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Abolish Restaurants: A Worker's Critique of the Food Service Industry
A 60-page illustrated guide to the daily misery, stress, boredom, and alienation of restaurant work, as well as the ways restaurant workers fight against it. Drawing on a range of anticapitalist ideas as well as a heaping plate of personal experience, it is part analysis and part call-to-arms.
56 pages, Pamphlet
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
August 30, 2016
I'd recommend it as a general breakdown of the food service industry, and a decent attempt at a Marxist analysis, but it's extreme generalizations and narrow scope of worker's actions and attitudes is a bit worrisome. Also, the way they quickly dismissed unions and co-operatives while making an overly romanticized call to Molotov style revolution will likely hardly have an effect on anyone that isn't already invested in that ideology, and it seems slightly masturbatory in that way.
May 28, 2016
this was pretty good as an economic analysis / critique / sorta history of the food service industry until it suddenly got all post-left/insurrecto at the end and like literally fabricated history and stuff lol
August 16, 2014
Interesting, but not entirely accurate. Restaurants were a fixture in cities during the Roman empire.
July 11, 2020
This was a well-illustrated radical pamphlet from the perspective of an anonymous worker in the food service industry. I’ve been reading chapters from the first volume of Marx’s Capital with some friends, and this pamphlet is a really good case study to work through some of the concepts Marx is trying to articulate in Capital.
I think one of the most important aspects of this text is how well it articulates both the immense stress and boredom that this industry encompasses, and the underlying resentment and anger in produces. Reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, I garnered a sense how completely alienating restaurant work is in the sense of how it can completely destroy your social life, and in many ways stratifies classes. When much of the nine-to-five crowd is off work, you are at work: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. It is the temporal structure of capitalism: five days of production, and an overwhelming surge of consumption on Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings (met with an equivalent production by food service workers). It’s the Marxian notion of reproduction, yet structured differently for different classes of people.
It’s fascinating that the lowest paid minimum wage jobs often concentrate in the retail and food service industries, which must manage overwhelming surges of consumption on weekends. Incredibly stressful, intense, and exhausting — and then the remaining days involve sheer boredom and useless tasks because your time is ‘owned’ by your employer.
It reminds me of this term I encountered in a Chomsky book: plutonomy. It’s an old term, used in different ways by people like John Ruskin, but its contemporary meaning is relevant here. Citigroup uses the term ‘plutonomy’ to describe economies that are basically powered around the consumption of the wealthy few. Examples it gives of plutonomies: the US, UK, and Canada. Whatever the gradation of extremes this manifests itself in, any society with a hierarchy of classes will be structured around the desires of the ruling class, the wealthy people, who have the money to consume things. That’s where labour will be focused — not on dealing with climate catastrophe in an actually effective manner, ensuring healthcare and education for all, clean and safe housing, affordable healthy food, etc. It will be on the whims of rich people.
But rich people are not the only ones who eat at restaurants, even if restaurants are an emblematic microcosm of inequality. My mom likes eating at restaurants, so I’ve eaten at them far too many times in my life. It always makes me cringe when she acts in a demanding fashion around restaurant workers, complaining half behind their back (yet still within earshot) that they are lazy or incompetent, despite the fact that she knows what it’s like working near the bottom of a hierarchy in an office environment and being pushed around and completely unappreciated — overextended. She grew up in poverty to very poor working class parents, and lived off government powdered milk packets in school given to chronically malnourished children. She knows what it feels like to be look down upon by other people, yet as Paulo Freire says:
“the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them.”
These dynamics sometimes recall for me the Parable of the Two Debtors told in the Christian Gospels (focusing on the hypocrisy of the man who is a forgiven debtor but unforgiving creditor). Although, even if being forgiving and generous is important, the end goal is and should be abolishing these relations of domination, so there are no opportunities to lord it over other people.
This is also an important thing I’m finding while reading Marx’s Capital. One is not statically an oppressor or always in a position of power. People play different roles in different circumstances. One of the memorable passages in this prole.info pamphlet reads:
“Customers can easily be working class people with jobs just as alienating and miserable as restaurant work. Even someone who works 60 hours a week as a busser, may go out to eat, and be an asshole customer. The class background of the customers is less important than their position as customers in a restaurant.”
