After Better Means: Enough Is Enough
Krzysztof Blinkiewicz summarizes the Better Means series, its twenty values, and what they ask of coffee people now.
Enough is enough.
It feels as though Better Means has already said everything. And that is enough.
About our everyday problems as coffee people. About scarcity, fear of the future, and dreams that will never come true.
About inequality, the grip of authority, discrimination, and climate catastrophe. About mindlessly following whatever the market sells us as success, growth, and fulfillment.
About political decisions made over the heads of coffee people. About the exploitation of our labor by those with more economic power, more cunning, and more influence. About how even they are not immune to the capitalist system itself. About the limits imposed by where we are born, our position in the world, and our social status. About war refugees. About our failure to come to others’ aid. About the ethos of individualism, the cult of profit, and the constant sense of never being enough.
I tried to address as many of the themes present in the brief definitions of The Better Coffee’s 20 Core Values as possible—themes that may not always come through with their full force when reading The Better Coffee Standard.
These twenty values are deeply rooted in political ideas, economic concepts, and social theories. I did not invent them. But I did bring them together into a set of values I believe in and try to apply every day in my work with coffee.
Even when—and perhaps especially when—remaining faithful to those values runs against the logic of late capitalism, representative democracy, and adaptive liberalism.
Strangely enough, I find that these same values—even when they go unnamed—remain alive among many coffee people I speak with and work alongside. They say: we need to restore values. We need to ground our work in them again.
Yet they rarely try to reform the coffee world themselves. Even more rarely do they try to reform the world at large.
Krzysztof Blinkiewicz
The Latin reformatio means transformation and renewal, but also restoration. And this is where I arrive at my most painful realization: how can coffee people restore values if they have forgotten—or never knew—that those values were ever part of lived reality? How can they return to something they do not remember? And is restoration really the work that needs to be done?
The political, social, and economic system we live in appears eternal to us. That is the nature of a paradigm. Once accepted as the consensus, it begins to seem immutable, permanent, and timeless. We stop noticing that it has a beginning, a history, and limits. We begin to treat it as nature itself.
Yet when we look at science, we know perfectly well that a paradigm is fragile. It cracks. It reveals anomalies.
Eventually, it collapses under the weight of its own inadequacy because it can no longer explain the world—whether as a whole or in one of its parts.
A new paradigm replaces it. With its own rules, its own measures, its own self-evident truths. Another order presented as “eternal” and “timeless,” until it, too, begins to crack.
Many of The Better Coffee’s values were well known to previous generations and earlier paradigms. Some of them once formed the foundation of social organization, work, mutual aid, and shared life before being subordinated to market logic or pushed aside as inefficient, naive, or unrealistic.
The Better Coffee, however, does not look backward.
We define better itself as ethical and future-oriented. Restoring values, then, does not mean returning to an idealized past. It is not an attempt to rebuild a world that once existed. The world described by The Better Coffee Standard has, of course, never existed. Restoration means giving values back their role as the foundation of our work and our lives.
I would defend the claim that the modern world has made getting rich its highest value—at the expense of people and the planet. Even at the expense of cluttering Earth’s orbit with debris.
Restoring values means placing human dignity above every other measure. Above price. Above growth. Above efficiency understood as increasing production and profit.
Dignity above coffee.
Coffee is secondary to coffee people. It is the material we work with. A plant. A fruit. A fairly dry green seed that we later roast—like bread.
It is ordinary and inseparable from daily life. A ritual and the sheer prose of everyday life.
We romanticize coffee more than the people who work with it. We give it personality, history, terroir, uniqueness, and origin. We speak about it with more tenderness than we do about the bodies, health, time, and lives of the people who produced it, transported it, roasted it, and served it.
Better Means is meant to remind us that labor deserves protection. That harming anyone means harming everyone. That you are equal to others. That you are free to decide for yourself whom you recognize as an authority—including yourself.
You should not have to suffer mentally or physically simply because, by choice, chance, or birth, you work with coffee.
Better Means says: your voice matters, and it must be heard. You should have a say in decisions, especially those concerning your own life. You have the right to learn and to access knowledge. You have the right to organize, defend yourself against exploitation, and count on help from others with nothing expected in return.
You also have the right to refuse. You have the right to say that something is not working, even when the market calls it success. You have the right to recognize harm, name power, challenge hierarchy, and stop participating in practices that destroy you, other people, or the planet.
I wrote this series for another reason as well.
As an overarching appeal for coffee people’s self-determination.
