Alright, it’s been a week at this point, we can discuss this with a bit more level headedness, right? Plus it gave me time to go back and reread Kripke, and I’d been needing a good reason to go do that. As a recap of what started all of this mess last week, I made a side comment that jobs are constructs of capitalism, something which, at least from a Marxist historical perspective, is a pretty banal claim. Anon took issue with it, and so here we are, again.
When I made that side comment, I was implicitly distinguishing a “job” from other similar terms, like “labor” and “work”, because I was taking job to mean something rather specific, that is, a particular kind of relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker provides their time/labor to that employer in exchange for wages. Anon argued that jobs aren’t a construct of capitalism, and that they existed in other times/economic systems.
I argued that, linguistically, the case is pretty open and shut. The word for “job” didn’t even exist until the 1600′s, well after the beginning of capitalism, which is generally accepted to have begun with the onset of merchant capital in the 1500′s. The term didn’t take on the meaning I outlined above until the mid 19th century, when Capitalism was firmly established. This, at the very least, shows that the concept of a “job” is tied to the capitalist era, and not any earlier time or economic system as Anon claimed, unless you take the word job to mean something I would consider to be overly broad–that is, like the more general (and much older) words like “work” or “labor”. But that’s not how I was using it, and I’d rather avoid a trite argument over definitions in any case, but I can haul out my copy of the OED if you’d like.
Of course, one can anticipate an objection to this etymological argument using descriptive theories of reference–that is, you can claim that while the term job might not have existed until the Capitalist era, the term job still picks out a socially determined concept uniquely determined by a cluster of descriptions. For example, one might claim that something which we can refer to as a “job” would satisfy a number of descriptions like 1) it trades wages for labor, and 2) a situation where a worker to be subservient to an owner or employer, and so on and so forth, for as many descriptions as it might take to satisfy. You can then claim, that even though the linguistic term “job” didn’t exist until the Capitalist era, that doesn’t mean that other economic relations prior to the term didn’t exist such that they satisfied the cluster of descriptions for the term “job”. That is, in more layman’s terms, to claim that there could have been economic relations in earlier times that weren’t referred to as “jobs”, but which satisfied the cluster of descriptions that we assign to the term. Thus, metaphysically, if not linguistically, the term job would successfully refer to those earlier relations prior to the existence of Capitalism, and therefore not dependent on Capitalism for their existence.
This brings us to Kripke. Beyond the fact that his argument against the cluster of descriptions theory of reference in the second lecture would very much counter the above objection (in particular, I doubt you could offer a collection of descriptions for the term “job” which weren’t, on some level, circularly defined) it’s his argument regarding natural kinds which I found to be more relevant to the discussion. The conclusion he comes to is that natural kind terms are rigid designators–that is, natural kind terms necessarily apply to the class of the object to which they are initially assigned. In his argument, this is why we can, for example, potentially discover that tigers, as a class, do not have four legs (perhaps, as he mentions, this is because of an optical illusion, or it is discovered that all tigers have a second tail which behaves like and resembles a fourth leg), but that if we discovered a new animal in the wilderness which possess many of the descriptive properties of tigers, but which are, in fact, reptiles, that these new animals are by necessity *not* tigers, despite the initial resemblance. That is, he’s attempting to draw a distinction between two different cases of discovery 1) the discovery that a designated natural kind X has new or different properties, and 2) the discovery of a second natural kind Y with many properties similar to X. (This is what I was referring too, poorly, when I mentioned the US last week, but I’ll do my best to explain my thinking better here.)
I believe a similar argument can be made about the term “job”. Of course, one initial objection is that the term can’t be a natural kind like the ones above, because the term is socially constructed, but I would reply that this actually makes the task simpler, and less complicated than natural kinds. The main reason for this is that the properties of a socially constructed kind, like the term “job”, has all of it’s properties stipulated–as opposed to being discovered empirically. Thus, we could never, for example, discover that “jobs” don’t actually involve wages, or that they don’t involve an employer–these facts about the term are necessary because of the term’s social origin and definition. However, just because the first case of discovery above can’t occur with socially constructed terms, doesn’t mean the second isn’t a potential issue.
What if we discovered that, prior to the rigid designation of the term job, a social relation in another, earlier economic system which satisfied many of the same descriptions as the term? That is, what if, in some ancient lost civilization a social system was found that contained economic relationships with many of the same qualities as what we call jobs? Would these newly discovered historical relations also be jobs?
As a side note, I’m willing to grant that relations with a similar appearance to jobs may have existed in prior economic systems. I don’t know for certain whether or not this is the case, but certainly history is large enough for this to be likely. What I’m trying to argue, is that this similarity isn’t enough to negate my initial claim–that is, just because there may have been social relations similar to “jobs” in the past, doesn’t mean that “jobs” as we *currently* designate them aren’t a construct of Capitalism.
Here’s the crux of my argument. The term job was rigidly designated within the Capitalist system–that much is indisputable etymologically. It’s used to designate a particular kind of social relation between a worker and an employee. Thus, the descriptions we use to pick out relations that satisfy the term job out in the world require other concepts and terms which are rooted in capitalist ideology–that is, the term job is fundamentally impossible to comprehend unless the system of capitalism is established and understood as a prior concept. Thus, the socially constructed kind term, “jobs”, is necessarily a construct of capitalistic terms and systems.
It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether or not we discover economic relations in the past that appear to be jobs–I would argue that there is no way they could satisfy a rigorous definition of the term. In the same way that the discovery of a second kind of animal that appears to be a tiger, but which is in fact a reptile, is necessarily *not* a tiger, a economic relation that looks like a job, which exists in an economic system other than capitalism, is necessarily *not* a job in the sense that we use the term. That said, if you can define the terms of “job” such that you avoid relying on the assumption of capitalism, then you would have a solid argument against my claim here, but I doubt such a definition is possible.
How about that to get us started today? This should result in lots of reasonable asks in my box I’m sure.
Bracken's Corner 