I’ve also been listening to some David Harvey lectures while reading Capital, and I found a similar thing he mentions in the lecture that he also wrote in his “Companion to Marx’s Capital”:
“Marx is concerned with the economic roles that people play, rather than with the individuals who play them. So he will examine relations between buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, capitalists and laborers. Throughout Capital, in fact, the focus will be on roles rather than persons, recognizing that individuals can and do often occupy several different roles, even deeply contradictory positions (as when, in our time, a worker has a pension fund invested in the stock market). This focus on roles rather than individuals is as perfectly legitimate as if we were analyzing the relations between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan: most of us have taken on both roles and adapt our behaviors accordingly.”
Some Marxists complain about postmodernists who emphasize this blurring of power relations, but it’s actually found in Marx’s dialectical commentary on power relations. Not radically distant from Foucault, even if Foucault eventually was an anti-Marxist. Of course I still believe class analysis is a useful way of seeing the world. But relations of domination intersect in complex ways across different axes of power.
People can be both buyers and sellers. This relation emerges from the commodification of food and the human labour behind it. In many ways food mediates the social relations that exist between people. Restaurants encapsulate relations of inequality in an almost religious manner, which is what Marx tries to get at with his notion of ‘commodity fetishism’:
“It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities…
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
…There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”
I’m still trying to parse through these parts of Capital, but I think about it like this: many Christians imagine God as having a personal relationship with them and also having a personal relationship with billions of other people. In the same way we have a personal relationship to the physical goods or services we produce, and the instant they become commodified (some cannot even exist as anything other than commodities), they have a monetary value as every single other commodity also has. This universalizing force of global exchange mediated by money, puts this commodity in relation to any other commodity in the world that can be exchanged for money. One can sell the commodity one has produced, and buy some other commodity another has produced, hence the ability for money to facilitate exchange of one commodity with any other commodity. Hence one’s labour commodified, has an exchange rate with someone else’s labour commodified. There exists a social relation hidden under the complexities of the economy. A restaurant customer exchanges their earnings for food and service at a restaurant. The amount that a corresponding restaurant worker can then purchase for themselves on their minimum wage income reflects the social relations of trickle-down economics. Hence the irony mentioned in this book about workers serving plates of exquisite-looking food they could never afford, with nothing but coffee, and maybe a little bread, in their stomachs.
Being a buyer you act in a certain way, being a seller you act in a different way. One can be an oppressor in one instance and oppressed in another instance, depending on the social relation existing under economic transactions. Either way, the relations of domination that the commodification of the entire world entails is degrading to everyone. Aime Cesaire describes how colonialism dehumanizes both the colonizer and the colonized:
“…colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”
This also relates, in a milder form, to the relations of domination that exist under capitalism. When labour is still treated like an animalistic force, as mere inputs into a greater productive machine. Everyone is dehumanized in the process. It’s hard not to feel that sometimes in a restaurant. Especially when someone has to pretend to be nice to you, to enjoy being around you, because they are just trying to survive and pay their rent. It’s dehumanizing for everyone.
Abolishing Restaurants is not about abolishing delicious food, and the pleasure culinary traditions and innovations can offer us as human beings. It is about abolishing the relations of domination that exist everywhere, including the food service industry. Mary (in Luke 1:53) envisions a future where the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. Her son, Jesus, tells a story about all the rich people who were too busy practicing capitalism and maneuvering assets to enjoy the banquet feast, and that’s why the platters were enjoyed only by the poor and disabled, gathered in from the streets. Such an inversion, a turning of the world upside down, is one of many steps that can be taken to abolishing restaurants and more importantly, abolishing relations of domination.
p.s. Long live potlucks! Especially communally produced potluck food! They are basically: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. (The intersection of Marx and Acts 4).
p.p.s. The Pita Kropotkin drawing in this book was my favourite part of the book. The only restaurant allowed to exist is Pita Kropotkin. The conquest of pita bread is the end goal.
