Fabio Lanza, Urban Revolution: People’s Communes in Beijing (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

In the depths of this engrossing study, Fabio Lanza notes a curious fact in one of his archival sources. In a document whose title reads “Provisions on some issues concerning the urban people’s communes at this stage”, the characters adding “centered on laboring women” have been erased by the editor. Whether this change was accepted in the final version, or how else to assess the flick of the editor’s pen, Lanza tells us, we do not know. (206 fn14). Without – as historians often say – reading too much into the sources, it would seem that this archival trace is fitting as an end to the book: it tells us something about the closure of the dramatic social experiment that was the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The crossing-out of the category of woman marks the end of the urban Great Leap and of the urban communes, which, for Lanza, comprised the most radical attempt to transform the conditions of the everyday during the course of the Chinese Revolution. This telling anecdote at the end of the book marks a perhaps deliberate contrast with the opening of the first chapter, in which a woman, Wang Zhijie, recounts the moment when she experienced the exceeding the category of “housewife” to which she had been limited. At the beginning, then: the opening-up and radical expansion of the category of woman as a site of indeterminacy; at the end, the foreclosure of that category as a language of politics and struggle. In between, a contested, evolving process in which the possibility of a transformed life entered into flickering visibility at decisive moments.

This is a book about the possibility and aspiration of a radical transformation of the everyday, understood with the aid of Henri Lefebvre as the (seemingly) trivial details of the quotidian that often bear on our experience as gendered subjects. For Lanza, the GLF was unparalleled in its ambitions for such transformation. He uncovers these ambitions by recovering the experience of the urban people’s communes in Beijing (1958-1962). The everyday, for Lanza, is not simply that which is the empirical immediacy or “real” that less sophisticated historians have tried to reveal. Rather, the everyday for him constitutes the shifting set of relations that is constantly transformed through the process of revolution itself. In this sense, the practice of socialist revolution for Lanza is by its very nature an everyday affair.

Across five densely-argued chapters, the book treats us to the evolution of a socialist project of everyday transformation. The formal arrangement of the book is a mark of great sophistication in its own right. It is not a strict chronological trajectory, but rather an account that manages to move between the details of emergent policies as actualized in state archives together with the often complex and even esoteric theoretical debates that emerged in the same period. Whereas chapters one, three and five mark a roughly chronological sequence, chapter two brings us into contact with Chinese Marxist theorists who grappled with how to conceptualize socialism in theoretical and policy terms as China was shifting away from a Soviet orthodoxy, whereas chapter four brings us into contact with a particular community of workers — barbers — who emerge as unexpected protagonists and subjects of the GLF. In and across these moments, Lanza develops an account of a locality – Beijing – in the midst of an unprecedented upheaval. The picture of the urban GLF that emerges is of an uneven attempt to provide new social services that would support the entry of women into new occupations beyond the home, accompanied by an ongoing attempt to theorize that process and its relation to the tasks of socialist transition.

Lanza’s study suggests the continuation of the theoretical and political interests that have structured his previous writing. Beyond Lefebvre, his engagement above all with the work of Jacques Ranciere is important; Rancière, like Lanza, is concerned with the moments of radical egalitarian politics in which subjects step beyond the social locations to which they have been assigned. In his first book, Behind the Gate, Lanza developed an account of radical egalitarian politics in relation to students, who, in the act of refusing the position of student as the disciplined subject of the university, moved onto the terrain of political struggle during the 1910s and 1920s. In the current book, the subject positions and locations that came to be troubled (albeit not enough, it seems) during the GLF were the “worker.” Indeed, as Lanza asserts, the GLF re-posed the question of “who was actually included in the category of the ‘worker’” (7). Moments of radical excess – of stepping beyond assigned subject locations – are, for Lanza as for Rancière, the stuff of politics itself.

