Benjamin Kindler, Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution: 1942-1976 (Columbia University Press, 2025)

What would literature and art be like in a utopian socialist society?  There is a long tradition of thinking, prefigured in Plato, and in strong form in the Marx of The German Ideology, and in Marcuse, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt School, that there might not be any, that the aesthetic dimension would be inseparable from the everyday, that creativity could find expression in all social activity.   

Marx and Engels’s social vision of art under communism had been predicated on the transformation of the division of labor:

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals. and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of the people is an effect of the division of labor. Even if in certain social relations everyone could become an excellent painter that would not prevent everyone from being also an original painter so that here too the difference between “human” work and “individual” work becomes a mere absurdity. With a communist organization of society, the artist is not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from the division of labor, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.¹ 

There were strong intimations of this direction in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the work the Soviet futurists, constructivists, and fellow travelers.  Sergei Tretyakov, translator of Brecht and ally of the Chinese revolution (he lived in China in 1924 and was one of the Soviet authors of the “Roar China” poems), eagerly anticipated the end of artistic production.  As Boris Pasternak wrote, “The only consistent and honest man in this group of negationists was Sergei Tretyakov, who drove his negation to its natural conclusion. Like Plato, Tretyakov considered that there was no place for art in a young socialist state.”²  Tretyakov, Meyerhold, and many others of their persuasion died in the purges. The consolidation of Zhdanovism in the 1940s, enshrining socialist realism and the CCCP’s direction of cultural work, postponed the aufhebung of the aesthetic to the distant future.   There was more urgent political work to be done.   Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko characterize the purpose of and reason for writing in the Soviet Union of Lenin’s and Stalin’s era as an effort “to systematize reality – Bolshevik experience – and also to manufacture subjects.”

Christian Sorace has usefully described the PRC’s “discursive state”, wherein “state discourse is invested with the power of shaping reality in accordance with broader cosmological- ideological visions and normative models of behavior”.³ This generative power of discourse inheres in the literary as well, particularly in the programmatic days of literary production before the Reform period.  The systemization of reality and the manufacture of new subjects—one way to describe the CCP’s Zhdanovist ambition for literary production in the period from Mao’s Yan’an Talks through the Cultural revolution—acquires, within the ambit of the discursive state, greater salience than in Soviet Union.  The study of revolutionary literature, then, would offer insights not confined to the realm of culture, but into reality-generation itself.

Benjamin Kindler’s Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1978 (Columbia, 2025) is in one sense a literary history, in that its focus is largely on literary works, roughly chronologically arranged, but as the title suggests, it sees literary production politically and philosophically, giving a privileged access to the architectonics of social and subjective construction.  Kindler is one of a small number of scholars publishing serious work on Chinese revolutionary philosophy—Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in particular.  In Writing to the Rhythm of Labor, his periodization of literary production is at the same time a periodization of socialist construction at the level of politics and ideology, with its particular, and uneven temporalities.⁴  

Marx’s call for the overcoming of the division of labor was central to the Chinese revolutionary imaginary; this was one respect in which the Chinese revolution differed in emphasis from the Soviet predecessor, and the question of the division of labor is central to Kindler’s book.  Although the discourse of the Three Great Differences and their overcoming—mental/material, agriculture/industry, urban/rural did not become prominent until the late 50s in the commune movement, Kindler convincingly makes the problematic of mental and material labor central to his argument about the development of revolutionary literature from early 1940s through the 1970s, and with this emphasis takes us to the heart of what socialist transformation actually is.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor (first German-language publication 1970; English translation 1978), which has been undergoing a major revival in recent years due in part to the attention given by Slavoj Zizek, Alberto Toscano, and other contemporary scholars of “real abstraction”, consistently holds the Chinese Revolution as the living laboratory where the overcoming of this difference was firmly on the political agenda (though Sohn-Rethel was more interested in workers’ acquisition of technical and managerial knowledge, fostered in institutions such as the Cultural Revolution era’s Workers’ Universities).  Locating abstraction itself as a product of the antagonistic social division of labor between the mental and the material, Sohn-Rethel saw the overcoming of this division as the only genuine measure of a socialist classless society.   In his Introduction, Kindler sees a similar orientation toward this aufhebung of labor in the revolutionary feminism of He-Yin Zhen:

He-Yin Zhen’s demand for a universalization of labor marks the supersession of all those violent forms of bifurcation and difference that attend capitalist development and a recoupling of the universality of labor against the abstract form of universality that it assumes under capital, in which all forms of labor are rendered commensurable with each other under the wage form (14).

Labor, thus, would become coterminous with life, and the most politically significant cultural productions were those that engaged directly with the realm of the everyday. 