I think one of the most important aspects of this text is how well it articulates both the immense stress and boredom that this industry encompasses, and the underlying resentment and anger in produces. Reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, I garnered a sense how completely alienating restaurant work is in the sense of how it can completely destroy your social life, and in many ways stratifies classes. When much of the nine-to-five crowd is off work, you are at work: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. It is the temporal structure of capitalism: five days of production, and an overwhelming surge of consumption on Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings (met with an equivalent production by food service workers). It’s the Marxian notion of reproduction, yet structured differently for different classes of people.
It’s fascinating that the lowest paid minimum wage jobs often concentrate in the retail and food service industries, which must manage overwhelming surges of consumption on weekends. Incredibly stressful, intense, and exhausting — and then the remaining days involve sheer boredom and useless tasks because your time is ‘owned’ by your employer.
It reminds me of this term I encountered in a Chomsky book: plutonomy. It’s an old term, used in different ways by people like John Ruskin, but its contemporary meaning is relevant here. Citigroup uses the term ‘plutonomy’ to describe economies that are basically powered around the consumption of the wealthy few. Examples it gives of plutonomies: the US, UK, and Canada. Whatever the gradation of extremes this manifests itself in, any society with a hierarchy of classes will be structured around the desires of the ruling class, the wealthy people, who have the money to consume things. That’s where labour will be focused — not on dealing with climate catastrophe in an actually effective manner, ensuring healthcare and education for all, clean and safe housing, affordable healthy food, etc. It will be on the whims of rich people.
But rich people are not the only ones who eat at restaurants, even if restaurants are an emblematic microcosm of inequality. My mom likes eating at restaurants, so I’ve eaten at them far too many times in my life. It always makes me cringe when she acts in a demanding fashion around restaurant workers, complaining half behind their back (yet still within earshot) that they are lazy or incompetent, despite the fact that she knows what it’s like working near the bottom of a hierarchy in an office environment and being pushed around and completely unappreciated — overextended. She grew up in poverty to very poor working class parents, and lived off government powdered milk packets in school given to chronically malnourished children. She knows what it feels like to be look down upon by other people, yet as Paulo Freire says:
“the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them.”
These dynamics sometimes recall for me the Parable of the Two Debtors told in the Christian Gospels (focusing on the hypocrisy of the man who is a forgiven debtor but unforgiving creditor). Although, even if being forgiving and generous is important, the end goal is and should be abolishing these relations of domination, so there are no opportunities to lord it over other people.
This is also an important thing I’m finding while reading Marx’s Capital. One is not statically an oppressor or always in a position of power. People play different roles in different circumstances. One of the memorable passages in this prole.info pamphlet reads:
“Customers can easily be working class people with jobs just as alienating and miserable as restaurant work. Even someone who works 60 hours a week as a busser, may go out to eat, and be an asshole customer. The class background of the customers is less important than their position as customers in a restaurant.”
I’ve also been listening to some David Harvey lectures while reading Capital, and I found a similar thing he mentions in the lecture that he also wrote in his “Companion to Marx’s Capital”:
“Marx is concerned with the economic roles that people play, rather than with the individuals who play them. So he will examine relations between buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, capitalists and laborers. Throughout Capital, in fact, the focus will be on roles rather than persons, recognizing that individuals can and do often occupy several different roles, even deeply contradictory positions (as when, in our time, a worker has a pension fund invested in the stock market). This focus on roles rather than individuals is as perfectly legitimate as if we were analyzing the relations between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan: most of us have taken on both roles and adapt our behaviors accordingly.”
Some Marxists complain about postmodernists who emphasize this blurring of power relations, but it’s actually found in Marx’s dialectical commentary on power relations. Not radically distant from Foucault, even if Foucault eventually was an anti-Marxist. Of course I still believe class analysis is a useful way of seeing the world. But relations of domination intersect in complex ways across different axes of power.
