← New Books Network
New Books Network
Fabio Lanza, "Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
01:01:06
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required Compatibility and availability Various 18
- [00:26]
Venmo Advertiser
Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.
- [00:28]
Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card.
- [00:34]
Say more.
- [00:35]
More. Exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get. Like earning up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on a bundle of brands.
- [00:43]
So order more pizza.
- [00:44]
The math demands it.
- [00:46]
Get the Venmo debit card.
- [00:47]
Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo me stashterm venmo checkout not available at all merchants venmo mastercard is issued by the bancorp bank
- [00:56]
Blinds.com Advertiser
na uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter. Stay cool and save up to 45% off custom window treatments during the 4th of July VIP access sale@blinds.com from outdoor shades to room darkening blinds, finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help and professional measure and install services or DIY it with confidence and support every step of the way. Shop up to 45% off site wide right now during the 4th of July VIP access sale at Blinds.
- [01:27]
New Books Network Intro
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:32]
Mark Baker
Welcome back to New Books Network. My name is Mark Baker from the University of Manchester here in the UK and I'm delighted to be hosting today Professor Fabio Lanza. We're discussing his new book, Urban Revolution People's Communes in Beijing, published just a few weeks ago now with Cambridge University Press. Professor Lanza joins us from the University of Arizona where he serves as professor of Modern Chinese History. Professor Lanza, welcome back to the New Books Network.
- [01:56]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Thank you Mark. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you for having me.
- [01:59]
Mark Baker
For those who may not yet have heard about this new book, Urban Revolution, this is the first full length study in English of the urban commune movement of the Great Leap Forward in Mao's China. That urban collectivization is much less well known than its rural counterpart, and this book does a fantastic job of uncovering that history with a grassroots study of the achievements and problems of Beijing's urban commune movement. But Actually, to say that it uncovers that history is to slightly undersell the book, because urban revolution is much more important than that. It's. It's not just about uncovering a forgotten episode in Mao period history. I think, more importantly, it uses the urban commune movement as a way of thinking through something much bigger, the potentialities, contradictions of socialist transformation in China. I absolutely love this book, both the rich empirical recovery and the bigger picture of the Maoist project. And we'll try and get into both of those things in our conversation today. So, Fabio, I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about how the project came about. What was it that got you interested in the everyday aspects of socialist transformation? And how did you come to focus on urban communes?
- [03:06]
Professor Fabio Lanza
So it's a long story, and I tried to make it short because I was looking at my old files just a few months ago, and I found a cover letter for a job application in 2004 that mentioned as a second possible project, a study of everyday life under Maoism. So this has been in my brain, some parts of my brain, since at least for over 20 years. And it came, as I mentioned in the introduction, from a sentence in a question in a really famous book, the Production of Space, in which he asked, almost in passing, whether state socialism had produced a space of its own, whether state socialism created a new everyday, a new revolutionary space. Because he said if socialism had failed changing life itself, then the revolution was basically doomed. And the question stayed with me through grad school and stayed with me afterwards. And so after finishing my first book and before sort of embarking in the sort of side project that became my second book, I started to investigate, I started trying to find a way to investigate what was socially spaced under Maoism. And from the very beginning, I started working on Beijing because that's my city, the city where I do all my research work. So it was easier for me, but also because I thought Beijing was. Had to be representative, being the capital. I mean, the place where this transformation would probably be more evident. So I started doing some archival work over, like probably 15 years ago at this point. And I look at planning debates. There's a lot of stuff about the famous debates on how to reframe the space of the Forbidden City and all these other things, but I didn't care that much about those. I wanted to look at actual attempts to change everyday life. But eventually I ran into an archival brick wall, because most of the planning documents the mapping, the nitty gritty stuff of actually urban transformation, urban planning were completely not accessible. I couldn't get into them. I wrote something about early pigeon, but then I couldn't get into them. So I decided to change the project and see if I could find some case studies to work to symbolize this everyday life, this attempt to radically transform the everyday, which was, I still argue, at the foundation of the Maoist project. And I eventually bump into the urban communes as one of these cases. And then I kept finding more and more documents and realizing that it was not just simply about, you know, at this point, about space and about everyday life and about politerization, but it had other aspects that were more foundational, even more foundational in the socialist project of transformation, as you mentioned at the beginning. And so this became the old project, the Grande formal and urban collectivization became the old project. And I had to sort of touch on other aspects. We'll talk about them, including like gender, labor and social reproduction and debates on below value bourgeois socialist economy and things like that. So this became a much more totalizing project. Still center on that, however, initial question. If there is a socialist space and
- [06:53]
Mark Baker
a socialist every day, that's great, thank you. It kind of inspired me to go back to some of my own job application materials and see if there's any traces of traces of current and future projects there. Now, many listeners, you know, including some specialists in the field of modern Chinese history, may not know a great deal about the urban communes. So I wonder for listeners, if you could just say a little bit about what the urban communes were when they were set up and what it was that they were trying to achieve.
