China's practice was firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition. Mao wrote, "As far back as 1905 Lenin pointed out emphatically that our literature and art should 'serve ... the millions and tens of millions of working people.'"(1) MIM is similarly committed to developing proletarian art which serves the people, and to applying the same dialectical materialist analysis to art and literature as we do to any other aspect of society. As Mao said at the 1942 "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art": "Works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are products of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society. Revolutionary literature and art are the products of the reflection of the life of the people in the brains of revolutionary writers and artists."(2)

Creating literature and art is a legitimate and important activity among the people, and it is important for revolutionaries to encourage and promote it:

"While both [life and art] are beautiful, life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life. Revolutionary literature and art should create a variety of characters out of real life and help the masses to propel history forward."(3)

This revolutionary statement about art, which laid much of the foundation for art theory and policy during the Maoist era, is a social appraisal of a social process. It is in direct contradiction to the bourgeois notion that art progresses along a separate plane from everyday human social relations, which are rooted in the mode of production.

One of the petit bourgeois fabrications about art is that proletarian art is "political" whereas art reflecting the dominant, bourgeois values is just aesthetic. Liberals refuse, for example, to see the creation of celebratory/simple landscape portraits, in the middle of a national liberation struggle, as a political act. As an article in Chinese Literature put it in 1974, "In feudal China paintings, whether of human figures, landscape or flowers and birds, reflected the life, views and sentiments of the feudal ruling class but ignored the major role of the labouring classes."(4) The bourgeoisie does not see anything wrong with producing art at the expense of the toiling masses, that has nothing to do with the masses' experience, that the masses will in most cases not be able to see or participate in, and that celebrates a beauty that comes with privilege and prosperity that they do not have.

Depictions of nature are no less political than depictions of people. There is reactionary landscape painting that celebrates the mystical beauty of nature, and, in a different context, there is landscape painting that celebrates "the victory of socialist man over nature."(20)

Rather than understand all art as political, but with different political lines attached, the bourgeoisie looks at the people's art, which explicitly champions that liberation struggle with portraits of heroic figures defeating imperialism, as introducing politics into an otherwise purely aesthetic terrain. Mao debunked this lie at the Yenan Talks:

"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine."(5)

In the Talks, Mao explained that all classes in all class societies have both artistic and political criteria by which they judge art - and all classes put the political criteria first. This the bourgeoisie will never admit, but it is constantly shutting out, censoring and destroying proletarian art no matter how high the artistic merit or quality. There is no clearer proof of this hypocrisy than the mountain of Western literature denouncing the destruction of feudal and bourgeois art during the Cultural Revolution - a time when a tremendous amount of art was encouraged and created among the people.

For example, in an exhibition about post-Mao Chinese art, bourgeois Western art historian Joan Cohen claims that the so-called Gang of Four wanted to destroy "all" art, and that "all" art creation between 1966 and 1972 "ceased." She later admits that there was art created "for propaganda purposes" but doesn't evaluate its merit, proving Mao's admonition that all classes put politics ahead of artistic criteria.(6) Finally, the bourgeois scholar rejects the policy adopted during the Cultural Revolution of "making the foreign serve China" by rejecting the proletarian "politicization" of art as lacking in technical merit.

In an e-mail exchange MIM had with someone seriously grappling with Maoism, the correspondent asked us if there was ever an instance in which art should be considered separate from politics. MIM responded:

"We must be dialectical materialists in our evaluation of art as of anything. Our task as Marxist-Leninist-Maoists is to analyze the world for the purposes of applying that knowledge to revolutionary struggle and the building of a new society - one based not on oppression and profit but on human need and equality. In contrast to the internal ideology of Western, classical art, Maoists do not view art as a separate endeavor from other fronts of human struggle. It is one front on which the class struggle is carried out.

The bourgeoisie promotes the study of aesthetics by promoting the myth that emotions, feelings, and appreciations for art and culture can transcend class relationships and consciousness. So they would say that there is "good art" separate from these relationships, and that appreciation thereof comes from some transcendental consciousness which is not determined by being, as in the Marxist formulation. In other words, the evaluative criteria for art is just as contingent on social and historical circumstances as the production of the art in the first place.

"The difference between bourgeois art and proletarian art can be looked at as the difference between the celebration of abstract ideas of love, freedom, human nature - and materialist formulations of these concepts, which are rooted in human struggle. Maoists are not trying to subordinate art to political struggle - rather, we see art as a component of political struggle. So we apply political criteria to its judgment."