So that we stop being merely a collection of individuals, or a miserable aggregation of people connected by the same product but deprived of collective agency. So that we become a strong organism, with the coffee circle as its bloodstream.
So that through our shared effort, we can treat the cancers devouring the coffee world—not merely protect ourselves from them.
We live in absurd times.
Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” is the social form of late, globalized capitalism. Capitalism “liquefies”:
employment—turning a profession and a stable career into a succession of contracts and periods of insecurity;
institutions—shifting responsibility from structures to individuals;
social bonds—treating lasting commitments as constraints on flexibility;
identity—forcing people to construct it endlessly through consumer choices;
risk—presenting systemic conditions such as unemployment or poverty as personal failures.
In liquid modernity, capital gained the ability to withdraw quickly, relocate production, and shed its obligations. Bauman wrote that capital had been released from the old “cage,” while labor remained bound to people and place.
You are supposed to remain both a worker and a consumer.
Power belongs to whoever can leave without consequences.
Do you have enough power over your own life to walk away from coffee without consequences?
What conditions must the coffee world provide for you to want to stay—and bear the consequences of staying?
And who is supposed to create those conditions, if not you?
We keep counting on someone or something.
That someone will buy our coffee. That they’ll order more of it than we’ve been selling so far. That the weather will cooperate and the harvest will be enough. That new coffee drinks will suddenly pack our café. That a new Reel will sell our newly designed coffee bags.
That drip bags, cold brew, a new dripper, some elaborate processing method—perhaps adding pineapple or strawberries during fermentation this time—or a larger roaster will transform reality and deliver the success dictated by “the market.”
Better Means asks: why do you keep counting on the market?
Then it jabs you in the eye: capitalism has built the coffee market in such a way that relying on it alone gives you very little chance of taking care of yourself.
This series is a lockpick.
The Better Coffee Standard describes not only values, but living mechanisms and structures.
They were built to change the fate of coffee people—to give them new ways to cooperate and trade, to learn, and to evaluate coffee quality: quality redefined by us.
I sometimes mention these solutions between the lines of individual essays. I want to show that alternatives do not have to remain theoretical.
Some of them already exist, and we can begin using them.
Better Means also situates The Endeavour within the critical tradition advanced by degrowth movements, which explicitly call for rejecting the logic of endless growth.
Capitalism will keep defining how we understand the world for as long as people cannot imagine a world after capitalism.
As Slavoj Žižek observed: “It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”
I hope these essays have allowed me to sketch my vision of a post-capitalist world for coffee people—a world grounded in The Better Coffee’s 20 Core Values.
It is neither a romantic nor an idealistic vision.
I am not a dreamer. I do not run Red Ink Coffee to sugarcoat the reality of coffee people or their future. Instead, I point to the effort we can make together, grounded in mutual aid.
I would not be myself if I failed to invoke Edward Abramowski here—one of the spiritual fathers of The Better Coffee.
He convinced me, as he convinced many others, that cooperativism—grounded in the abolition of hierarchy, shared decision-making, freedom from authority, and selfless aid, while preserving the personal property of collective members—is more than a method of work long familiar in practice.
It is the future for coffee.
Of all the sentences I wrote in Better Means, I would single out a few.
“The system doesn't break coffee people by accident. It does it methodically, generation after generation, and calls it the market.” (“Take What Is Yours,” p. 30)
“Don't ask how many points this coffee scored. Ask how many employment contracts are attached to it.” (“Protect the Unprotected,” p. 33)
“Language is a tool of power. But it's also a tool of truth. The choice belongs to whoever is holding it.” (“Stop Telling Me What I Taste,” p. 41)
“The coffee system won't change on its own. It changes when coffee people start acting together. Cooperatively. In solidarity. Consciously.” (“Does Your Coffee Pay the Bills?,” p. 10)
“The planet doesn't negotiate.” (“The Planet Doesn’t Negotiate,” p. 46)
Please write them down by hand on a piece of paper.
If you have a desk, hang the page above it. If all you have is a wall, pin it up like a poster. Or roll it up and carry it in your pocket.
Save these sentences in the notes app on your phone. Record them and use the recording as your alarm. Do whatever it takes to return to them—when this book gets lost somewhere on your hard drive, or when you are offline and cannot dig them back up on Red Ink Coffee.
Does that sound absurd?
Perhaps.
But I want you to begin counting on yourself—and to start changing the present and future of your own work with coffee.
Let Better Means mean you.
Krzysztof Blinkiewicz