That theatre is a place of work seems beyond debate. But what kind of workplace is it? And under what conditions does theatre conform to a capitalist production process? At first glance these questions may seem obviously, even inextricably, linked; but investigating theatre as somewhere people go to work is a far different enterprise than specifying its economic connection to capital.

While researching the history of performance at Berlin's Friedrichstadt-Palast I had come across this rejection of the idea of “a socialist handstand” many times, before I realized the extent to which the judgment had been qualified:

This essay is about a performance by the musician, singer, and performance artist M. Lamar, who describes himself as a “Negrogothic Devil-worshipping free black man in the blues tradition.” I saw the piece, Destruction, in the American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center in New York City in January 2016. During the seventy-minute-long performance, the countertenor sang and played the piano, and appeared in mediated form in a complexly assembled film montage. In both live and filmed form his performance was a labor to resurrect the dead into an insurrectionist revolt, an army of all the black people whose lives have been taken—from slavery to lynchings, to incarceration, to police shootings. The lush, sometimes heart-stopping sound environment was both live and recorded, a mix, mash-up, and collage of sounds and sources the core of which was Lamar's singing of fragments of slave spirituals. In what follows, I am prompted by Lamar's work to explore my own ongoing commitment to Marx through what I read as the work's temporal innovations. These innovations, I suggest, supplement Marx's failure to imagine a revolutionary strategy through anything but the standard progressivist notion of time and history. In so doing, I claim Lamar for an affiliation to Marxism and materialist thought by identifying in his work a material immortal.

In this article I argue that Plato's allegory of the cave dramatizes democracy's dependency on slavery. Plato's cave forces the theatre, the political space of ancient Greek representation, to confront its material dependency upon a space from which it is otherwise visually and territorially separated: the mines where intensive use was made of slave labor. As many have argued, the most salient aspects of Plato's allegory of the cave are the complete absence of lexis (speech) and praxis (action), the evacuation of the acoustic and the distortion of the visual. These are also the most decisive features when delimiting the border between the free and the unfree in Greek antiquity: