Week 3 Blog Post – Caitlin
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I chose Locke and Duck on the topic of labor and the entitlement of the laborer based on his work. Locke is of the mind that working the land entitles the laborer to the profits gained from the work of their own labor, and when it gets crowded, people can just continue to move out and create more workable land from wild land. Duck lives in a different time period and reality. He works the master’s land and works under the landlord, his life is an endless agricultural cycle and he sees no payoff at the end. He doesn’t own any of the land he works and if he were to take any of the fruits of it home without permission it would be considered stealing from the land’s master. I think that Locke would try to inform Duck of his rights as a hard working man and what he is entitled to. In response Duck would call Locke an oblivious philosopher and thinker whose never done a hard day’s labor in his life and has little or no idea of the realities of the hierarchy of agriculture in Great Britain. Ultimately I don’t think they would agree on what rewards labor entitles a laborer, one thinking the other a high minded pansy and the other thinking the laborer an educated but still simple-minded worker who has no concept of philosophy but, granted is good at rhyming.
I wrote my comparison between the same authors, and found many of the similar ideas. While Locke’s concept of labor leading to property is very nice, it’s too much of an ideal to actually work in practice. From Duck’s point of view, there is no escaping his endless cycle of mindless toil.
Clearly the system that Duck is working under does not agree with Locke’s ideas about labour and value. But I wonder if that means that Duck would completely be turned off by Locke’s ideas. I know that if I worked in the field all day, I would feel like I deserved some profits whether or not I actually received them.
You might well be right that Duck would be aghast at Locke. The implication, if I’m reading you correctly, is that Duck wouldn’t see Locke’s pontificating as valid labor. Why not? What is it about thinking that Duck would be dismissive of? I want to encourage you, because I think you’re picking up on an important contrast between the two — but at the same time, I want you to think carefully about what you argue. After all, Duck spends a couple hundred lines “thinking” himself. How would he differentiate that work from Locke’s Treatise?
I was thinking about these two views some more, and maybe Duck is gaining something. Perhaps he is trading his labor for protection by the landowner, or for the right to live on the landowner’s land. It’s a little more complicated than Locke’s ideal of “move away to unoccupied land” but Duck isn’t working for free, either.