As discussed in previous chapters, Scottish modernism had from its beginnings an essential ideological dimension. This was no ‘avant-garde art for art's sake’ movement, nor one which sought to revitalise cultural activity within an existing political system. ‘Making it new’ meant changing not only the artistic culture, but, by what Michael Levenson has called ‘challenging an unfreedom’, transforming also the country's political, social and economic life. Like the Russian artists in the heady early days of the 1917 Revolution – the period of ‘heroic communism’ – who took art into the streets and the countryside in order to create ‘a living factory of the human spirit’, MacDiarmid and his associates believed that the artist had a critical part to play in building a new future.