism's total irrationality: they began burning their coffee. In the first year alone, 7 million bags were burnt; in 1937, 17 million bags were destroyed at a period when global consumption was still just 26 million bags. At the same time, they were feverishly attempting to persuade Colombia, which was cutting into Brazil's export market and benefiting from their valorization plan, to use similar techniques. They failed to do so, therefore they dumped their reserves on the market as retaliation in 1937, instantly plummeting coffee prices for everyone.
There's a lot to mock in the specialty coffee sector, especially now that the torch has been handed from the since-corporatized Starbucks to Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and Counter Culture. It was revealed in 1996 that Central American beans were being routed via Hawaii so that their makers could label them as Hawaiian Kona coffee, despite professional cuppers recognizing the fake coffee as superior than Kona. Kopi Luwak, which has been consumed by the Asian palm civet and extracted from its excrement, is one of the most costly coffees available today. And, of course, practically every speciality roaster is fighting tooth and nail to be the first to claim that they can both pull indigenous peoples out of poverty and rescue the earth if you purchase their beans. Green capitalism's promises are nowhere more exaggerated and disgusting than in the coffee industry. However, the most ludicrous commodity hawked by the specialty coffee artists also meets a true need in modern American society: sociability. Howard Schultz, the radical centrist who supervised Starbucks' fast development, sees coffee shops as meeting the demand for a "third space," a phrase he derives from sociologist Ray Oldenburg. A "third place" is a public location that serves as an escape from both alienation and loneliness. It is neither work nor home. Coffeehouses have long provided “the distraction of company” amid a “nursery of temperance,” to quote the 17th-century author of Coffeehouses Vindicated, but not in today's merciless society.
Caffeinism was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 (along with “ego-dystonic homosexuality”), culminating years of ridiculous alarmism about coffee's alleged health consequences, but was quickly withdrawn. The fact is that coffee is an addictive but mainly harmless diuretic, but its harmlessness has been used in the service of the endurance of damage throughout the history of capitalism. According to Luttinger and Dictum, “coffee has always been the perfect accompaniment to dehumanizing industrialization,” and it has been no less so to dehumanizing deindustrialization.
Coffee keeps us awake, aware and gives our work habits a machine-like efficiency. Margaret Meagher, the author of To Think of Coffee in 1942, appropriately identified the purpose of coffee today: "Coffee has expanded[ed] humanity's working-day from 12 to a possible 24 hours." The velocity, complexity, and intensity of modern life necessitate something that can achieve the miracle of boosting brain activity while avoiding harmful, habit-forming side effects.”
Global climate change is now threatening the manufacturing of this miracle medication. On our current trajectory, the quantity of appropriate land for coffee growing will be cut in half in 30 years and abolished in 60. It's difficult to fathom a future without coffee, especially for the 20 million rural families that rely on coffee farming for a living. But it's also impossible to comprehend the other many consequences of capitalism's self-destructiveness, the most of which promise to be far more catastrophic than coffee withdrawal.
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