The direct personal and political domination and exploitation in this precapitalist society is dependent on tradition and custom, which results in a unique relation of the laborer to the earth. Marx emphasizes the notable difference between serfs and day-laborers:
Similarly those working on the estate have not the position of day-laborers; but they are in part themselves his property, as are serfs; and in part they are bound to him by ties of respect, allegiance, and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly political, and has likewise a human, intimate [gemüthliche] side. Customs, character, etc., vary from one estate to another and seem to be one with the land to which they belong; whereas later, it is only his purse and not his character, his individuality, which connects a man with an estate.35
Those working the land under feudal domination are negated in such a way that their personal independence is not recognized by their lord. Serfs are regarded as a part of the lord’s landed property. This relation of domination and dependence essentially differs from the situation of day-laborers in modern bourgeois society because the latter are free from any direct political domination and recognized as “free” and “equal” legal subjects.
This does not mean, however, that day-laborers can enjoy a freer and better life than serfs. Marx argues that the opposite is the case. Precisely because serfs are negated and deprived of their rights, there remains their unity with the objective conditions of production and reproduction, so that the physical existence of serfs is guaranteed. As Masami Fukutomi pointed out, the unique relation of serfs to the land is decisive for Marx’s analysis of alienation in the Paris Notebooks.36 Notably, Marx emphasizes in the cited passage that personal domination in feudal society possesses “a human, intimate side” despite the antagonistic opposition of the land to those working on it. Though the concrete situation varies according to the different customs and characters of lords, the fundamental characteristic common to feudal production is the unity of producers with the land. In spite of the negation of their independence as legal subjects, they can attain a guarantee for their own physical existence as well as freedom and independence in the production process. There is no room for the reified domination by capital because direct personal domination prevents capital from penetrating its autonomous power. Under this situation, the producers provide surplus labor and surplus products only through the threat and often the reality of physical coercion, which inevitably impedes the increase of productivity. The feudal lord also does not strive to attain maximal advantage from his land, but rather “consumes what is there and calmly leaves the worry of producing to the serfs and the tenants.”37
The lord’s seemingly moderate behavior is praised by Romantics as a manifestation of his noble character, but it is clearly conditioned by the underlying objective relations of production. In this vein, the entire production in feudal society acquires a stable character because its aim is fundamentally directed to the satisfaction of concrete social needs. In contrast to the Romantics, Marx concludes that it is not the moral character of the lord but the relationship between humans and the earth that realizes the “nobility’s relationship” to landed property and casts “romantic glory on its lord.”38
Then Marx investigates modern bourgeois society, where, together with the dissolution of feudal personal domination, landed property has been fully transformed into an object of “huckstering.” This change creates a wholly different type of domination, one that is the non-personal and reified domination of capital, accompanied by a specific form of alienated labor:
It is necessary that this appearance be abolished—that landed property, the root of private property, be dragged completely into the movement of private property and that it become a commodity; that the rule of the proprietor appear as the undisguised rule of private property, of capital, freed of all political tincture; that the relationship between proprietor and worker be reduced to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploited; that all personal relationship between the proprietor and his property cease, property becoming merely objective, material wealth; that the marriage of convenience should take the place of the marriage of honor with the land; and that the land should likewise sink to the status of a commercial value, like man.39
As the landed property becomes a commodity and thus comes to be integrated into the huckstering system of private property after the dissolution of the earlier personal relationship of domination and dependence, individuals, on the one hand, can face each other as formally free and equal subjects. They are all uniformly recognized as legal subjects in the civil society. On the other hand, they also lose the direct connection with the earth, so that they now have to appear in the market to sell their labor power. In illustrations by political economists, this new modern relationship provides a foundation of an ideal and harmonious realm of freedom and equality in which the relationship of domination seemingly ceases to exist. Marx rejects this view and argues that the bourgeois ideal of “freedom” and “equality” is not the end of domination at all. This ideal turns out to be an appearance, for instead of the relationship of personal domination between the exploiting and the exploited, there comes an impersonal and reified relationship of domination. Day-laborers must be subordinated to a qualitatively different, modern form of alienation, and their working conditions prove much worse and more alienated in various aspects than in feudal society.
Domination in capitalist society must be strictly differentiated from that of the feudal world. Due to the commodification of land, the producers in modern society lose any direct connection with the earth and come to be separated from their original means of production, whereas serfs were still tightly connected to the land.40 Consequently, modern individuals are all constantly obligated to sell their own labor power, the only commodity they have, to another person and thus become day-laborers suffering from estrangement from their own activity. According to Marx, this transformation of the relationship between humans and the earth is decisive in order to understand the specificity of the capitalist mode of production.41
Modern workers lose any guarantee of physical existence, and their activity becomes estranged, controlled and dominated by alien forces. Propertylessness, precariousness, alienation, and exploitation are tightly connected. It is true that exploitation existed for the serfs, and they had to provide the lord with surplus labor and surplus products. However, contrasting this with the situation of modern workers, Marx argues that the labor of serfs still possessed an “intimate side,” because, thanks to the connection with the earth serfs maintained autonomy in the production process and their material life was secured. Ironically, this is a particular result of the negation of their personality in feudal society, which transforms them into a mere part of the objective means of production. In this regard, Marx without doubt recognizes a positive side of the feudal mode of production.
The regulation of the autonomous power of capital can take various forms, such as “craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labor still has a seemingly social significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-itself, i.e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.”42 Within a craft, guild, and corporation there no longer exists the direct unity between humans and land, but there is still a stable connection of the producers with their means of production thanks to the intersubjective coordination of the entire production, which hinders the full penetration of the power of capital. The complete dissolution of the tie between the workers and their objective means of production for the first time prepares “free” labor, in a “double sense,” and thus the impersonal, reified dominance by “liberated capital.”
Modern laborers, on the contrary, lose any direct connection to the land. On the one hand, they are free from personal dominance. On the other hand, they are also free from the means of production and thus can no longer relate to nature as their own “inorganic body.” The original unity with the land disappeared with the collapse of precapitalist personal domination. Its result is alienation from nature, activity, species-being, and other people—or simply said, modern alienation arising