People can be both buyers and sellers. This relation emerges from the commodification of food and the human labour behind it. In many ways food mediates the social relations that exist between people. Restaurants encapsulate relations of inequality in an almost religious manner, which is what Marx tries to get at with his notion of ‘commodity fetishism’:
“It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities…
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
…There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”
I’m still trying to parse through these parts of Capital, but I think about it like this: many Christians imagine God as having a personal relationship with them and also having a personal relationship with billions of other people. In the same way we have a personal relationship to the physical goods or services we produce, and the instant they become commodified (some cannot even exist as anything other than commodities), they have a monetary value as every single other commodity also has. This universalizing force of global exchange mediated by money, puts this commodity in relation to any other commodity in the world that can be exchanged for money. One can sell the commodity one has produced, and buy some other commodity another has produced, hence the ability for money to facilitate exchange of one commodity with any other commodity. Hence one’s labour commodified, has an exchange rate with someone else’s labour commodified. There exists a social relation hidden under the complexities of the economy. A restaurant customer exchanges their earnings for food and service at a restaurant. The amount that a corresponding restaurant worker can then purchase for themselves on their minimum wage income reflects the social relations of trickle-down economics. Hence the irony mentioned in this book about workers serving plates of exquisite-looking food they could never afford, with nothing but coffee, and maybe a little bread, in their stomachs.
Being a buyer you act in a certain way, being a seller you act in a different way. One can be an oppressor in one instance and oppressed in another instance, depending on the social relation existing under economic transactions. Either way, the relations of domination that the commodification of the entire world entails is degrading to everyone. Aime Cesaire describes how colonialism dehumanizes both the colonizer and the colonized:
“…colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”
This also relates, in a milder form, to the relations of domination that exist under capitalism. When labour is still treated like an animalistic force, as mere inputs into a greater productive machine. Everyone is dehumanized in the process. It’s hard not to feel that sometimes in a restaurant. Especially when someone has to pretend to be nice to you, to enjoy being around you, because they are just trying to survive and pay their rent. It’s dehumanizing for everyone.
Abolishing Restaurants is not about abolishing delicious food, and the pleasure culinary traditions and innovations can offer us as human beings. It is about abolishing the relations of domination that exist everywhere, including the food service industry. Mary (in Luke 1:53) envisions a future where the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. Her son, Jesus, tells a story about all the rich people who were too busy practicing capitalism and maneuvering assets to enjoy the banquet feast, and that’s why the platters were enjoyed only by the poor and disabled, gathered in from the streets. Such an inversion, a turning of the world upside down, is one of many steps that can be taken to abolishing restaurants and more importantly, abolishing relations of domination.
p.s. Long live potlucks! Especially communally produced potluck food! They are basically: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. (The intersection of Marx and Acts 4).
p.p.s. The Pita Kropotkin drawing in this book was my favourite part of the book. The only restaurant allowed to exist is Pita Kropotkin. The conquest of pita bread is the end goal.
September 25, 2020
it was fine. i get the sense that this is super generalized and doesn't really reflect how all restaurants work or even how all restaurants in the us work but it was still a pretty interesting read until the end which is just like "we need to create world without restaurants" which was just like ok i'm not sure if i really buy this or whatever.
November 11, 2020
A lot of the reviews of this call the author bitter which I think is an attempt to lessen personal guilt. I have worked in hospitality a lot. I resonated with a lot of what the author said. I also enjoy eating in restaurants. A reminder that every luxury is at the expense of someone stuck in wage labour. Do we need it? Probably not. But while it is there and available we will keep going. The best thing we can do as customers is to question “the customer is always right” and bring our grievances to the owner/management, not the servers.
October 10, 2014
This was cool. I like eating at restaurants. But they're pretty horrible. "I like (verb) at (noun). But it's pretty horrible" - Capitalism Mad Libs.
December 19, 2025
I served 10 years behind bars.
By which I mean that - before my current gig as a university lecturer in Political Theory - I spent a decade working in restaurants.
I began, like most, by washing pots. I then graduated to cook and shimmied up the ladder to waiter, then barista, then bartender, then host, then assistant manager and finally manager.
