Essay by Anna McCauley for Contextualising Practice

 

‘Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal,
taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping;
the quickened and the deadened, whirling on’
– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty 

As the contradictions of capitalism metastasise into destruction and immiseration of a planetary scale, critical thought is pivoting back to Marxism to diagnose the system’s inner logic. Karl Marx intervened in the field of 19th-century political economy and challenged the bourgeois naturalisation of capitalism. He revealed capitalism to be a social relation, one that functions by extracting surplus value from workers with the telos of valorising it (Marx 1976). Much of his life’s work proceeded upon revealing the impoverished shortcomings of this dictate, which at its core establishes exchange value rather than use value as the central axis of the economic organisation of society. In the wake last century’s historic failures to transcend this value form, a broad swathe of theories has proliferated to explain its endurance. Many of these have identified the core, revolutionary tenants of Marxism – the commitment to a universal emancipatory project – as its downfall, suggesting this aspect partook in the same delusions of grandeur as capitalism itself. In taking a bracketed tour through critical junctures in art history and critical theory – from the avant-garde through to post modernism to new materialism – this essay will draw upon the ‘end of illusions’ thesis, a conceptual apparatus developed by Marxist philosopher Gabriel Rockhill (2014) to critique the undue causal power ascribed to enlightenment in general, at the expense of factors immanent to capitalism specifically, for the real or perceived failures of 20th Century socialist projects. 

My work gives sensuous form to Marx’s concept of the ‘social metabolism,’ which proposes that we are expanded far beyond the confines of our bodies through the unique properties of our labour (1976). Our advanced use of tools and social organisation entangle us in increasingly complex social relations of production, distribution, and exchange. This, Søren Mau (2023) argues, facilitates ‘economic power,’ a mechanism by which the capitalist social relation leverages our flexible corporeal organisation to implicate itself in our very survival: our means of subsistence are enclosed within private property relations, and our access to them depends on us selling our labour. I will reference three of my own artworks that redeploy scientific motifs from the fields of biology, geology, and technology to visualise the dynamic co-determination between humans and our environment, as well as how this metabolism is intercepted and commandeered by capitalism. In doing so, I reclaim the pedagogical function of art on the premise that we can approach accuracy through applying the appropriate frameworks, without falling into dogma. At the same time, I satirise bourgeois pretensions to have engaged in such rigour when engineering the ‘eternal laws of nature’ of the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1976:925).  

Primitive Accumulation 

My 2024 comic she may need them like she needs her own lung (see figure 1), utilises diagrams, illustrations, and quotes rendered in custom fonts that convey the expressed meaning; visual devices that lend a sensuous form to the gothic language Marx uses to describe the capitalist body horror. 

 

By drawing on the gothic mode, which emerges as a response to the behemoth technical and social changes brought about by industrialisation, I reframe the ‘realism’ of capitalism as a determinate social construct. In doing so, the work addresses the senses to interject in the fetishistic form of appearances capitalism relies upon. This locates the work in the lineage of pedagogical art, where the sensual nature of aesthetics is used to educate or promote certain ideas. This function has been denigrated by bourgeois reassignment of art’s purpose: it is considered outdated by high modernist celebration of spontaneous, individual genius, and controversial due to opposition to art’s instrumentalisation for propaganda (Jameson 1998:89). By combining an Andreas Malm quote from The Progress in this Storm (2017) with excerpts from Chapter 28 On So-called Primitive Accumulation from Capital Volume I, I draw a link between the violent historical process of ‘original accumulation’ and the apparent intractability of capitalism today, through its metabolic enmeshment in our very will to persist. Marx argues that the naturalisation of capitalist property relations allows economic power to disappear from view, which, in turn permits liberal democracies to posture as a mode of political organisation that centres individual liberty. The power latent in art is often considered to be ideological—the ability to influence ideas. This can be explained not just by the routine obfuscation of economic power but also by the unique conditions of artistic production.  

The Production of Art

To understand art’s political potential, we must understand the conditions of its production. Dave Beech (2015) argues that art has been inoculated against subsumption into the capitalist mode of production, as its categorical uniqueness renders it incompatible with mass production and therefore the standardised process of ascertaining value. Rarely is art produced in factory-like settings at the outlay of a capitalist. Rarely does an artist sell her labour power for a wage, destined to be alienated from the product of that labour. Its subsequent location adjacent to capitalist production is often understood to imbue art with a critical distance, or autonomy, which casts it as an inherent site of resistance (Rockhill 2014). Gabriel Rockhill argues this appointment ‘bracket(s) the material social relations of cultural production’ (Rockhill 2025), which, much like the production of everything, are the active factors in realising political potential.  

