Marx reproduced Aristotle’s theoretical marginalization of slaves.

Evidence

There was an obvious genealogy and a striking parallel between Aristotle’s treatments of slaves and slavery and those of Marx. Aristotle saw slavery as necessary for the self-sufficiency of the polis, and in only rare instances were slaves expected to achieve a virtuous life. Given their marginal intelligence and development, Aristotle found no compelling reason for inquiry into the ethics, consciousness, or desires of slaves, content to state that “the slave is in a sense a part of his master, a living but separate part of his body.” Marx, though he found slavery abhorrent, similarly recessed slaves from his discourse on human freedom: “The slave only works swayed by fear, and it is not his existence itself which is at stake, since it is guaranteed to him even if it does not belong to him.” Their role in capitalist production, Marx believed, was an embarrassing residue of a precapitalist, ancient mode of production, which disqualified them from historical and political agency in the modern world. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 82

Categorization

• XREF: The Aristotle-Marx genealogy directly underwrites why the Black radical tradition has to exist outside Marxism; core to the reader’s ‘origin’ question.
• DEEPTHINKING: Robinson’s demonstration that Marx’s exclusion of slaves is not incidental but genealogically inherited from Aristotle’s justification of slavery is a paradigm-shifting genealogy of theoretical blindness.