For writers to play a role in the transformation of labor and life, they would need, in terms Kindler elaborates from party theorist Zhou Yang, to “enter life”.  This entry into life was explicitly predicated on resistance to the division of labor, which meant that the position of the writer, or the writer as laborer, needed to be transformed at the same time agricultural society was being transformed into an “army of labor”.   The latter took, as Kindler acknowledges, non-socialist forms, building on cooperative modalities inherent in peasant life.  There were tensions in this project: “how to forge the otherwise fragmentary character of peasant labor into a collective body of labor power” (39), as well as the “uneasy relationship between the expanded productive power of collective labor on the one hand and its disciplinary power on the other”.   Disciplinary power commonly took the form of acceleration, and the period was full of exhortations against unproductive leisure activities—often gendered—and for an expansion of labor time. The disjuncture between the idea of the social transformation of labor power and the slow pace with which such transformations are actualized in real life creates temporal aporia which are reflected in the narratives.Kindler’s reading of Liu Qing’s 1947 novel, A Record of Sowing Grain, based on Liu’s practice of rural investigation during the cooperative movement, shows how the novel’s artificial and unsatisfactory external motivation for the transformation of rural social relations reflects the author’s—and the society’s—limited figuration of “life”: “At the level of content and form, the legibility of domestic labor would remain a challenge for socialist culture after this point, as well as the task of remaking ‘life’.” (47).  In Ding Ling’s fiction and reportorial work from the 1940s, however, the capacity for gendered affective sociality provides more fertile ground for the integration of “life”. Yet Ding Ling, like others, faced without final resolution the conundrum arising between the disjuncture between the lonely act of writing and the collective scene of social labor. Her famous line “I want to labor” was also a cry for the kind of transformation anticipated by Marx in The German Ideology. 

In the Yan’an period, the project of remaking life and labor was determined by its rural context.   The project of urban-based industrialization and the formation of a new working class brought the requirements of cultural politics closer to those of the Soviet Union.   This took institutional form in the summer of 1949 in the formation of what would become, in 1953, the Writers Association, a full-functioning ISA. The Writers Association combined the professionalization of writing with the persistence of the demand that writers “enter life”, i.e. industrial labor, but the terms of that entry could devolve easily into mere formalism.   The charge to make writing serve the formation and consolidation of the proletariat—Kindler’s second chapter is titled “Lazy Peasants, Productive Proletarians”—led to uneven results in literature, from the overly formulaic work of Zhou Libo to the more formally innovative work of feminist author Bai Liang. This chapter also treats the emergence of the worker-writer, an effort begun in the first half of the 50s under Ding Ling and others, and quickened in the second half of the decade, with the polemics around the newly emerged “amateur writer”, and debates about the extent to which a worker writer should remain connected to the scene of labor. Many of these discussions revolved around time: the time to write, and the productive use of that time. When time becomes the preoccupation of the state, however, that normally portends one thing: acceleration. This would of course become the salient dimension of the Great Leap period.

The literature of Great Leap acceleration included some formal innovations: an emphasis on the short or short short story, a form whose reading and production could be more easily integrated into the accelerating rhythms of labor. Of greater interest is the literary staging of waged labor and its connection to one of Kindler’s central thematics, that of “bourgeois right” (zichanjieji faquan). The discourse around “bourgeois right”, a theoretical consideration of the political/ ontological status of capitalist social and economic relations under socialism, revolved primarily around questions of unequally waged labor, but also around the political and class character of writers, whose insertion into the wage labor and pay-for-manuscript systems along Soviet lines was one source of questions about the class character of writing. The critique of waged labor, elaborated most forcefully by Zhang Chunqiao, represented the major departure from the Soviet model, and would grow in importance during the Cultural Revolution. 

The role of literature in the reproduction of socialism after the Great Leap takes shape within a complex and uneven temporality.  Kindler’s fourth chapter, “Reproducing Revolution: Cultural Reconstruction and the Aesthetics of Communist Heroism”, shows a double movement: a continued focus on the class character of writers and writing, and a re-professionalization of writing, which required greater urgency given the centrality of writing to the reproduction of socialism. The chapter begins with a close reading of a road not taken, in Ru Zhijuan’s 1960 short story, “All Quiet in the Maternity Clinic”, a text reproduced and widely discussed from 1962 on. The story’s setting within a maternity clinic—an actual scene of reproduction—was distinctive, but more so was its framing of the question of revolutionary continuity given the historical gaps between generations formed before and after the revolution. How, and by what means, was a revolutionary subject formed? The gendered complication of that question, evident in Ru Zhijuan’s story, gave way in mainstream 60s writing to a pervasive masculine version of revolutionary heroism. And as the struggle against Soviet revisionism took shape, amid more explicit warnings that the division between mental and material labor represented by the writer/ intellectual could be a dangerous locus of bourgeois tendencies, there was a more explicit effort to guide the political mission of literary work. Kindler notes that “[t]he visibility of the PLA as the locus of a struggle against bourgeois right provided the conditions for the promotion of selfless militarized discipline as a model for the transformation of the consciousness of labor, as well as being a model for the transformation of writing”. This orientation gave rise to the depiction of revolutionary heroes and models, and the various disjunctures that accompanied this prominence. A reading of Jin Jingmai’s 1965 The Song of Ou Yanghai shows how the novel stages the gap between heroic and quotidian temporality, but reaches its narrative resolution confined within the terrain of the heroic.  