Whether it is the exchange value sought in the commissions of private gallery owners, the speculative value that appeals to collectors, the socially-assigned value that makes artworks attractive assets for financial instruments and tax strategies, or the sophisticated array of use values pursued by public institutions (such as state legitimisation), the type of art that is produced, circulated, and consumed is by no means ‘autonomous’. Thus, art is subjected to the same dictates of accumulation, while largely alienated from the revolutionary potential of the proletariat – the ability to struggle in common with your class to withhold your labour from the production of surplus value*.  

The Abolition of Art 

The impulse to liberate art from bourgeois institutions unified the diverse movements loosely congregated under the avant-garde umbrella in the early 20th century. The fusion of art with every day practice sought to undermine the artificial autonomy of art to imbed it into life praxis. A classic example is Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, a urinal, signed and placed in a gallery space, simultaneously reconstituting the concept of artwork and the parameters of a gallery. On the other hand, the goal to make the gallery and museum altogether redundant was pursued by movements such as Bauhaus who integrated artistic practice into industrial design and architecture, into lived space and objects of utility. If the symbolic and propositional aspects of art could be transcended, art could be  transformative dialogue with the real world (Rockhill 2014). Conforming with this impulse, my 2024 metafiction project LLARP (Loss-Prevention Labour-Management All-in-One Robotic Porpoise) intervened in the quintessentially quotidian space of the supermarket. The work interpreted space-age dolphin mania through the lurid distortions of early AI image generating software to critique a particularly egregious application of AI: the augmented surveillance of workers in their workplaces and a key site of their social reproduction. I developed the character Tanya Stockworth, the ‘new CEO of Woolworths’, who was deployed in two different contexts: a corporate boardroom and a Woolworths store, to convince both shareholders and shoppers that they stand to benefit from the implementation of a state-of-the-art surveillance unit, Loss-Prevention Labour-Management All-in-One Robotic Porpoise.   

The investment pitch (see Figure 2) parodied corporate techno-speak, combining boardroom slickness with girl-boss choreography drawn from YouTube tutorials. A PowerPoint presentation replete with data visualisation brazenly commended the sordid sources of surplus value: the exploitation of its workforce and wringing of profits from its customers (see Figure 3 and 4). The problem the pitch sets up is a perennial one: how to make more, and spend less, money. The proposed solution comes in the form of a collaboration with a disreputable Aerospace and defence technology company, Northrup Grumman, to produce an animatronic dolphin security guard, revealing the casual compulsion of corporations to direct military technology onto their customers and staff to optimize their bottom line.  

Tanya was subsequentially wheeled out to Preston Woolworths to stage the live launching of the LLARP (see Figure 9). She hands out mock corporate pamphlets (See figure 7 and 8) inverting the content of the PowerPoint pitch to be consumer facing, satirising the duplicity of PR. She then launches into a speech unveiling this ‘cutting-edge’ surveillance unit. The LLARP is a human in a wetsuit and a detailed dolphin mask manoeuvring with robotic articulation. Once again, the hype is betrayed by the reality. 

 

 

This component of the metafiction project breached the insularity of the artworld and found an engaged audience of shoppers and workers. The work served as a flash point between two historically specific phenomena; a profit driven inflationary period during which Woolworths faced allegations of price gouging (see Grigg & Portaka, 2024), and the still-unfolding era marked by the seismic implications of artificial intelligence upon labour relations, artistic production, and technological mediation. Hype and hysteria often bled together, where the existential threat narrative was co-signed by AI’s beneficiaries to generate hype which delivers dividends to shareholders (regardless, or often because of, disastrous implications to workers). Criticism of AI has often been underpinned by notions of human nature being tainted by technological mediation. Taking the definition of human nature advanced by Mau (2023) in Mute Compulsion, if humanity does have an inherent, transhistorical nature, it is that we are ‘biologically underdetermined’. Our reliance upon tools grants us a ‘porous corporeal organisation’ that is in a state of constant mediation. This project did not seek to critique mediation as such, but instead sought to foreground the particular type of mediation stemming from the application of AI to advance the crude aims of capitalist valorisation, which, as sure as the sun will rise, rests upon the exploitation of workers (Marx 1976).  