- [07:23]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yes, and you're right, I mean, I remember going back to MacFarquhar, the origins of the Cultural Revolution. And yes, an entire book on the Great Forward is also a page and a half, I think, on the urban communists that mentioned literally, like, as not a thing. But urban Communists were important. They were the urban side, to put it simply, of rural collectivization. We know a lot about rural communes because they lasted much longer because of the famine and the disaster, and because they stretch into the 80s, basically, urban communes are much shorter in duration. They're much more, much less tragic in their history. Nobody really dies in the cities, as we know. They start in 58, basically at the same time, the summer of 58, at the same time as a rural commune. They start in the same place. They start in Henan, and then they quickly develop all over the country, but they end very early. In most parts of the country, urban communes are either destroyed, disbanded, or emptied out of any actual significance by 62 at the latest. And the exception is Beijing, which in Beijing they last longer, probably with some validity and some function, until probably 64 and in name up until the culture function. So to understand what this urban collectivization was trying to achieve, we had to look back at the situation in China after 1956, when China declared the achievement of socialism, basically the end of private ownership of the means of production. That's what they meant by it. And 57, which marks the end of the first five year plan. What you have by 57 is a mass development, industrial production, Soviet style, massive improvement of life, especially in the cities, but also a deepening of social equality, inequalities, especially between the countryside and the cities. Sort of a massive increase of the urban rural split, but also within the city, between certain kind of workers and other kinds of workers, mostly the workers who work for the state sector, the state owned sector, which develop by the late 50s, all those benefits that we associate with the work unit, the townway, and people outside the sector which live in condition of sometimes poverty, sometimes, but you know, they don't have access to the same benefit. Also for all workers, especially for the state owned enterprise workers, you have development of certain characteristics that look suspiciously capitalist. Factory discipline, discipline, one man management, the continuous relevance of wage and wage differences and things like that. So there is a growing dissatisfaction by 57 with the Soviet model. And so there is a search for a different strategy, a strategy that would produce a different form of development. Pushing industrialization to the countryside, pushing realization of city, greenification of city, but also making a proposing a total reframing of social relationship, breaking down the privatized life center on the individual and the family, and creating a new collective every day. How do you do that? Given that there is no capital to push forward this kind of the development? You do it through imposito rescuing labor, labor, especially labor of people who are not yet working, not working outside a home, meaning women. At this time they're referred to as housewife or dependents. So in the city, what happens, you get this housewife involved in labor that will lead to increased production, which will in turn finance collective services like canteens, kindergarten crashes, nurseries, social services that will replace that displaced domestic labor now become productive labor. And this will in turn create a new set of social relationships centered under the code word of women's liberation. So urban communes are a massive attempt, a massive campaign centered on production, but in a complete reframing of social relationship and on women's liberation.
- [12:21]
Mark Baker
Great, thank you. That's a great summary. I wonder if I could just ask a quick follow up question to help help listeners and to help me understand how this worked or was supposed to work. Wonder if you could just say a couple of words about how the urban communes were supposed to fit into both the state sector and urban state work units and the kind of territorial governance of urban districts.
- [12:49]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, that's a problem in the sense that it's a problem in many cities. In many cities, urban communes have different organizations according to different cities. In some places there is one commune which is the entire city. In some places they overlap with district. In some place they don't. In Beijing, they basically overlap with what I call a sub district communities. So administrative units. So they literally overlap with the existing administrative units. And so there's less of a problem there, thankfully. And that's might be one of the reason why they last longer in Beijing. There's administrative conflict, there's less administrative conflict. The issue with state owned enterprise and the state owned sector is one of the main issue. You have a sector of the economy, which is the sector of the economy that mostly urban communes try to reorganize, which is a sector of the economy under collective ownership or even at this point private ownership, individual family ownership, which is not fully integrated into planning. While state owned enterprise are under the planned economy. This sector, or at least large chunks of the other sector is not. Collectivization also aims at making this into part of the planning. There is a promise of eventually making these workers handicraft workers, small enterprises, new commune enterprises like new small factories that create the communes into the state owned sector to make them part of the planning and by that also giving them the same benefits and the same status and the same possibilities of the state owned enterprise workers. It really never happens. But that's part of the planning to raise one sector of the economy to the level of, you know, and we can talk about it, the so called ownership by the old people, basically state ownership.
