Colonial Slavery and Divergent American Modernity: Reconsidering Labor, Freedom, and Capitalism Through Jacob Gorender

This article uses Jacob Gorender’s theory of colonial slavery to challenge a core premise of modern social theory—that labor inherently generates freedom. In Hegel and Marx, productive activity enables recognition, consciousness, and ultimately emancipation. The article argues that this mechanism depended on a historically specific condition: the worker’s juridical possession of labor-power. Plantation slavery abolished that condition. The enslaved laborer did not sell labor but was owned as labor, making alienation, recognition, and class formation structurally impossible. Building on Gorender’s claim that colonial slavery constituted a distinct mode of production integrated into global markets, this article shows that plantation economies produced accumulation without proletarianization, commercialization without citizenship, and economic modernization without social emancipation. Drawing on institutional theory, it further argues that the legal and political arrangements created to manage coerced labor persisted after abolition and continue to structure inequality and coercive governance across the Americas. American modernity therefore followed a trajectory different from the European one: rather than emerging from the emancipation of labor, it developed from its permanent subordination, indicating the existence of multiple modernities.