The End of History and The End of Illusions  

During the latter half of the 20th century, artists and critical theorists metabolised the failures, real and perceived, of communist projects, generating a chorus of voices that proclaimed an epistemic horizon in which the utopian impulses of the avant-garde had proven illusory (p.92 Rockhill, 2014). Rockhill (2014) synthesises these post-modernist and post-structuralist sentiments into the ‘end of illusions’ thesis, arguing it provided an aesthetic counterpart to the political pronouncement of the ‘End of History’, asserted decisively by liberal economist Francis Fukuyama at the fall of the Soviet Union (Fukuyama 1992). For those on the left who weren’t convinced the final stage of history had been reached, the end of illusions merely signalled the end of a particular kind of politic, namely a totalising and universal one. Theoretical propositions that decentred, flattened, redistributed power and agency came into vogue for the latent promise that they would mediate the brutality that transpired in real life communist projects (Meiksens Wood 1998). Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson made his name by suggesting that these apparently radical conceptual innovations of post modernism were, in fact, consummate expressions of late capitalism (1989). In particular, he drew a link between the totalising nature of capital and the rejection of metanarratives. In Marxism and Post Modernism (1998) Fredric Jameson highlights the idealism central to this ‘taboo on totality’:

‘… this general feeling that the revolutionary, utopian or totalizing impulse is somehow tainted from the outset and doomed to bloodshed by the very structure of its thoughts does strike one as idealistic, if not a finally a replay of doctrines of original sin in their worst religious sense.’ (p.39) 

The curtains were thus drawn on the broad horizons that characterised earlier avant-garde sensibilities: a novel possibility to ascertain agential historical forces and leverage them to instate a different mode of production. Instead, we were provided with the methodology of ‘movementism’, described by Joshua Moufawad Paul as being predicated upon ‘the assumption that specific social movements, sometimes divided along lines of identity or interest, could reach a critical mass and together, without any of that Leninist nonsense, end capitalism.’ (2014 loc46). Moufawad Paul (2014) describes this methodology developing through anti-globalisation movements at the turn of the century to come to a head in Occupy and the Arab Spring. The synthesis of diverse interests was never achieved, resulting in critical failures in the ability to hold power. This compromised front met a consolidated ruling class who had, in a hydra-like manner, fortified itself against strategies of resistance.  

While the scrutiny faced by the dictatorship of the proletariat model in the late 20th century was certainly warranted, the openness and eclecticism introduced to temper its problems were, according to Ellen Meiksins Wood (1998), ‘purchased at the price of much more fundamental closures’. This often resulted in the ‘collapsing and conflating (of) the wielding of power with the objective behind it’ (p.39 Jameson, 1998), placing this inexorable step in overcoming capitalism off limits to the left. The subsequent cauterisation from an entire lineage of revolutionary history drastically compromised our ability to envision an alternative future. Mark Fisher (2009) dubs this imaginative impairment ‘capitalist realism’ whereby ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Fisher 2009). Rockhill (2017) has documented trends within ‘the global theory industry’, noting a sanctioning of post structuralist thought within western academia that is consonant with cold war objectives to designate the communist project as beyond repair. As an artist sceptical of these resounding turns in critical discourse, I see a unique place for myself to breach these perimeters.  

Dialectics of Nature

A fundamental innovation of Marxist thought was to identify the social and historical nature of capitalism, intervening in attempts to naturalise its presuppositions. This premise has been undermined by trends in critical theory towards collapsing distinctions. If certain distinctions are dissolved, it is hard to adequately theorise the heightening contradictions of capitalism – the bifurcation of wealth and power amongst humans, the perpetual expansion of capital within a finite planet. The distinction between nature and society is seen as a root of the modernist hubris auspicing communism’s failure. Both the discursive and the material turn partake in this merger: post structuralists, in emphasising the social mediation of knowledge, invest language with excessive power, suggesting that dissolving conceptual dualities can resolve material contradictions (p.316 Harraway, 1992). New materialism balked against this by insisting that matter contained meaning beyond that ascribed to it by human semiotics, demoting human agency into a collaborative role within a network of other, equally important, agencies, while what would formerly have been described as material properties, were promoted to agencies (Malm, 2017). Yet both misapprehend the dialectic distinction Marx and Engles draw: as Chen Yiwen (2025) clarifies ‘Marx’s dialectic is not a dualism between human (society) and nature, but rather a framework that appropriately integrates both’ through the concept of the social metabolism.  

 

My 2025 sculpture Continuity and Rupture (see figures 7 and 8) sculpturally describes dialectical relationship between nature and society. Two models of the same width made from cast bronze and sand are displayed one above the other. A stratigraphic column contains amongst its strata a layer of black sediment, lending the bronze pipes that emerge from the top the character of mining infrastructure. This connotation is betrayed by their playful Euclidian meandering which alludes to the iconic screensaver from Windows 96, Windows 3D Pipes. A platform suspended by bronze rods hosts a clean square sample of red sand, out of which jut the aliquot parts of a voluptuous organic form, articulated through a sharp cross section. The cast bronze form depicts the Golgi body, an organelle found in the Eukaloid cell, common to every animal, plant and fungi on the planet, but available to view only through the invention of the microscope. This tension evokes the dynamic codetermination between the social and the natural at play in the social metabolism: ‘nature is the totality out of which emerges an animal whose corporeal organisation opens up a new field of possibility which sets these animals apart from the rest of nature’ (p112 Mau, 2023). 

