ABSTRACT
Karl Marx describes the political emancipation offered by the capitalist state as instituting a malicious separation between individual and communal being, between an individual's 'real' material life and the 'unreal' realm of citizenship. Post-Marxist American Studies scholarship is troubled by the way Marx's historical materialism in some of his most well-known volumes is caught within a Eurocentric dynamic, fixed on industrial capitalism, and theorizes labor in ways that marginalize slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of women and children. In classic Marxism, historical materialism refers to Marx's theory that history moves from stage to stage as the material productive forces of a society come to outstrip that society's relations of production. Alex Rivera's near-future cyberpunk science-fiction film Sleep Dealer, the border between the United States and Mexico has been permanently closed to migrant laborers, but US corporations, agricultural businesses, and private households are still able to exploit the labor of Mexican workers through means of a dystopic new technology: node labor.
