Alienated Labor, Visual Culture, and the Colonial Foundations of Capitalist Modernity

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Abstract

This paper reconstructs Marx’s concept of alienated labor by situating it within the colonial and racialized foundations of capitalist modernity while advancing visual art as a mode of sociological theorizing. Drawing on Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and subsequent Marxist traditions, the paper argues that alienation should not be understood solely as a condition of European industrial labor but as a structural relation produced through intertwined regimes of factory production, colonial extraction, and coerced labor.

While Marx’s theory of alienation has long served as a foundational critique of capitalism, its dominant reception has often centered the European factory worker. This paper challenges that framing by emphasizing the global conditions under which industrial capitalism emerged. European industrialization was materially dependent on colonial plantations, mines, and extractive economies structured by enslaved, indentured, and racially subordinated labor. Rather than treating colonialism as contextual, the paper contends that colonial labor regimes were constitutive of the very forms of alienation Marx sought to theorize. Alienation thus emerges not only from mechanization and wage labor but from dispossession from land, community, and political personhood across the colonial world.

A central intervention of the paper is its treatment of visual art not as illustration but as a mode of sociological reasoning. Rather than simply depicting alienation, selected artworks actively theorize its affective and spatial dimensions—fatigue, enclosure, erasure, and displacement—by giving them aesthetic form in ways that reshape how alienation itself can be conceptualized. Read alongside Marx, these images reveal how alienation operates unevenly across labor regimes while remaining structured by a global system of colonial capitalism. By rethinking alienation as historically evolving and globally constituted, the paper contributes to Marxist sociology and decolonial critiques of capitalism, demonstrating how visual culture can extend and transform Marxist theory.

Author

• Laura Hart, Missouri State University