Marx insisted on an exceptional quality to human labour that provides the condition of possibility to become a global species radically altering the world around us. While Marx’s differentiations of human labour come under contemporary contention – spiders think with their webs, bees can conceive of zero (Seymour 2024) – it remains the case that there are discernible and consequential distinctions in the degree to which our capacity for abstraction proceeds through manifold intentions to modify our environment. In the hunt for hubris, one would better look in assumptions that historically followed this observation, i.e. that this bestows upon us a certain dominion; an ordained position that allows us to draw, incessantly and without consequence, from the reserve of nature (as well as the civilisational racism and colonial expansion these positions justified). As our complex technological society continues to drastically alter the constitution of our life-sustaining planet – from its very biosphere to the tiniest planktons in the sea – the redistribution of agency and the denial of human particularity are conceptual innovations incapable of dealing with the actual contradictions that capitalism produces, enhances and exploits. 

Conclusion 

My art practice employs satire and pedagogy to puncture the illusions that have ossified into the common sense of capitalism. Working from within Mau’s triad of power, I recognise the revolutionary limits of artistic production in that operates chiefly within the auxiliary agent of ideological power. Our metabolic enmeshment in capital’s logic of accumulation is a sticky situation that can only be addressed at the level of primacy of economic power: seizing the means of production. A precondition to this is accepting the complicated, possible and necessary task of collectively determining the best possible frameworks to glean impetuses of history, and to integrate this into a conscious reordering of society. For all their interesting provocations, strands of the critical turn have eroded the basis of this collectivity and thus provided poor coordinates for the world historical task of transcending capitalism. While post modernism, post structuralism and new materialism draw upon aspects of Marx’s analysis, they each jettison the revolutionary core of his methodology, while their sanctioned status within the global theory industry absorbs and disorients the radical impulses of those ushered into its discursive snare. My practice gives sensuous form to dialectical and historical materialism as methodologies with the demonstrated capabilities of cohering action. With universal emancipation as due north, I refuse the futility of critique for its own sake and stake a claim to a future beyond the barbarism of capitalism.  

 

Notes

* surplus value, as understood by Marx, is specifically value produced by workers in the production process and expropriated by the capitalist to advance the spiral of capitalist accumulation (Marx 1976) 

References 

Beech D (2015) Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics  Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 94

Bellamy-Foster J and Rockhill G (2025) ‘Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue’ Monthly Review, accessed 12 June 2025 https://monthlyreview.org/2025/03/01/western-marxism-and-imperialism-a-dialogue/ 

Engels F and Marx K (2010) Collected Works 1855 – 1866: Volume 14. Lawrence & Wishart. Electric Book 

Fisher M (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, Collective Ink. Print  

Fukuyama F (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press. Print 

Grigg A and Potaka E (21 February 2024) ‘Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci announces departure days after walking out of Four Corners interview’ ABC accessed 13 June 2025 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-21/woolworths-ceo-brad-banducci-retirement-four-corners/103493418 

Haraway D (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.’ Cybersexualities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 314–366. Web. 

Jameson F (1984) ‘Post Modernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 1/ 146: 53-92 https://web.education.wisc.edu/halverson/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2012/12/jameson.pdf 

Jameson F (1998) The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983 – 1998, Verso. Print 

Malm A (2017) The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Verso 

Marx K (1976) Capital Volume 1. Penguin Books, London. 

Mau, S (2023) Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Verso 

Meiksins Wood E ‘The Post Modern Agenda’ Monthly Review 1-25 Special issue: In Defense of History 

Rockhill G (2015), Radical History and the Politics of Art, Columbia University Press. ISBN: 9780231527781

Rockhill G (2017), ‘The CIA read French Theory: On the intellectual labor of dismantling the cultural Left’, Monthly Review accessed 7 November 2025 https://mronline.org/2024/12/30/the-cia-read-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/ 

Spufford F (2012) Red Plenty Graywolf Press 

Yiwen C (2025) ‘The Dialectics of Ecology and Ecological Civilization’ Monthly Review accessed 13 June 2025 https://monthlyreview.org/2025/04/01/the-dialectics-of-ecology-and-ecological-civilization/#en52backlink