Yet the more radical orientation of this book is the way it ties the theoretical vocabulary of the everyday and the subject to that of gendered experience and the role of women in the Chinese Revolution. The problem of the everyday is a gendered experience, not least in the way the “trivial” matters that are often dismissed as beyond the realm of “real” politics are themselves gendered. In this respect, Lanza’s work draws on the work of a number of feminist historians working in the field of Chinese Studies, such as Tani Barlow, Gail Hershatter, Kimberley Manning, Wang Zheng, Rebecca Karl, Dong Yige and others.

One major structuring category of the book is framed through the question of reproduction, which is a slippery category both for the Marxist tradition generally as for Lanza himself. It is thus worth pausing here to note the varying and distinct ways in which the category emerges in Lanza’s treatment. The most persistent concern is with the practices of gendered reproduction that comprise what Marxist feminists have termed the “hidden abode” of everyday life and which provide the substratum on which factory-based forms of wage labor rely. These can be profoundly material (preparing and eating food, sleeping, washing, etc.) but they also encompass the emotional and bodily practices that produce and sustain us as subjects (care, sex, etc.). In Lanza’s argument, Chinese Marxists did not generate a specific concept of reproduction insofar as references to reproduction as 再生产 always indicate a narrower and more circumscribed concept derived from the Soviet theoretical edifice (173), ¹ namely the expanded reproduction of the productive forces through socialist accumulation. Nor, crucially, Lanza acknowledges, are the forms of gendered reproduction just listed equally available for collectivization (171). Lanza therefore reaches repeatedly for the theoretical resources of Marxist and autonomist feminists, notably Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who have foregrounded the gendered everyday and its associated practices of reproduction as central to Marxist analysis.

Running alongside this feminist account of reproduction, there is another concept of reproduction, not opposed to the first but that denotes a distinct theoretical logic. When,, in chapter two, Lanza writes that, with the proliferation of bourgeois right, “bourgeois forms of social relations will continue to reproduce themselves, endlessly re-creating new inequalities and differences incompatible” (98) he is invoking a theoretical logic and tradition formally distinct from feminist accounts of gendered reproduction, and more closely orientated towards a part of the French Marxist tradition as associated with such theorists as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar and Charles Bettelheim, all men who engage(d) in various ways with the Chinese Revolution. They were concerned, as Lanza observes, with an understanding of socialism as an extended and non-contemporaneous period of transition in which capitalist forms reproduced on the basis of socialism itself co-exist with incipient communist modes and relations. Multiple significations of reproduction are thus in operation in this book.

In the Marxist tradition,  these different accounts of reproduction have never quite met, insofar as their points of departure have always remained largely different from each other: Dalla Costa being concerned with the everyday forms of violence and oppression that exist within the family and the insurgent possibilities of new feminist movements rooted in the powers of gendered subjectivity, whereas Althusser and his disciples  begin from the role of the Ideological State Apparatuses in the reproduction of subjects, in which the school takes on the decisive role. When, then, we ask the question of what or who is being reproduced when we talk of reproduction, the list becomes expansive: social relations, temporalities, modes of production, bodies, subjects, systems of gendered power, and so on. At another level, therefore, beyond the initial question of the everyday, Lanza’s study is an attempt to think these different modes and questions of reproduction together. We are led to confront the question: what is the relation between the transformation of the conditions of the reproduction of life through the reworking (if not abolition) of the family form and the provision of new collective services on the one hand, and, on the other, inhibiting the tendencies towards the reproduction of capitalist social relations?

Just as the divergent strands of reproduction have never quite met in Marxist theoretical analysis generally speaking, so too, it seems, they never did meet in the course of the GLF and the Chinese Revolution more generally. ² The (male) theorists who intervened in discussions around bourgeois right did not, after all, factor social reproduction into their discussions. The effective use to which Lanza mobilizes the category of “reproduction” might, here, have benefited from an explicit interrogation of how much work that category has done within the Marxist tradition, and how that work relates to the absence of an explicit consideration of “social reproduction” as a theoretical category in the Chinese Revolution. Yet Lanza is too good and sensitive a reader to simply mourn the fact that the Chinese Revolution did not generate the theoretical categories that we might like. Instead, he diagnoses the shortcomings behind the urban communes.

