london restaurants

definitely there's a need to combat exploitation of restaurant workers, but once you reach a point that the people in a restaurant are a) doing it because they want to, b) under less time pressure and c) sharing the profits equally, then frankly there's no further cause to challenge restaurants from a socialist perspective imo

this scenario would of course make restaurants smaller and would challenge fast food chain culture, which strike me as far more realistic goals than abolishing restaurants, which will of course not happen (given a broad yet accurate definition of 'restaurant')

anyway, good posting from renowned poster Arbeitology, you definitely achieved the target m8 (spread online muck of a weekend, get people arguing past each other)

the movie 'boiling point' was basically a horror movie about uk high-end restaurant culture, worth seeing

His point is almost nobody wants to work the punishing Labour for fuck all that people in restaurants are made to because they need to survive.

He is coming from actually abolishing money and the profit motive. That's why you don't get what he's saying and posting nonsense like b) xp = and watching docs that tell you the above but calling it a 'horror movue' instead of people's reality.

otm across several abolition discourses

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 29 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

The discussion between Dave and the Brazilian anarchist on canteens was really interesting and took it a step further.

I've worked as a Kitchen Porter/Dishwasher and it's fucking dogshit work and nobody in a sane state of mind would choose to do it for minimum wage.

Boiling Point is a one-take fiction piece w/ ilx favourite Stephen Graham as the chef.

'boiling point', while based on grim reality, was literally a work of fiction? (exactly xp) but yeah, the sort of necessary art that challenges the admittedly grotesque state of (some) UK restaurant culture (I wouldn't speak for it elsewhere)

Cool. Excuse me for tuning out halfway through imago's bullshit xp

What would challenge the restaurant culture is abolishing that culture lol.

calzino otm re: kitchen porter work.

i’ve probably told this before but i once replied to an ad for a kitchen porter without knowing what that term meant and showed up wearing a white button-up shirt! they sort of chuckled and led me back to the kitchen.

you are at the bottom of the Kitchen hierarchy and in my experience you end up amassing hours of unpaid overrun every week. hey .. but hey let's do it for team kitchen!

"people arguing past each other"

like yeah bro, I think nurses probably have a lot to say about how the workplaces in hospitals is organised, and we should listen to them! - but I really think it's a cheap trick to move 'abolish restaurants' to 'what about hospitals' lol https://t.co/pbx58zsKeU

— Arbeitology (@Arbeit_Fish) May 28, 2022

there isn't really an argument as far as i can see, if capitalism is ended - yeah i know - then the artefacts, institutions and relationships of capitalism have to end, even the ones people think are good

not really surprising that a number of people who consider themselves anticapitalist haven't really thought things thru that far

that was a lot of "really"s, some kind of Lacanian slip obv

the bonnington cafe in vauxhall is a good post-capitalist model for a restaurant. people sign up to cook. there’s a calendar with an indication of what type of menu to expect each night. you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent. byob. musicians come sometimes. i once saw brecht/weill songs performed there. some of the diners knew the words and they passed the mic around.

oh that sounds frightfully darling, shall we give it a whirl?

NV - I loved the surrounding discussions and threads. It was good that the original poster actually answered a lot of quote tweets and didn't back down as it got him to expand. It's one thing to say 'abolish prisons', but a restaurant and the whole business of eating out is another matter.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

also

you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent.

paradigm shift y'all

when I first read that I was like 'the CUSTOMERS sign up to cook?' and thought okay, there might be something in that, but no, it's the standard model except with more ~solidarity~

anybody can sign up to cook. at least that’s how it was when i was going there (a few years ago now). but it’s not for the faint hearted! the standards are high and there are a lot of plates to serve up. sorry you seem to find this so irritating imago.

An unfinished concept.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

yes i've been thinking about the limited amount of stuff i know about food vendors in precapitalist cultures and it'd be interesting to read more about that. some of the conversations have been good and enlightening, i just mean that i think the "this too shall pass" side of the discussion is clearly correct

apologies, ignoring the singing stuff collective restaurant ownership emanating from a squat/commune model does actually sound like a nice idea regardless of how wellmeaningbourgie the clientele actually end up being, albeit nothing too far removed from the traditional small-restaurant model of the chef also being the owner and any employees often being their family members or friends

anyway as we all love Twitter here's a good thread by a communist about all this

It seems (like *every single form of 'discourse' on twitter*) based on a semantic ambiguity. He denotes a 'restaurant' as the specific institution unique to capitalism where you make food based on exploitation. Others denote it as any specified place people make food for others.