Maoists also have a materialist view of the process of art creation, in contrast to the bourgeois, mystical view. The bourgeois view touted throughout history, and picked up by Lin Biao during the GPCR, is that "art comes with a flash of inspiration rather than deriving from and reflecting integration with the masses as the basic source for art."(22)

The 1942 Talks outlined some fundamental principles by which we understand art and literature, and in that speech Mao introduced the dialectics between remolding the old art forms and developing the new; as well as between the popularization of art and the raising of artistic standards. These were dynamic contradictions that would be applied with different emphases during the revolutionary struggle for state power, and during the mass campaigns such as the Hundred Flowers and the Cultural Revolution. Anti-Maoist critics, in their insistence that communism and Maoism are dogmatic ideologies, are forever looking for inconsistencies in the application of Maoist ideas in practice. Instead, they should understand that political line is applied to actual struggle, and that the meaning of art and literature is highly contextual.

Understanding this dialectic helps to explain the apparent contradiction between China's move to "destroy" old feudal art and art forms, and its sometime assertion that aspects of China's national heritage were worth remaking into proletarian art forms that served the people. So in the 1942 talks, Mao explained:

"We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim must still be to serve the masses of people. Nor do we refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remoulded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people."(7)

During the Cultural Revolution on the other hand, a sharp class struggle against the forces of revisionism and capitalist restoration, art was more sharply scrutinized, and the leaders of the GPCR put less emphasis than before on the potential uses of China's pre-Revolutionary artistic legacy, and more on new forms created by the people. It is not true, however, that they ignored those older art forms, and in fact they aggressively promoted uses of older art forms to serve the people.

In the 1972 National Art Exhibition the painting "Newcomer to the Mine," a painting with proletarian content, was praised:

"because it successfully blended Chinese traditional painting techniques and certain methods of Western painting, in particular that of depicting light and the use of perspective, and [the artist] 'develops the broad strokes of Chinese traditional painting to bring out the girl's pride at become a miner against the background of morning sunshine.'"(21)

GPCR leaders were also more critical of art created during the Hundred Flowers Campaign and in the early 60s, insisting on a higher standard of proletarian politics during this time of heightened political struggle.

Similarly, the sending of artists to the countryside to live and work among the people was applied to varying degrees in revolutionary China. At Yenan, Mao was insistent that:

"If our writers and artists who come from the intelligentsia want their works to be well received by the masses, they must change and remould their thinking and their feelings. Without such a change, without such remoulding, they can do nothing well and will be misfits."(8)

Although artists had been sent to live among the people before the GPCR, according to Arnold Chang in Painting in the People's Republic of China: The Politics of Style, the focus had been on them gathering materials, rather than submerging themselves in the lives and work of the people and genuinely remolding their thinking. "Now writers and artists were sent to factories, rural areas, and the armed forces, for periods of one-third to one-half year at a time, to toil alongside the people. It was reported in 1966 that 160,000 literary and art workers were living among the people."(9)

Artists' exposure to physical labor enhanced their understanding of their new society and thus improved their art. Furthermore, during the early 1970s, "young artists and old often went directly to factories or to farms to live and work with workers and peasants and to seek their criticisms for their paintings of worker and peasant life and heroes."(23)

People who complain about sending artists or other intellectuals to work in the countryside reveal their contempt for the masses whose lives are characterized by this work. They thus reveal their contempt for the masses' suffering.

From the 1919 May Fourth Movement through the Cultural Revolution, communists aggressively promoted artistic production. At about the time of the Great Leap Forward, when the Party was strongly emphasizing self-reliance, "was the promotion of amateur literary and artistic activity among the masses themselves. Spare-time writing, drama, music, and art groups were established to encourage the people to create their own art."(10) During the GPCR, "painting was especially encouraged among workers, peasants and soldiers." (11) Worker and peasant art was both encouraged and widely exhibited throughout revolutionary China.

That communists encouraged art among the people the bourgeoisie will begrudgingly admit. But in their mystical worship of "natural talent" - which is in fact the product of particular education and training - they focus on the loss of art from artists being integrated into to the productive labor of building socialism, and disparage the outpouring of new art from a population previously shut out of artistic production.

GPCR China was a dictatorship of the proletariat over the formerly-exploiting classes. Just as the big landlords and bourgeoisie were repressed and prevented from exploiting the masses, some artists were repressed and prevented from glorifying the masses' exploitation. We also have no basis to deny that some art was outright destroyed during the GPCR. But instead we emphasize that in pre-revolutionary China, art and literature were absolutely restricted terrains that the majority of people were totally locked out of. They couldn't view, create or learn traditional art, and there should be no tears shed when this entire aspect of society is turned upside down to genuinely incorporate the feelings and criticisms of the people.

What the anti-Maoist Western accounts of art destruction also fail to mention is that art sequestered inside landlord's private houses was effectively "destroyed" - if no one but the private owner could view it and it served no social good, and only served to heighten the class contradictions between the disfranchised old ruling class and the people. The crime is not in destroying hidden art, it is first in the circumstances of its creation - an unequal society in which some have access to the creative arts and others do not - and in the profit-making and hiding of the art from the broad masses of people.