- [15:00]
Mark Baker
Thank you, that's, that's helpful. And actually it links nicely to chapter one of the book. We won't have time to go into all the fascinating details in all of the chapters. There's some absolutely fascinating documents from district archives, municipal archives here that readers will get a sense of when they tackle the book. But chapter one is really a fascinating glimpse at some of the early problems in organizing and getting off the ground the urban communes. So I wonder what some of those questions were and what those issues in the first weeks and months reveal about some of the tensions in the urban communes project.
- [15:43]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah. I make the case throughout the book that, you know, while the Great Leaf failed because of a bunch of other reasons and Great Leap in the City also failed for very practical reasons. My argument is that there are contradiction intention in the project from the very beginning. And then actually the evolution of the urban commune reveals tension and contradiction that are inherent to the socialist project and to the Maoist project, and especially concerning gendered labor. So at the very beginning of the collectivization in Beijing, you have description. They're very positive, by the way, the description at the very beginning are very positive. Everything seems to supposed to proceed like almost naturally. Women get out of the house, build a small factory with their own, like bringing their own tools. They make it a shed out of rubbles and use recycled pieces of metal to do something. And then eventually a factory is born and then it expands. And because they need social services, social services are created to give food and all these other things and also. And these develop almost naturally. But you see a series of contradictions. And the contradiction to me have to do with the various things that the urban commune were supposed to do. They were supposed to increase production. There was always the first goal. They were supposed to collectivize domestic labor. And third one of course was to liberate women from the slavery of trivial domestic labor, as they call it. But you always have a contradiction between these three. Because production was always primary and collective services were supposed to allow for production. And production also meant accumulation, meant, you know, increased capital accumulation for that didn't go mostly to the state, but stayed locally. But it was, it was always like primary, it was always. The developmental push, was always primary. So what happens when, you know, the development of services, the guaranteeing services for these newly recruited workers, gets into contradiction with, or into a state of tension with increased accumulation to reproduction. What happens if you need money to finance, for example, these services? What if the canteen needs to be subsidized? Is that a contradiction? Yes, eventually it is. There's also more theoretical contradiction. If you are at the very beginning, and it's a very Marxist debate, but you have at the very top of the party and you see it in practice in the development of urban communes. People believe in the idea that if you develop the so called forces of production, basically if you increase production, if you get more people involved in production, if you enlarge the amount of productive labor, then then the changes in other things in social relationship will happen naturally. And then you have people like Mao and others that don't believe that because They've seen it happen through the first five Year Plan, which massively increased the forces of production, but has not really changed social relationships, or at least it's not changed them in a more equal term. So you have to intervene in social relationship first, in imposing political changes at the level of social relationship, no matter what the forces of production are. And there is a contradiction that it's at the very, very sort of beginning, on the very foundation of the Great Leap and in its urban case. But I think these are some of the very, very contradiction at the very beginning. And then they develop through the course of the campaign, basically.
- [19:41]
Mark Baker
I wonder if you could just give listeners a sense of what it was that urban commune workshops were actually producing. You know, if the emphasis is, is on production here, what is it that these commune workshops are actually making and for whom?
- [19:59]
Professor Fabio Lanza
So they were making. They were supposed to be making three kind of products and three large chunks of products. One which became minority towards the end of the movement was they were supposed to work in collaboration with major state owned enterprises to do stuff for them that was simple and basic. Like, I don't know, the main factory needed copper wires. So spool copper wires. So these women, again these are mostly women, will put up a shed and start spooling copper wires through recycle and putting it together on long copper wires. This was a boring, low skill work that will take it was supposed. And they literally said that would take precious labor time from skilled workers, male skilled worker in a normal factory. But that was fine for women to do in the small workshop in their commune. So this kind of stuff, it becomes more technical and more elaborate over time. But this was like one kind of labor, the other kind of labor which was perhaps the most they have product which was perhaps the most important one was to produce the object of everyday use. The girly four were sorry. The first five Year Plan had developed industrial production, but mostly heavy industrial production. We're talking about like big things, steel, you know, tractors, things like that. What was still lacking even after the industrial development of the first five Year Plan was the availability of everyday use product. And condoms were supposed to condens. Factory were supposed to do this and we're talking about like little things like you know, you know, burners or chimneys or like, you know, like, I don't know, things for everyday use. There's a long list of products in the book. The third one, which I don't speak much about but it is important was products for export. Because these are again women embroideries and things like that were valued and will be exported and get very important and very valuable foreign currency for the state. So these three kinds of product, but I would say the second one was perhaps the most important.