On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, before a group of amateur writers, Zhou Yang declared that the amateur writer was the future of literary writing, and that the professional writer was destined to disappear entirely. With correct ideological and political leadership, writing would cease to be an individual affair and would “truly become part of the practice of the party, part of the revolutionary practice of the people and the masses”. (Zhou Yang, quoted on p. 175).  The burden placed on writers and writing was thus a great one, and one whose attainment, particularly given the limitations inherent to narrative construction itself, would be difficult to demonstrate. In the Cultural Revolution, the struggle against the literary scene as the location of bourgeois dictatorship reached an apotheosis, leading to the suspension of the Writers Association and the cessation of all state-sponsored cultural activity from 1966-1969. Kindler’s fifth chapter, “In and Out of Petersburg: Soul and Writing Under Late Maoism”, begins and ends with a discussion of the essay “Get Out of Petersburg”, where “Petersburg” is a metaphor for the literary and cultural ISA, viewed as a primary locus of “bourgeois right”. Though the ISA itself had been dismantled, the recrudescence of “bourgeois right” required continual monitoring.  Kindler’s chapter includes an extended and deeply insightful analysis of the thinking around bourgeois right, primarily through the successive versions of a textbook on political economy, whose final version appeared in September 1976. The textbook, starting with a consideration of the wage under capitalism and socialism, resulted in a picture of socialist society that was “a site of unevenness and as an ensemble of contradictions” (209). This unevenness placed unending demands on political work, since “the persistence of capitalist relations under socialism in the form of bourgeois right spontaneously produced ideological forces that themselves needed to be surmounted in order to transcend those capitalist relations… the restoration of capitalism was always imminent within socialist relations of production themselves”.    

A salient dimension of this uneven and contradictory scene was the theoretical recourse to “personification” (ren’gehua), whereby persons could be identified as “capitalist roaders” or revolutionaries. This had the potential to transform social relations into “problems of consciousness”, a politically ambiguous terrain. In Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his study of the Cultural Revolution, psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton coins the term “psychism”, which involves a temporal short-circuiting of the social transformation process: “in its zeal to replace technology with mind, it tends to interfere with precisely the internal work necessary to accomplish real individual conversion and general social transformation…. the psychic work required for authentic inner change is in turn replaced by an image of the change having already taken place.⁵ In the terms of the bourgeois right discourse, this interiority is simply bourgeois subjectivity, and the wager of revolutionary literature was that the process of transformation could be taken up in other ways than an individualized, psychological framing of transformation. A common mode was the subgenre of the sent-down youth narrative. Kindler gives an extended reading of Zhang Changgong’s 1973 novel Youth, comprising a sent-down youth’s diary within a framing narrative.  Like other works of this nature, Youth stages its protagonist’s encounter with revolutionary models, an encounter that serves to figure the quotidian work of self-transformation. The diarist in Youth expresses that work as follows:

The advanced soldiers of the proletarian all have revolutionary tenacity.  Comrade Lei Feng praised the spirit of the screw, showing that in order to ram a nail into a board of wood, you need to rely on squeezing and drilling. Considering “squeezing” in terms of the problem of time: whenever there is the slightest free moment, it is necessary to occupy it with revolutionary content. Considering “drilling” in terms of one’s effort in work: any given matter requires repeated grinding, and constant initiative.” (182-183)

As Kindler writes, “the text, in these terms, comes to emerge as the site of multiple sites of copying and transcription” (183): textual processing as labor on the soul. The fruits of this labor, in the literature and theoretical work through the late Cultural Revolution, were figured in tropes of heroism, often mediated through texts or films, a heroism that inhered in the most quotidian dimensions of working life. Kindler ends his chapter with a reflection on the predicament created by the logic of personification: “these challenges could only be articulated in terms of psychic interiority, either in the form of a heroic subjectivity as the basis for the supersession of the wage form, or in the paranoid projection of writerly subjectivity as always already bound to the logic of capital.” (216) This is of course a different interiority from Lifton’s, but one that does not escape its political limits.