If the common sense that occupies discussions around the GLF too often blames it as a movement of foolish excess always bound to failure, Lanza instead locates its shortcomings in the fact that it was not feminist enough. When women exited from the home to work in commune enterprises, he shows, they did so in conditions where their external labor continued to be viewed, remunerated and disciplined in highly gendered terms (135), within a Taylorist logic (146) that was orientated towards the singular aim of increasing production (157). In his most incisive formulation, Lanza notes: “…as the history of urban collectivization proves, the problem of gender equality, even among workers, could not be reduced to one of self-awareness; rather, it was grounded on a systematic devaluation of any work performed by women, in the home as well as in the factory” (158). And this, in turn, points me towards the most generous aspect of the book, in the way it poses the question of who or what counts as a proper site of theoretical production.

There is plenty of analysis in the book that coheres to accepted definitions of theory and philosophy (chapter 2 especially) in the way Lanza pursues close engagements with Marxist analysis and reads that work with the seriousness it deserves. But so too throughout the book there is a sense of the imminence of theory to everyday socialist practice, not only in the way debates around, say, bourgeois right informed the Leap, but also in the way that the subjects of the urban communes evoke desires, fantasies, even visions of utopia that are themselves instances of theory-making. When he writes of how the frenzied orientation towards production eliminated the time available to women amounted to a “devaluation” of their desires (163), and when, in doing so, he draws on the theoretical insights of Dalla Costa, we should, I believe, see this not as an instance of reading “Chinese history” through “Western theory” but rather as a set of feminist echoes across space, embodied in the expression of desire for that most simple but elusive of pleasures: time outside of and beyond the demands of production, in the home or in the factory.

What, then, remains, to borrow a question from another socialist feminist, Christa Wolf? This is of course a book about the Great Leap Forward. Lanza notes that even whilst later moments in the Chinese Revolution witnessed the persistence of certain questions and challenges that emerged in the GLF, the Great Leap was unparalleled in the way it sought – however partially, however unsuccessfully – to address problems of the everyday through reproduction.

 In this regard, it would be remiss not to at least touch on the other moment of radical Maoist politics, namely the Cultural Revolution. In a recent panel discussion on the “late” Cultural Revolution at the Association of Asian Studies meeting in Vancouver (March 2026), Lanza responded to a paper by Harlan Chambers on “struggle drama” by noting that short dramatic texts featuring women protagonists who take up political struggle are curious for their lack of narrative content relating to reproduction or indeed production as such.³ As a descriptive statement, Lanza was quite right, and my instinct is that this was intended as a critical remark about the texts in question. Yet, if we insist on the term of reproduction itself not just as referring to who does the dishes but also as the production of subject positions and subjectivities, then, seen in those terms, the Cultural Revolution clearly was also about reproduction – in the way the critique of Confucianism under the auspices of the Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius campaign was directly concerned with the ideological reproduction of a hierarchical gendered order, and in the way that new subject positions such as the “youth”/qingnian or “revolutionary successor”/jiebanren (movingly recalled by Zhong Xueping and Wang Zheng amongst other contributors to the volume Some of Us) offered new modes of subject formation that stood at least partially outside a gendered order. Or, to pose this question from a different angle, we may also ask the question of what other theoretical categories were absent from the Great Leap Forward alongside a fully developed concept of social reproduction, in which case we find the surprising absence of a language of class and class struggle under socialism (distinct from the logic of bourgeois right, which does not, in the Great Leap period, admit the formation of a new bourgeoisie in the party) insofar, as, during the Great Leap, the tasks of overcoming the class divisions of pre-1949 society were understood to have been largely completed. It is, by contrast, the return of class struggle in the Cultural Revolution and indeed its totalizing function that also allows it to incorporate a set of feminist concerns around the persistence of patriarchal logics in the everyday and their associated modes of subject formation, with a corresponding interrogation of the family form that encompasses a more ruptural set of possibilities.