— 🅄🄱🄾🄰 (@Uboatheflesh) May 29, 2022

From the last thread you can tell that's a pretty clueless thread. Arbeit isn't looking to organise or anything lol, it's his take on restaurants, as someone who works and sees the exploitation in the industry.

This is better

Adorno, a Marxist, once wrote that restaurants “are putrescence in amber, only ever performing the ideology of their own nothingness.” I don’t know what that means, so therefor I’m going to McDonalds.

— john (@johnsemley3000) May 29, 2022

adorno wasnt really a marxist

All joeks.

lol this is the perfect thread to be derailed by some good old fashioned class war tbf. I'm more inclined to listen to people who work in an industry that mostly treats its workers so shit there is currently a labour shortage, than posh patrons feeling attacked because they lead idle leisure lifestyles and want to be seen as progressive and maybe even fashionably radical, while enjoying the benefits of luxury minimum wage servitude. I think it's good that someone brought this up tbh and some of the reactionary responses are quite amusing.

Reactionary responses from 'communists' too.

they must have gone to the same school as imago!

came across this while hunting for info on cooking competitions in the ussr: https://geohistory.today/soviet-kitchen/

i dont know how reliable it is -- not a topic i know nuch about -- but the swerves and changes it depicts are interesting and i was entertained by the robustness of the title of the 1923 pamphlet "down with the private kitchen"!

(also intriguing why and how restaurants re-emerged in the 30s)

There was something similarly collectivist but just as unrealistically workable during the not very great leap forward when Mao banned private agricultural plots, and I think then reversed the ban when even wild propaganda from local cadres couldn't cover up the mountains of starvation victims.

When Vladimir Lenin came to power, collective nutrition became the new ideal. Lenin’s administration believed that people were not capable of receiving proper nutrition when they cooked for themselves

lol, the cunt was a bigger tory melt than Jamie Oliver!

Vittles have, to their credit, written about this.

since @Arbeit_Fish has pissed off all the right people today, gonna reshare the piece we wrote about the labour crisis in the restaurant industry for @vittleslondon https://t.co/ybCYhyn7CL

— stolen valeur (@nightoffices) May 29, 2022

dan barrow's review of bastani's fully automated luxury communism: a manifesto maybe rambles a bit and if i wanted to tweak the new socialist guys in general id tease them abt the joys of high-theory-as-jargon as its own kind of pleasure in exclusivity, but it hits a lot of marks -- including towards the end the point that the contradictory aspects of luxury are themselves a value (as a kind of knotty problem to think a thing through)

http://newsocialist.org.uk/falc-and-its-discontents/

(the abolitionist position walks too easily away from this knottiness i think, which is a submerged reason it generated pushback, even if the pushback was then too often formulated just as "b-but my treats!) (anarchists often aren't good dialecticians, is my undialectical snark here)

(same snark applies to bastani lol)

The problem of dreariness.

I think publicly run hotels under democratic workers’ control under socialism would be nice. I think the problem with the sort of society you’re sketching out is it seems pretty dreary and unattractive which is a hard sell

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) May 29, 2022

are not big hotel chains like Novotel etc usually quite uniformly dreary places.. lol wtf is he on about.

Travelodge is, Marriotts aren't. The issue is it's all maintained by exploited Labour. OJ just wants it to be publicly run and seems to think if maids are paid so they can buy a luxury car the issue of the work they do to maintain it somehow goes away.

In the US there were reports that as soon as people got a few months worth of pay (2k in their bank accounts to stay home during the pandemic) they got the fuck out of whatever 'horror' it was they were doing (under 'horror' management they worked under) to keep afloat.

Any breathing space.

Good to see some good spots in the discourse, like this exchange.

Oh man, I really appreciate this - yeah it's been a bit of a pile-on I wasn't really expecting - especially as I *thought* the subtext of my tweet (that I didn't expect to go viral) was, like, we can do more fun and less exploitative ways of eating together without capital!

— Arbeitology (@Arbeit_Fish) May 30, 2022

Being called an 'ultra-left shitposter' by Owen Hatherley must make the whole thing feel worthwhile.

Don't think he cares what Hatherley thinks, he's going for the stars (abolishing time).

i mean he is an ultra-eft shitposter lol?

everyone cares what everyone thinks, it's the internet

He is not a shit poster, he wouldn't have bothered to engage fairly seriously with people.

thst doesnt make him not a shi t poster !