Alessandro Russo has suggested, though, that the image of the worker-hero had, as the Cultural Revolution progressed, lost considerable luster:

For the Maoists, a prerequisite for finding a new order was discovering how to remold the political role of the workers in the factories together with the entire state system. The rhetoric of the “marble man,” the “socialist labor hero,” the “model worker,” inspired by the Stakhanovism of the thirties in the USSR, was largely discredited by the events of 1966–1967, which revealed its disciplinary and anti-political nature. It was in fact used by the “loyalists” and by the Shanghai party authorities to quash the independent workers’ organizations. The canonical formula of the workers as “the masters of the state” remained empty propaganda if new forms of the relationship between worker and factory were not experimented with by going beyond the terms of the ordinary functioning of the “industrial danwei.”⁶ (Russo, 251)

The late Cultural Revolution reorganization of the factory, uneven though it was, was evident in initiatives such as the factory universities, as well as in the power of independent workers’ organizations, and the strengthening of workplace democracy in the late Cultural Revolution period, as documented by Joel Andreas,⁷ and these developments were somewhat at odds with the dominant trends of literary production.  Further research into unofficial publication might show evidence of alternative formal or subjective innovation.⁸

Kindler ends his book with a consideration of Ding Ling’s late (published 1978) Du Wanxiang, which he reads not in the context of the socialist hero bildungsroman, but as an exploration of the “time of communism”:

This is no longer a unified or synchronized temporality unified under the state, including in the form of the Writers Association as ISA, in the interests of a project of development, but rather in the mode of a disjuncture from the state, and in the inauguration of a long, stretched temporality, in which we pursue the cultivation of communist relations in the space of the everyday” (233)

Literary explorations of the time of communism persist after the end of the revolution, in China and elsewhere, albeit uncoupled from an ongoing revolutionary project.   In a development that might surprise those earlier advocates of the worker-writer, Zhou Yang’s amateur ideal, Chinese workers’ cultural production has over the last fifteen years flourished to a degree unprecedented in history. This has been not only on social media—the narratives, podcasts, musical performances and dance videos that fill Weibo, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and other platforms—but in a wide range of published fiction, testimonial, auto-ethnography, and poetry. The reader curious about the lives of the ubiquitous kuaidi delivery drivers, for example, could consult delivery driver Hu Anyan’s Wo zai Beijing song kuaidi (I do express delivery in Beijing)⁹ or one of Wang Erdong’s award winning poetry collections. Wang’s 2023 collection Gai zenyang jiang yige kuaijian digei ni (How to send an express package to you) is divided into four parts—collection, intermediation, transportation, and delivery—followed by a chapter glossing professional terms from the industry—packaging filler, electronic waybill, reverse logistics, et al –with short explicatory poems.¹⁰ This summer (August 2025), Zhang Sai’s Zai gongchang mengbudao gongchang: ruci gongzuo ershi nian (In the factory you don’t dream of factories: twenty years of work like this) was published to great acclaim in a prestigious literary series.¹¹ Better known in the west are worker-writers such as Xu Lizhi (d. 2014), whose poems of the Foxconn assembly line acquired special poignancy after his suicide, and Fan Yusu, part of the group associated with the New Workers Literature journal based in Picun, Beijing, whose 2017 short memoir Wo shi Fan Yusu (I am Fan Yusu) became an internet sensation after her writing appeared on WeChat.  Wu Feiyao and Qin Shaoyu’s award-winning 2017 documentary Wode shipian (The verse of us) focused on six worker-poets, including Xu Lizhi, and stimulated a nationwide discussion of the “literariness” of worker poetry. The aesthetic debate was fairly uninteresting, due in no small part to the predictable wenren (intellectual) gatekeeping element. Although worker-writer production flourished, the movement to foster a worker’s culture, represented by Picun and a handful of other NGOs, had mostly collapsed by the end of the 2010s, victim to both state repression as well as developments internal to the groups themselves

Politically, the stakes in workers’ cultural production often centered on recognition, in some cases explicitly referring to the social status of work, labor, and cultural production in the socialist period. Here the effects were more muted. Although one of the most popular songs performed by the Picun New Workers Art Troupe, “Laodongzhe zan’ge” (Ode to the Laborers) had as a refrain a line often uttered by Xi Jinping, “laodong shi zui guangrong” (work is glorious), workers’ cultural production in the twenty-first century—whether tragic, humorous, reportorial, or sensational—just as one would expect, finds little glory or dignity in actual working life.  In its location within the everyday, though, this work holds open the space where the seeds of social transformation could sprout.

Christopher Connery, UC-Santa Cruz