The Starbucks Socialist

The Starbucks Socialist

Walk into any urban coffee shop adorned with pride flags and Black Lives Matter stickers, order a $9 oat-milk latte, and you’ll likely overhear the unmistakable cadence of the modern “Starbucks Socialist.” These are the young, college-educated, often gainfully employed (or at least parentally subsidized) activists who loudly proclaim that capitalism is a crime, that billionaires should be eaten, and that society must be reorganized along “democratic socialist” or even fully communist lines. They are armed with slogans, TikTok infographics, and an unshakeable confidence that this time socialism will work—because they’ll be the ones running it from their MacBooks.

What becomes immediately obvious when you listen to their rhetoric, however, is a near-total ignorance of history and an even more astonishing blindness to their own future position in the very systems they romanticize.

History? Never heard of it. The Starbucks Socialist has never heard of the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields, or the Venezuelan bread lines that began not with shortages of flour but with price controls and expropriations.

They believe the Soviet Union collapsed because of… the CIA and Ronald Reagan, not because central planning is mathematically incapable of solving the economic calculation problem identified by Mises and Hayek a century ago.

They think “real” socialism has never been tried, apparently unaware that every single attempt—from the Paris Commune to Allende’s Chile—either devolved into authoritarianism or was crushed precisely because it started confiscating private property and terrified everyone with a functioning brain.

They quote Che Guevara on T-shirts without knowing he personally signed the execution orders for hundreds of political prisoners. They call for “seizing the means of production” without realizing that every revolutionary cadre that ever uttered those words eventually discovered the means of production also include the secret police, the labor camps, and the famine.

Who, exactly, do they think will be in charge? Here’s the part that should induce cold sweats, the Starbucks Socialist genuinely believes that after the revolution, they will be the ones writing the Five-Year Plans from a cozy government office while listening to Chappell Roan. They imagine a world of universal basic income, co-op coffee shops, and six-hour workdays where they personally get to decide what is produced and who gets what.

History says otherwise. Every communist revolution in history followed the same pattern:

Phase 1: Idealistic intellectuals and middle-class students provide the rhetoric and street muscle.

Phase 2: Harder men with guns (Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Mao’s peasants, Castro’s barbudos, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge cadres) take actual power.

Phase 3: The useful idiots who thought they were going to be the new ruling class are lined up against the wall or sent to the countryside to learn the dignity of breaking rocks for twelve hours a day.

The barista with the “Eat the Rich” pin does not realize that the revolution will not be staffed by gender-studies majors. It will be staffed by people who already know how to make other people disappear at 3 a.m.

The trust-fund socialist tweeting “Late-Stage Capitalism” from Brooklyn will not be put in charge of the Ministry of Culture; he will be lucky to get a job mopping the floor of the state-owned oat-milk factory under the supervision of a party apparatchik who grew up shooting stray dogs for fun.

No, you will not be playing video games on the couch. The most delicious irony is the fantasy that socialism means never having to work again. “Fully automated luxury communism” is the meme that reveals everything. These people think the revolution’s end state is them sitting at home, high, eating Hot Pockets and grinding Fortnite while the robots (somehow paid for and maintained by nobody) deliver everything for free.

In reality, every socialist economy in history has been characterized first by shortages, then by forced labor.

When you abolish profit and private property, you abolish the only known mechanism for coordinating complex supply chains. The result is not leisure, it is standing in bread lines, followed by state conscription into “voluntary” labor brigades when people refuse to work for patriotic slogans and food rations.

The Soviet Union had chronic labor shortages despite having millions in the Gulag—because when you pay everyone the same regardless of effort, effort disappears. North Korea today solves the problem the old-fashioned way, you go where the state tells you, you work how the state tells you, or you and your family starve.

There is no Twitch streaming career under Kim Jong Un.

Lenin himself called them “useful idiots.” The original term was slightly longer and spicier, but the meaning is clear, the comfortable, educated children of the parents who made their life under free market capitalism, who agitate for communism are always, without exception, the first to be liquidated when their services are no longer required.

Today’s Starbucks Socialist are not a proletarian. They are not even working-class in any meaningful sense. They are a credentialed, debt-financed member of the laptop class who has been told their entire life that their political opinions are a substitute for both virtue and competence. They think the revolution will be a morally pure extension of their campus protest, not understanding that revolutions are run by people who have already demonstrated a willingness to kill for power.

In the end, the tragedy is not that socialism doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. Mountains of corpses and empty grocery stores have settled that question. The tragedy is that every generation produces a new cohort of overeducated, underemployed romantics who are certain they will be the exception—the ones who finally get to sit on the Central Committee sipping fair-trade espresso while someone else digs the potatoes.

They never do.

They always end up as the potatoes.