Ever the student, I couldn’t help but observe the tendrils of capitalist power-economics seep across the mop-soaked floors. Whether it be the “dehumanisation of the KP”, “clocking-in as surveillance” or “customer/waiter as master/slave” - I found myself scrawling essay titles in notepads in place of drinks orders.
How fitting therefore that Jaco got me this short volume for Christmas - which I gobbled up in one sitting on the Eurostar home.
The author of this pamphlet, quite simply, gets it. You can feel the fury at the long hours and shit pay leap off the page. The book does well in diagnosing the problem. Restaurants are not only symptomatic of the labour abuse inherent in capitalism, but represent a particular and specialised example of it.
The historical accounts seem a little rushed (and US-centric) and I think the dismissal of unions is too swift. Yes, restaurants present a challenge to union-power due to their unique position at the end of a supply chain, but we should not give up hope in them.
Nevertheless, this is an engaging and relatable read for anyone who’s polished glassware at 3am while musing whether to fashion it into a molotov cocktail…
4*
By which I mean that - before my current gig as a university lecturer in Political Theory - I spent a decade working in restaurants.
I began, like most, by washing pots. I then graduated to cook and shimmied up the ladder to waiter, then barista, then bartender, then host, then assistant manager and finally manager.
Ever the student, I couldn’t help but observe the tendrils of capitalist power-economics seep across the mop-soaked floors. Whether it be the “dehumanisation of the KP”, “clocking-in as surveillance” or “customer/waiter as master/slave” - I found myself scrawling essay titles in notepads in place of drinks orders.
How fitting therefore that Jaco got me this short volume for Christmas - which I gobbled up in one sitting on the Eurostar home.
The author of this pamphlet, quite simply, gets it. You can feel the fury at the long hours and shit pay leap off the page. The book does well in diagnosing the problem. Restaurants are not only symptomatic of the labour abuse inherent in capitalism, but represent a particular and specialised example of it.
The historical accounts seem a little rushed (and US-centric) and I think the dismissal of unions is too swift. Yes, restaurants present a challenge to union-power due to their unique position at the end of a supply chain, but we should not give up hope in them.
Nevertheless, this is an engaging and relatable read for anyone who’s polished glassware at 3am while musing whether to fashion it into a molotov cocktail…
4*
July 24, 2020
The Communist Manifesto for the modern service worker. Class solidarity is created not though lofty philosophising by decades-dead Russians (though I do appreciate their work), but by meaningfully engaging with the oppressed masses in terms that reflect their daily struggles.
Abolish Restaurants is a steak knife straight to the heart of the capitalists who abuse restaurant workers everywhere everyday, and it has the foresight to remind us that the struggles of those very workers echo the struggles of workers everywhere.
Solid praxis, good illustrations, 5/5
Abolish Restaurants is a steak knife straight to the heart of the capitalists who abuse restaurant workers everywhere everyday, and it has the foresight to remind us that the struggles of those very workers echo the struggles of workers everywhere.
Solid praxis, good illustrations, 5/5
April 25, 2023
Read this because I was interested in the provocative title. Overall, I found it to be slightly misleading, quick to generalize in places, and lacking a real call to action. However, it is very short and easily approachable.
September 11, 2025
PM Press and Prole.info is responsible for exceptional literature promoting solidarity amongst the working class, and this short 56-page pamphlet is no different.
This pamphlet is the fifth of a series that illustrates modern day challenges that require our attention. It begins with a brief history of how restaurants came to exist as they do today, and how they operate from a standpoint of pure economics and labor.
This foundation is used to criticize the overwhelmingly hostile work environments that the compact majority of restaurant workers face around the world, and just how difficult the conditions are to ameliorate.
The pamphlet also describes the challenges current solutions face - such as the weak position from which a unionized restaurant must fight given such a high turnover of laborers and excessive competition. It nevertheless takes time to highlight the need for change.
While the pamphlet does retain a small section for a call to action, I believe this was one of the few ways in which the literature was lacking. I feel the first 52 pages were incredibly engaging, only to have the final conclusion, "A World Without Restaurants," to be underwhelming in its call to action, boiling down to little more than 'we should fight the system.'