- [22:27]
Mark Baker
Yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense.
- [22:30]
Home Depot Advertiser
Pros trust the Home Depot for heavy duty storage solutions for any job site or garage. Right now get up to 15% off select storage and organization Impact and water resistant totes and shelving built to hold up to £2,500. Storage systems have space for all your tools and protect them in the garage, on the job site and everywhere in between. Save time and maximize efficiency with adjustable shelving customizable to your business's needs. Shop and save on pro grade storage at the Home Depot. How pros get more done
- [23:00]
Professor Fabio Lanza
so good, so good, so good.
- [23:03]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more plus plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.
- [23:27]
New Books Network Intro
When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
- [23:57]
Mark Baker
One of the great things about Urban Revolution as a book is that each chapter takes us on quite a different kind of journey. There's always something a bit unexpected in the next chapter. And actually chapter two takes us to, on the face of it, quite a different place from chapter one in that it moves to more theoretical debates among party theoreticians in the top party journals and newspapers. And I wonder if you could give us a sense of what it was that these party elites were arguing about the end of 1958, going into 1959. And as I was reading, I was trying to work out whether these theoretical questions were kind of the same questions as were being asked in more practical terms by those trying to set up the communes on the ground. Are these sort of different ways of phrasing the same question, or is it really a different set of questions that they're trying to answer?
- [24:54]
Professor Fabio Lanza
No, I think. And that's why I wanted this chapter to be in the Book. One of the readers of the original manuscript said maybe you should take it out. But I insisted on these chapters should be there because I think they are actually dealing with at least some of the same questions. I mean, in this chapter there's no discussion, for example of the question of gender and social reproduction, but there is a discussion of certain issues. How do you. And I think. Let me rephrase that. And the question is basically socialism is a transitional stage, meaning it moves out of capitalism and goes into communism. It's supposed to go into communing communists. So the question is, how does this transition happen? How can we make it happen faster? What are the actions that we can take to move to a more equal society? And I think these are very much the same question at the practical level and at a theoretical level in the debate on socialist economy that takes place in 5859. So the same debate takes place, I think the same discussion, the same question are posed at the level of,
- [26:03]
Mark Baker
of
- [26:03]
Professor Fabio Lanza
theory in 5859 and the level of practice, in the practice of the urban communes. And they have to do with how to achieve a more equal society, how to change social relationship and how to transition from a condition of capitalism or a condition of early social is to a condition of full developed socialism into communism. And the question is, and as I mentioned an early one, I mentioned the first five year plan. If you have the first five year plan, that leaves you with what is a more, if you want more, less equal society in many ways, or with new forms of inequality, with new forms of differences, then you cannot just say that these are leftover of capitalism, that these problems are leftover capitalists. They are actually created by socialist change. So how do we deal with this? And that was the, the question. And this was a question for which Marx was not very helpful because he never really talks about what happens after the revolution really except in one sentence, basically. And Stalin and Lenin were also not helpful because they had curtailed. Stalin especially had curtailed the debate and said everything is fine, basically. So the debate in 58 takes two parts and I think both parts of both debates have very practical implication. If you take one side of the debate, there is very, very practical implication for what you are supposed to do. If you take the other side and we will see eventually which one wins and what the consequences are for the urban conduits, you take completely different practical actions. So the debates in 58 has two parts and I'll go very quickly. One party very, very much follows Stalin and the Debate that Stalin had sort of tried to stop about forms of ownership in the. Under socialism, meaning that the system was supposed to transform all forms of ownership into what's called this, called ownership by the old people, which we call state ownership, kind of. And so collective ownership by collectives or private ownership will eventually disappear into the system. And how that transition happens. And urban communes were considered to be exactly that transitional form that will lead from collective ownership to ownership by own people. And again, ownership by the old people comes