The anti-Maoists also portray the Cultural Revolution art policies as tightly controlled and dictated exclusively by Jiang Qing. In fact, like the rest of the Cultural Revolution, art policy was developed through mass struggle and the application of the mass line. Jiang also had mass support among the proletarian pole of the artistic community. "On November 28, 1966, at a massive rally of more than 20,000 literary and art workers held in Beijing to repudiate the bourgeois reactionary art line, Jiang Qing was appointed advisor on cultural work to the Chinese People's Liberation Army." (12)

The notion that everything old and foreign was censored or destroyed is also bourgeois hype. As Mao stressed in 1942, the old and the foreign elements in art should serve the people. They should be transformed, as all of society was being transformed, into socialism and eventually communism. During the GPCR, there were five "model revolutionary operas" that had Jaing's official approval, all of which were performed in Beijing during 1967 - the 25th anniversary of the Yenan Talks. According to Liang, "the Western music and staging incorporated into the operas were evidence of making the foreign serve China." (13)

Finally, the production of these revolutionary operas was thoroughly proletarianized by the incorporation of the "three-levels" of participation that were adhered to in the army and in the factories during the GPCR. The three levels were: the Party, the "experts" (writers, actors, musicians) and the "masses, who served as teachers and critics."(14) Taking an art form traditionally revered for its lack of change, and transforming it into revolutionary content with mass participation and continuous improvement was a substantial contribution to revolutionary practice.

Bourgeois art historian Joan Cohen admits that paintings labeled counterrevolutionary were not summarily destroyed but exhibited - "in official art galleries in major cities. Long explanatory labels listed counterrevolutionary elements in the paintings." (15) Liang writes that during the Cultural Revolution, "art exhibitions were vast in scope and were attended in record numbers." (16) Compare this practice with the wholesale censorship of subversive or revolutionary art under capitalism - as bourgeois and corporate sponsors of museums will simply not fund art which challenges the political status quo.

Modern bourgeois concepts of "interactive museums" are laughable compared to the advanced application of the mass line during the GPCR in the arts. In 1965, the provincial leadership assigned "a group of sculptors from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts" to create a giant sculpture garden, with life sized figures depicting peasants bringing rent to the tyrannical landlord. The Rent Collection Courtyard was created, produced and installed in the courtyard of a landlord's old mansion, which had been converted into a people's museum (17) to educate the masses about the transforming social order.

According to Liang, whose book does not uphold Maoism but at least takes it seriously:

"The sculptors listened to comments and criticisms of the local peasantry, who often stopped by to see how the work was going. The peasants, some of whom had actually been tenants of this landlord, described the grim real-life situation in the old days, and they suggested ways of improving the figures, such as the use of glass eyes to provide a more realistic facial expression. Thus, the sculptors were educated politically and artistically by the masses. The sculptural panorama also satisfied the demand to make the old serve the new because the figures utilized traditional techniques once used for making religious images." (18)

This participation of the peasantry in the creation of art of high technical merit enfranchised a previously "inarticulate" population and gave them national representation. In the case of the Rent Collection Courtyard, the party gave it wide publicity by photographing the sculptures and exhibiting them throughout China. Again, with the input of soldiers, workers, cadre, peasants and Red Guards who saw the photographs, the work was improved upon and changed.(19)

Only the bourgeoisie, desperate to discredit developing socialism and preserve capitalism and semi-feudalism, could study this period of the masses' heightened political and social activity and complain about the repression that was part of it. The masses are not out for blood and are not out to harm the bourgeois intellectuals, because the oppressed understand better than anyone what it means to impose violence on people. For this reason the proletariat would never call the GPCR "violent" in comparison with other historical periods, and MIM will not allow the bourgeoisie to go unchallenged in its slander of this period of great proletarian political and artistic freedom in China.

Notes:

1. "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" (May 1942), in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Zedong, Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1971. p. 258.

2. Yenan Forum, p. 265.

3. Yenan Forum, p. 266.

4. Ellen Johnston Liang, The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China. University of California Press, 1988. p. 72. emphasis MIM's

5. Yenan Forum, p. 271.

6. Joan Lebold Cohen, Painting the Chinese Dream: Chinese Art Thirty Years After the Revolution. Northampton, Mass. 1982. p. 6.

7. Yenan Forum, p. 259.

8. Yenan Forum, p. 255.

9. Arnold Chang, Painting in the People's Republic of China: The Politics of Style. Boulder: Westview Press, 1980. p. 43.

10. Chang, p. 16.

11. Chang, p. 41.

12. Liang, p. 60.

13. Liang, 61.

14. Liang, p. 61.

15. Cohen, p. 6.

16. Liang, p. 65.

17. Liang, p. 62.

18. Liang, p. 62.

19. Laing, p. 62.

20. Liang, p. 80.

21. Liang, p. 76.

22. Liang, p. 82.

23. Liang, p. 76.