I loved every moment of reading this pamphlet, and felt it educated me thoroughly on the economic conditions of the food service industry, even despite my modicum of experience working within it. Sadly, after feeling profoundly inspired, I feel like reaching the end was a let down, with few tangible solutions, proposals, or theories as to how we get to a better place.
This pamphlet is the fifth of a series that illustrates modern day challenges that require our attention. It begins with a brief history of how restaurants came to exist as they do today, and how they operate from a standpoint of pure economics and labor.
This foundation is used to criticize the overwhelmingly hostile work environments that the compact majority of restaurant workers face around the world, and just how difficult the conditions are to ameliorate.
The pamphlet also describes the challenges current solutions face - such as the weak position from which a unionized restaurant must fight given such a high turnover of laborers and excessive competition. It nevertheless takes time to highlight the need for change.
While the pamphlet does retain a small section for a call to action, I believe this was one of the few ways in which the literature was lacking. I feel the first 52 pages were incredibly engaging, only to have the final conclusion, "A World Without Restaurants," to be underwhelming in its call to action, boiling down to little more than 'we should fight the system.'
I loved every moment of reading this pamphlet, and felt it educated me thoroughly on the economic conditions of the food service industry, even despite my modicum of experience working within it. Sadly, after feeling profoundly inspired, I feel like reaching the end was a let down, with few tangible solutions, proposals, or theories as to how we get to a better place.
December 22, 2025
Does this little book deserve all of the bad and mixed reviews? Probably – it does generalise quite a lot, and the end disappoints. But I feel this disappointing side is one of the subtler points about this work missed by many.
Let's start with something any decent person will agree on: work in HORECA, fast food and bars mostly sucks. Been there, done that. And the work sucks not only because people are forced to do it, which is true about most other occupations. HORECA work is particularly exploitative because of the mask that the workers have to wear and because of just how boring and totalitarian it can be:
A finer point, specific to anarchist literature, is that some things simply cannot be meaningfully reformed. The book argues that restaurants are one such example. Wanting to reform restaurants is a bit like saying that cage-free agriculture is the best solution for factory farming when in fact it is rarely a tangible improvement for the lives of animals and often little more than marketing. )A general move towards veganism (barring some exceptions) would be a real solution.)
This little book argues that reforms to the restaurant system of today (like worker-managed locations and community restaurants) largely fail. And that's because they replace direct exploitation by the bosses with self-exploitation or will often fail to be profitable. I find this critique quite a harsh and somewhat unfair generalisation, although it is true that ethical restaurants are really rare and most HORECA establishments are painfully and obviously exploitative.
This leads me to a point that the book does not directly make. And it can't make it because Marxist, anarchist or revolutionary literature cannot embrace deep pessimism since it tries to inspire change. So the weak and undefined call for abolishing restaurants from the end of the book is, for me, an indication that HORECA is unlikely to be meaningfully reformed in the future. More people will be doomed to smile politely while being overworked, living in fear of loving a job they don't like and that pays so little that most couldn't never afford to visit their workplace as a customer.
We simply like restaurants, fast-food joints and bars. Most of us are also aware that most of these places treat their employees quite badly, not to mention what happens to the animals before they reach our plates. But similarly, most people find ways to accept the system: suffering is part of life, amaright? Or may politely remind you how work in HORECA gives so many people a chance to make an income, and we should not take that away from them. Just like the author of that small book, we can't really imagine a lasting alternative to HORECA. Most of us do not even make the effort to eat at ethical, vegan, or community-led restaurants.
So, if you think that abolishing restaurants is a sort of idealism that cannot even be imagined... fine. That is fine. Who doesn't? But reform we should. I know from experience that working for 7.5 hrs/day in a Norwegian restaurant was a much more of a dignified and painless experience than doing 12- or 13-hour shifts in Greece. So let us support local, vegan and nice establishments with our wallets and generally reform work. For it is undignified to exploit people and animals anywhere, be it in restaurants or less visible businesses.
