Art reflects the world around us, but does art not also help shape the society we live in? John Molyneux—a Marxist writer with a prodigious output over many decades, who has also had a lifelong interest in visual art—tackles this fascinating subject, in this extended piece based on a forthcoming book. This is a very compressed version of a much longer argument that will appear in a forthcoming book on The Dialectics of Art. Both the book and this article are written in the belief that visual art matters, not only to the minority who are passionate about art, but objectively to society as a whole and its development. It is not that paintings or sculptures will be the prime movers in the immense social changes that will be necessary if humanity it is to have a decent future. That role has been and will be played by mass popular struggle. Art matters because of its ability to articulate in visual imagery the social consciousness of an age, in a way that aids the development of the human personality, and our collective awareness of our natural and social environment.