Get to the back of the line, you ain’t the only one bucko!

wesleybracken:

Not much. A couple dildos and some nipple play stuff. I have a small selection of leather/fetish clothing too.

Aa! Silly me, I forgot the rim chair. That thing gets the most use of all of it.

Not much. A couple dildos and some nipple play stuff. I have a small selection of leather/fetish clothing too.

Here’s the full question, which got broken up:

[New Player Added] I enjoy your stories, was reading over your asks etc. Why is it that you hate capitalism? I completely understand how many problems it caused when company towns were a thing, however once that got sorted out, our world became what it is today- almost every luxury we have is the product of capitalism: fresh water/plumbing, every appliance, mechanical methods of transportation and roads. Even during feudalism, despite servants and apprentices not necessarily paid, only their

needs were supported. And even people getting land for labor, they still needed to sell items to support themselves. With only communism, industry wouldn’t exist. There used to be people who specializes in clothe making, blacksmithing, etc. But there would be no manufacturing. No organized work unless they were all servants under one name. Capitalism isn’t that different from Feudalism, just instead of land it’s industry. So again, why is Capitalism evil and Communism above it?

   

First of all, even Marx thought that Capitalism was a modern marvel. Capitalism has generated a lot of great advances in general quality of life. But Capitalism has done a lot of terrible shit too–colonialism, human trafficking, environmental destruction, police states, world wars, nuclear weapons, etc. etc. You have to take the bad with the good here.

But beyond that, it’s important to remember than traditional Marxism functioned on a version of Hegel’s theory of history, which…well, it’s doubtful that it’s very true, but it provides important context for the theory. For Hegel, and for Marx, history is a story of human progress, and to them, history has an end point–a level of human civilization where, essentially, we all, as humans, finally figure our shit out. For Hegel, this was the advancing Napoleonic Empire (that was a pretty hot take) and for Marx this was a future economic system he called Communism.

The difficulty with trying to describe Communism is that Marx was never very specific about what, exactly, it would look like in any of his writings. To some extent, this makes sense–after all, if we’re assuming (in his framework) that Communism would be the pinnacle of human progress, if we knew now what it would look like, then, necessarily, shouldn’t we be able to create it with the snap of our fingers? Under the Hegelian view, we would, essentially, know when we saw it, but we could take some guesses.

Mark gave some rough guidelines himself. Communism would be fundamentally egalitarian in nature. Because each previous economic system was toppled by a collapsing of class hierarchy, and because the end result of Capitalism (to Marx) was the collapse of all of human society into two classes–a small percentage of wealthy capitalists and a huge mass of workers–that the revolution at the end of Capitalism would necessarily result in a single, unified class of workers. This is probably a pipe dream, but it’s what he thought. Mostly, the fundamental ruling principle of Communism would be that the means of production is owned and operated by the workers–no one is alienated by their own labor, and the false consciousness of class ideology will have at last fallen like scales from our eyes.

So is Capitalism evil? I would say so. Capitalism has created a system where the vast majority of the global population live in relative poverty compared to a small collection of wealthy corporations and individuals. This division has only grown more stark in recent years. But setting aside the question of evil, a better question is whether Capitalism is sustainable. This, I think, is the more powerful argument that Marx puts forth, in his third volume of Capital. Capitalism is fueled by consumption–because the fundamental economic drive of the system is the accumulation of resources, Capitalists have to constantly be searching and squeezing out every last chunk of surplus wealth people and the world have to offer. The result is a constantly escalating series of economic booms and busts, the complete destruction of the environment, and massive consolidation of wealth.

Personally? I think this is unsustainable. I think Capitalism will, at some point, collapse under it’s own weight. I doubt that the result will be communism, because I don’t think history runs on rails. I think it’s probably too late for humanity, given the rapidly approaching crises of climate change, sea level rise, and global war.

But hey, we have appliances, right? And plumbing.

Yay.

Thanks! I mean, I like drooling idiots as much as the next guy, but for me, dumbing down is less about the loss of mental ability, and more about the humiliation the guy suffers because of it. Some writers make the mistake, I think, of thinking that the greater the fall, the greater the arousal–that is, taking a genius with an IQ of 200 down to the level of an imbecile is better than changes which are less extreme.

But while extremes can be good, a lot of times this turns into caricature. It’s not really erotic, it’s mostly humorous. What makes mind drain work for me, is that it makes someone unable to function in the life they created for themselves. Even just draining away skills without touching intellect is intriguing to me. It’s about finding new ways to render characters helpless, and therefore dependent on the people changing/controlling them.

Motherfuckers would be an insult, but daddyfuckers is just the truth, right? Besides, who wouldn’t want to fuck a daddy, really? They’re adorable–well, some of them. Most? I guess it depends on your standards.

Thanks, though I will say that being on anon and then requesting more exposure is…counterproductive?

Sex is politics, right? At least it’s only one day a week!

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.