Let's start with something any decent person will agree on: work in HORECA, fast food and bars mostly sucks. Been there, done that. And the work sucks not only because people are forced to do it, which is true about most other occupations. HORECA work is particularly exploitative because of the mask that the workers have to wear and because of just how boring and totalitarian it can be:
'With few exceptions, the workers in a restaurant want one thing more than anything else: to no longer be workers in a restaurant.'
'We are controlled, monitored and under threat constantly. Time at work in a typical restaurant is totalitarian. But no totalitarian regime survives by coercion alone. The entire restaurant is set up to pit employees against each other.'
'The same fifteen minutes (or hour-and-a-half) seem to repeat themselves over and over again, day after day. The work becomes second nature. On a good day we can fly through it almost unconsciously, on a bad day we are painfully aware of how boring and pointless it is.'
'Restaurant workers are either bored or stressed. We’re either trying to look busy, with nothing to do, or trying not to fall hopelessly behind, doing ten things at once.'
A finer point, specific to anarchist literature, is that some things simply cannot be meaningfully reformed. The book argues that restaurants are one such example. Wanting to reform restaurants is a bit like saying that cage-free agriculture is the best solution for factory farming when in fact it is rarely a tangible improvement for the lives of animals and often little more than marketing. )A general move towards veganism (barring some exceptions) would be a real solution.)
This little book argues that reforms to the restaurant system of today (like worker-managed locations and community restaurants) largely fail. And that's because they replace direct exploitation by the bosses with self-exploitation or will often fail to be profitable. I find this critique quite a harsh and somewhat unfair generalisation, although it is true that ethical restaurants are really rare and most HORECA establishments are painfully and obviously exploitative.
This leads me to a point that the book does not directly make. And it can't make it because Marxist, anarchist or revolutionary literature cannot embrace deep pessimism since it tries to inspire change. So the weak and undefined call for abolishing restaurants from the end of the book is, for me, an indication that HORECA is unlikely to be meaningfully reformed in the future. More people will be doomed to smile politely while being overworked, living in fear of loving a job they don't like and that pays so little that most couldn't never afford to visit their workplace as a customer.
We simply like restaurants, fast-food joints and bars. Most of us are also aware that most of these places treat their employees quite badly, not to mention what happens to the animals before they reach our plates. But similarly, most people find ways to accept the system: suffering is part of life, amaright? Or may politely remind you how work in HORECA gives so many people a chance to make an income, and we should not take that away from them. Just like the author of that small book, we can't really imagine a lasting alternative to HORECA. Most of us do not even make the effort to eat at ethical, vegan, or community-led restaurants.
So, if you think that abolishing restaurants is a sort of idealism that cannot even be imagined... fine. That is fine. Who doesn't? But reform we should. I know from experience that working for 7.5 hrs/day in a Norwegian restaurant was a much more of a dignified and painless experience than doing 12- or 13-hour shifts in Greece. So let us support local, vegan and nice establishments with our wallets and generally reform work. For it is undignified to exploit people and animals anywhere, be it in restaurants or less visible businesses.
March 6, 2024
I found this pamphlet very empowering. As a 6-year food/beverage service worker, it is easy for our unique struggles to feel forgotten — or, widely known and taken for granted with no hope for any solution. Especially when seasoned service veterans take too much pride in having survived the ringer of years of shitty pay and work environments to really hope for any real systemic change, resorting to simply seeking out the best possible work situation for themselves and chiding less experienced, “worse” workers for not being at their level.
This was one of the first true leftist works I’ve read. I’m familiar with and support the basic principles of leftist ideology, but have been wanting to become more intimately familiar with ideas and solutions to the current landscape as a working class individual. Reading this made me feel seen, and even if restaurant work isn’t always as bleak as this pamphlet makes it out to be, it was very validating to read familiar archetypes and situations. I feel less alone in my struggle for having read it. I look forward to further immersion in leftist ideology, and hope we can cultivate a better future for workers everywhere.
