What’s The Cause Of Servitude

The present thesis argues on the basis of Marx’s texts that he accounts for the cause of servitude by means of three core concepts:that of "alienation" in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, that of "division of labor" in the German Ideology, and that of "surplus-value" in the Capital and its manuscripts. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, alienation implies servitude; it is the doctrine of alienation that explicates the cause of servitude. Here the phenomenon of alienation originates from the fact that the laborer does not own the product of labor, and thus the doctrine of alienation as a whole is a critique of this form of ownership. Servitude cannot take shape without regarding the laborer, who is a living "human", as a "thing" in the reality of capitalist economy. The "human-thing" distinction therefore becomes the fundamental framework that Marx employs to analyze the phenomenon of servitude. In the German Ideology, servitude is explained through the division of labor. This concept has, compared with the doctrine of alienation, developed into a critique of production and yet remains associated with the private ownership. The division of labor, the premise of which is the "human-thing" distinction, leads to servitude. In the Capital and its manuscripts, servitude is specified as economic exploitation, and the doctrine of surplus-value explains the cause of servitude from the sole perspective of production. This doctrine takes as the logical start point the twofold character of labor, which in effect involves the "human-thing" distinction. Accordingly, Marx’s three accounts of the cause of servitude shift logically from a critique of the ownership to that of production, and are all informed by a less than apparent analytical framework, i.e., the "human-thing" distinction.