with benefits, comes with guaranteed welfare base for everybody and lifetime employment. All these other things. Moving from one to the other, from one form of ownership to the other, has very, very, very practical implications. The second part, which is actually the more interesting part of the debate, has to do with the question of so called bourgeois right. Bourgeois right means that under socialists there are certain form of capitalist relationship and capitalist forms that keeps persisting, that seems to be unkillable. And these are wages, for example, or the idea of distribution according to labor. The more you work, the more you get paid and the so called lower value. So how do you get out of those form? How do you get rid of those form? So off of the. Some parts of the party say, oh, they don't work the same way, we can keep them, it doesn't matter. And some people, Mao included, and at this point especially Jack Zhongtiao for later of the Gang of Four, argued, no, no, we have to restrict its form. We cannot destroy them immediately, but we have to prevent them from spreading and basically infecting society and changing us into capitalist and making our system more capitalist. So you have to restrict the role of wages, restrict the role of commodities. And again, the urban communities are exactly there. It's a system in which your money is supposed to become less important commodity, which the products will be given to people, not, not pay for as commodities in which you expand a sector of the economy that is under, that is not subjected to, you know, the commodity form basically. And ends with the. Unfortunately with the victory of the. The other side, the side that says no, no, these things are fine, they keep working on the social, if it will just work differently by 59. But it's a lingering problem that will stay on and will reappear eventually later on during the Cultural Revolution in different forms.
- [30:51]
Mark Baker
So that ending of the debate, or a kind of freezing of debate that takes us through to the spring, I guess, of 1959, and then we get this kind of freezing of the urban communes movement. And then a bit later on, maybe at the, I guess it's at the very, very end of 1959 and going into 1960, there's this kind of second wave of urban collectivization and a reinvigoration of the urban commune movement. Why, why did that happen? You know, if the more radical side of the debate hadn't been reopened, why was it that there was that second wave of interest in urban commune?
- [31:33]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, that's a difficult thing to explain. I mean, you can rely on the literature, mostly political scientists, to explain the party inner working and the post Lushan conference relaunch of the leap in another different form. And you can attribute it to Mao stubbornness or whatever. I don't go into those debates because I don't. I mean, I. That's not my thing and not the thing I'm interested in this book. But what happens is that you're right, it basically freezes up until the Lushan Conference. And after the Lushan Conference, towards the end of 59, you see a kind of a relaunch, not just the leap in general, but specifically urban collectivization. And it's difficult in the specific case of urban communes to figure out if it is a push from the top or a push from the bottom or. Or both. There are reports from various provincial governments that say, hey, we have been doing urban collectivization. You know, we haven't founded urban commons because you told us not to, but we have done experiments in collectivization. We can factories and it's working womenly, so let us do it more. Hanan does that. Hei Hilong Jan sends proposals and eventually the central state says okay, okay. By early 1960s they allowed for a, you know, the toll and you know, that the freeze is lifted and people can start to creating new urban commune. And eventually by I think March or April 1960s, even the larger cities, the five largest cities including Beijing, are allowed to relaunch communes. And in Beijing it's, it's a, it's a boom. They clearly had been working through 59 on experiments of collectivization without formally creating communes, because communes goes from like I think six or seven to 48 in a few months. In Beijing you have like truly a blossoming of this organization which clearly could not add some foundation in the previous year. And this is the moment in which for a very, very short period, as I remember, somebody says all Chinese cities become commons, basically they seem to have become largely collectivized.
- [33:58]
Mark Baker
And that second wave of urban collectivisation really reopens or re reveals something that you touched on a little while ago in the answer to the question about the first chapter, which is this question of the place of female labor, the primacy of production and the welfare aspect being secondary, and that that tension between reproductive labor and productive labor outside the home. So I guess the big, the big question in chapter three is whether in any sense the urban communes were a liberation for their female workers. And what kind of evidence can we see for that?
