Art and literature are ideologies within the realm of social superstructure’s思想文化领域. Its characteristic is to reflect certain social life through concrete images, and through these images to embody the understanding of the social life essence by certain artistic creators, while also reflecting their thoughts, feelings, desires, and ideals. Therefore, art and literature can have an inspiring作用, and the images they showcase can become artistic images.
Art and literature originate from life; all their images stem from specific phenomena in social life, but they are also higher than life because they focus on reflecting certain social phenomena and can use various material means to depict different social phenomena. Regarding the current state of human society, the material means used by art to depict life images include: architecture, painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, film, literature, and games.
As Chairman Mao pointed out, in class society, “all culture or literature and art belong to a certain class, to a certain political line. Art for art’s sake, art beyond class, and art that runs parallel to or independent of politics, in fact, do not exist.”[1] In capitalist society, the class nature of art is generally divided into bourgeois art representing the interests of the bourgeoisie and socialist art representing the interests of the proletariat. The former is reactionary, containing bourgeois reactionary, decayed, and declining思想; the latter is progressive, containing advanced, revolutionary, and developmental思想 of the proletariat. Bourgeois art always occupies a dominant position in capitalist society because the bourgeoisie will utilize its ruling position to exhaustively produce, promote, and develop bourgeois art, and will use all means to prohibit, suppress, and smear socialist art, striving to eliminate the existence of socialist art. This is because socialist art can spread revolutionary truths, inspire revolutionary people’s fighting spirit, evoke revolutionary feelings among the masses and middle groups, expose the darkness of capitalist society and criticize reactionary bourgeois思想, playing an important role in shaping revolutionary public opinion. It is an extremely necessary propaganda tool for the proletariat before and after launching the socialist revolution. Therefore, all proletarian organizations and Marxists who are willing to carry out socialist revolution should create or disseminate revolutionary art within their capacity, thereby preparing the necessary public opinion for the socialist revolution.
The revolutionary art section of the forum is established to spread revolutionary art for the broad user base to read and appreciate. The forum will upload various revolutionary arts created during the Chinese socialist period and other periods, and welcomes users to upload various revolutionary arts after review. Generally speaking, the types of revolutionary art that the forum’s online format can accommodate include revolutionary literature, revolutionary drama, revolutionary painting, revolutionary music, and other types of revolutionary art presented in document form. The forum will provide a brief introduction to each revolutionary art published by the forum, allowing users to understand its general content, and also welcomes users to introduce their own uploaded revolutionary arts to facilitate other users’ understanding of their content.
It should be particularly pointed out that, due to technical limitations, revolutionary art in video form will not be directly posted as video files, but links to watch or download videos will be provided, allowing users to watch and download videos through the links.
Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 1, 1967 ↩︎