This was one of the first true leftist works I’ve read. I’m familiar with and support the basic principles of leftist ideology, but have been wanting to become more intimately familiar with ideas and solutions to the current landscape as a working class individual. Reading this made me feel seen, and even if restaurant work isn’t always as bleak as this pamphlet makes it out to be, it was very validating to read familiar archetypes and situations. I feel less alone in my struggle for having read it. I look forward to further immersion in leftist ideology, and hope we can cultivate a better future for workers everywhere.
May 27, 2024
' The only way we can free ourselves is to broaden and deepen our fight. We involve workers from other workplaces, other industries, and other regions. We attack more and more fundamental things. The desire to destroy restaurants becomes the desire to destroy the conditions that create restaurants.
We’re fighting for a world where our productive activity fulfills a need and is an expression of our lives, not forced on us in exchange for a wage–a world where we produce for each other directly and not in order to sell to each other.
This is the direction we push every day. We need to push harder and better. We can’t let anything stand in our way. '
While this article is focused on Restaurants and workers there, it is universal to almost all industries where the employee's creativity and self governance is stripped away from them.
Bless the Anarchist library for this essay.
We’re fighting for a world where our productive activity fulfills a need and is an expression of our lives, not forced on us in exchange for a wage–a world where we produce for each other directly and not in order to sell to each other.
This is the direction we push every day. We need to push harder and better. We can’t let anything stand in our way. '
While this article is focused on Restaurants and workers there, it is universal to almost all industries where the employee's creativity and self governance is stripped away from them.
Bless the Anarchist library for this essay.
May 9, 2022
Fantastic, firebrand polemic that was perfect to read immediately after David Chang's memoir. Chang lays out many of the issues with the restaurant industry our anonymous anarchist gets into here from the other side; the answer might be somewhere in between what they each chronicle. Or maybe we just get rid of them and cook for each other, but in a cool communal way, not a lame Queen's Jubilee street party kind of way, idk.
August 29, 2022
A great concise critique of restaurants and all the horrible stuff that goes into working in them. Has a great introduction to the labour theory of value you could give pretty much anyone, so I recommend buying a few cheap copies of the printed version to slyly gift to your friends. The conclusion doesn't totally land, and may leave the reader wanting, but otherwise very cool.
December 24, 2017
Edición de Klinamen, snif. Muy interesante, la parte de ilustraciones está bien para distraer un poco, pero ya. Al final hay un salto un poco así de "en realidad esto no tiene solución, más allá de abolir el capitalismo lol".
July 24, 2022
This pamphlet does a good job of highlighting just how terrible it is to work in the food service industry, but is kind of short on solutions other than that it just shouldn’t exist - which seems impractical
August 7, 2022
I picked it up on a whim in Chicago to support the local bookstore. It's an alright book and kinda funny but didn't feel too impressed by it overall. The message of abolishing restaurants wasn't as strong as it could have been. It did explain the pain of restaurants pretty well tho
August 30, 2024
Abolish Restaurants is a radical critiqe of the food service industry, placing musch of the bruden on capitalism. Whether the restaurant is owned by a boss or a collective, the ownes are responsible for the bottom line, with that comes the desire to make a profit or go broke.
September 17, 2017
Great artwork can't disguise that thus is a rag of embittered service worker rage. That in itself would be fine if it suggested any constructive alternatives.
August 21, 2021
I’m so thankful for the existence of this book.
September 24, 2023
a fairly decent analysis in some aspects, but i found it to go a bit too into generalisation for my liking (and as compared to my lived experience).
June 16, 2024
Really liked the format and the force of the message. Wish they'd spent a little more time at the end explaining their issues with leftist sects as they did with their issues with unions, but that might just be on me for picking up one issue of a series and expecting to be able to get all of it. I appreciated them differentiating the restaurant model from past forms of food production and would have liked a brief touch back to potential issues with those forms of food production and if there are forms of food production that could work for people at all.
January 2, 2013
Divided into two halves. The first an description of the restaurant industry. The second, how to dismantle it. The first is excellent, the second is rushed. Worth the read, I quite enjoyed it and passed it onto my friends still in the industry.
September 14, 2013
The rationale behind the argument and logic it follows is so flawed, that it defies critical interpretation.
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