re wondering why we use the colorful phrase¶

If you're wondering why we use the colorful phrase "social-democracy is the left wing of fascism," try to understand how ghoulish it is to see this through the lens of "Americans will have to pay more for coffee."

Coffee is one of the most egregious examples of unequal exchange. https://t.co/GUp0syjrhq In Colombia specifically, the vast majority of coffee pickers are migrant workers, largely from Venezuela. They make around 11-16 cents per kilo of raw cherries picked. This work is done at a grueling pace during harvest season, and then the work dries up when the season ends. These workers are highly precarious, work in dangerous conditions without PPE, and for their efforts, they are paid abysmally -- even during the limited period when they can work at all. Regulations like child labor laws, minimum wage, and maximum hours, are flagrantly ignored. (The above claims are supported by Sanne van der Wal et al., Working conditions of flower packers and coffee pickers in Colombia, SOMO, 2018) To get a kilo of roasted coffee beans, it takes about 5 kg of raw coffee cherries, for which the average coffee picker in Colombia is paid about 70 cents.

Depending on the final preparation, you can expect to get about 120 cups of coffee from one kilo. In other words, out of the cost of your cup of coffee, about half a penny went to compensate the worker who harvested it.

There are many other steps in the production process to get from the ground to your cup, of course. The picker is not the only one who requires compensation. Planters are often a subset of the same population of workers who will harvest; the planting season is less labor-intensive, so most of the pickers are out of work during this time.

After harvest, the raw fruit is dried, hulled, fermented, and generally roasted before export. All of these steps before shipping are done at tiny wages. Mere pennies from the total cost.

Colombia exports around 635 million kilos of coffee each year, generating around $4 billion in revenue: that's about $6.5/kilogram, easily 5-6 times the cost of all labor to that point. Coffee is being imported to the US at ~5.4 cents/cup, and from there, all downstream labor starts to get compensated at much higher rates. When you buy a cup of coffee at a shop, the worker who made it is still adding more value than they get paid for -- but not 5 times as much. And if tariffs cause the price of importing that coffee to jump to even double its current price, the change is largely negligible by the time it reaches the consumer. Because of the immense exploitation of third world producers, the cost of the raw material barely fluctuates. It's unfathomable to see this entire production chain, built on gross worker exploitation, brutal conditions, environmental destruction, and the utter pillaging of the third world, through the lens of "My coffee might cost me the equivalent of an extra minute of labor." Trump isn't doing this to punish you the poor, American consumer. He's doing this to flex the ungodly economic might of the US empire. For less than a penny, some of the most precarious workers in the world slave away to get you that cup of coffee -- and even that is too much.