- [34:41]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, that is in large part the question around the book. And you know, and you know, I remember Gaylord Shatter's question at the beginning of her great book, which is, did Chinese women have a revolution? And the answer is it's complicated. Yes and no. And in this case, did Grain Forward produce a temporary liberation? Yes, alone. Because you can argue that women and the sources, these are state sources, reports voices of women, and they report contradictory voices of women. But you have these women say we achieve a status as work. There is a celebration of a new freedom, a new achieved status, the getting rid of the status of dependence and becoming a worker and becoming through participation in labor a full fledged member of society with a minimum amount of financial independence, which is important, but also, as I say, a recognized status and an implied transformation of certain social relationship. That happened for sure, but only happened to an extent because one, these women could never get rid of their original connotation as women and specifically as housewives, which influence how they were recognized, how much they were paid, what kind of labor they were allowed to do, what kind of status they could achieve. They could. Could they really become workers? Well, it's debatable because even in the sources, even the state sources, they keep calling them housewives. Even when they are fully working hours and hours in a factory or in a childcare center or in a canteen, they're still in the end housewives. And also they were that transformation that the advantage transformation from housewives to workers was based on engaging in forms of labor that were often boring, stultifying and programmatically undervalued and underpaid. So it was a liberation through labor. And no real liberation can be achieved that way, especially not through this kind of labor. So it's a difficult thing. And I think, and I guess that's large part of my argument the problem is that the Maoist and the Marxists in general at this stage never had developed through complex understanding of social reproductive labor. They never understood, they never really care to understand what was a woman does as in the family, as domestic labor. They never understood the role of domestic labor. It was a thing that only get valued when it was performed outside the house and somebody had to provide it. But once it went back into domestic labor, within the walls of the family, within the walls of the house and the whole home of the family, nobody care. And you cannot really do social transformation if you don't understand that part, if you don't even problematize that part. And again, that's not It's a massive problem. And I'm not saying it's easy. And so you have these cases with this detention between women's appreciation for the newfound statute and now they express it and the state undervaluing of their labor always come to the fore. And I have examples of this throughout the book, but it is a constant contradiction, basically.
- [38:43]
Venmo Advertiser
Chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or
- [38:47]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
more, can make me feel like a
- [38:48]
Venmo Advertiser
spectator in my own life.
- [38:50]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
Botox Onobotulinum Toxin A prevents headaches in
- [38:53]
Venmo Advertiser
adults with chronic migraine.
- [38:54]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
It's not for those with 14 or
- [38:56]
Venmo Advertiser
fewer headache days a month.
- [38:57]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
It's the number one prescribed branded chronic
- [38:59]
Botox Advertiser
migraine preventive treatment prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lynch Lambert Eaton Syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [39:37]
Venmo Advertiser
Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. Ever wonder where Tropicana got its name? The Tropics. And every time you enjoy a glass, you're not just drinking juice. You're taking a trip, stepping into sunshine and embarking on a flavorful journey into the tropics, where ripe fruit is crafted into wildly delicious juice. And the best part? No passport required. Tropicana. Give life some juice. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's A reason millions of companies like Mattel Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer yeah,
- [40:38]
Mark Baker
and one of the really interesting things about chapter three, and to some extent chapter one and chapter five as well, is this sense of a constant struggle of keeping commune welfare services going, you know, particularly childcare and, and canteens, in the face of, you know, desperate financial shortages, in the face of labor difficulties and in the face of a reluctance of, of some people to, to use those services. You know, I was reminded, you know, lots of, lots of current day contemporary nation states grappling with questions of subsidized childcare, the state's role in early years provision and all of those difficulties of finding the balance and winners and losers and this sense of maximizing the exploitation of labor. Basically.
- [41:37]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's exactly the, it's very similar under declared socialist state, which is supposed to move rapidly at this stage towards communism. It's even more stark. I mean, sorry, I'll be very practical here. For once imagine the situation. You are a relatively poor family in smack in the center of Beijing. The husband makes X amount of money working in a collective factory nearby or something. All of a sudden your offer a increase of family income by, you know, making the wife in this case go out and work, you know, eight, nine hours a day, ten hours a day in a local factory. It makes, you know, 80, she makes 30 or 40. It's a massive increase in the family budget. But if you want to send your kids to childcare, the entire family, it's at the canteen. You have to pay, I don't know, 30 out of those 40s or even 20 out of those 40. This is a massive decrease of what this promised income was. And so what's the solution? The solution is not to use the service and rely on domestic labor again, despite the fact that the woman in question is also doing factory labor on site. So at the end of this period, if you don't really subsidize or if you don't provide a way to do this service for almost no money, what happens? You have women who work two shifts. They have to work the domestic labor they did before and now the factory labor.
- [43:22]
Mark Baker
Yeah, yeah, that's right. One of the great things I wasn't expecting in this book is a chapter about the barbers industry, hairdressers and barbers. I wonder why it is that the barbers are such an interesting case study and what does it reveal about the Great Leap Forward and its limits? And I suppose actually maybe you could just tell us how you got interested in cutting of hair in the first place.
- [43:51]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, I'm the last person who should be talking about hair because I have none and I'm bold. And I found the barbers came up basically in sources, kept coming up in sources. They were central category of what seems to be the everyday of people in Beijing at the time. Again, I don't think of barbers. I'd never been to a barber in I don't know how many years. So I was kind of perplexed and I kept archiving these sources. On barbershop there were two groups, barber and people who manages bathouses. This was the second category. But barbers were much more present and eventually I had to write about them because Tay Mari, as you said, some of the problems and the contradiction of the leap. One of the problems of socialism and of the Leap, we don't usually think about that because we always think in terms of blue ants all the same and all looking, wearing the same clothes. But socialism and Mao specifically promise not just a better life in terms of more equal life for everybody, but also a better life and more beautiful life. Socialist people were supposed to be better fat, better dress, better attire. And that implies also better cloth, with better hairstyles, with better, better, you know, looking good, looking better, looking more beautiful. One of the problems of the Great Leap was to make life more beautiful. And with the Great Leap, you have a problem. The barber sort of identified this attempt in two sense by providing better services to the people. There was apparently a chronic lack of barbers in Beijing. At a certain point there was always long queues and, you know, but also to improve the life of some of the barbers, because the barbers were one of those professions that, you know, because it was based on family business or itinerant peddlers on things like that that was very, very much not fully socialized. So it was an attempt to collectivize barber as a profession and also to buy collectivizing barber as a profession to offer better service to people. Now the promise was to offer better service to everybody. But how it developed was that instead of offering better service to everybody, the conversation of barber led to very different service provided to very different class of people. We assumed that this is a massive egalitarian movement that is a push for everybody gets the same things. And no, it wasn't actually people with more money or more status Military officer, professors, you know, richer people were supposed to receive better hairstyles and people, you know, workers and poor people were supposed to be getting cheaper and crappier hairstyles. It was actually in the design of the campaign. So you see, you reveal a contradiction of the colifeurization project by looking up the barber. And then in the process of development the campaign, you see the barber are a microcosm of the process of collectivization and decollectivization that happens towards the end of the Great Leap when, for example, certain barbers get fully collectivized, becomes under basically ownership of the old people and you know, profits diminish and the system is reverted, they revert back to collect, they get the collectivized, basically they revert to collective ownership, they revert to other forms of ownership and managements because they are not profitable enough. So you see in the barbers both the fragmentation of social classes and refracted in the fragmentation of social tastes and social needs in the barber industry, but also the very microcosm of the process by which the profitability of the system and political equality promised by the system are always in contradiction.
- [48:18]
Mark Baker
Yeah, the barber is a really great example of how even as something as simple and everyday as that, the drive for output, you know, cutting more heads in a day trumps the, the impulses of egalitarianism. Yeah, yeah.
- [48:33]
Professor Fabio Lanza
I was astonished by how many, like the data is how many, you know, clients, basically how many ads per day can you, you know, shaved, you know, and they data that goes like barbers competition in distant pidgin district. It's bizarre.
- [48:50]
Mark Baker
Yeah, yeah. I think our students are going to really enjoy that chapter. I think it's really going to help them think a little bit differently about the whole Marist period. Really certainly helped me think differently about it. You touched there on the retreat from the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s. And that takes us to the very last of the main chapters of the book. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about the chain of events that led to the demise of the urban communes and what that example tells us about the wider retreat from the Great League forward.
- [49:24]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, as I said, there were a series of practical reasons why this movement ends by 61, more or less. 61, 62. And I don't discount it. They have to do with the larger retreat of the Great Leap, the reassessment of Roy Cummins, for example. But I think it's sort of the blooming out, the explosion of those contradictions that I mentioned in the rest of the book that actually sort of doom the whole enterprise. And I think those contradictions are more visible in the case of Beijing, because Beijing takes a longer time to end. The end in Beijing is lower, it starts in 61, but they continue to sort of degrade and decay and have problems at least until 63, 64. And then by 64 you can really. There's not much to save. So what I trace, for example, is that by 60, 61 you have the assertion, the clear assertion, if there was a tension before, once it goes away, of production, productivity and accumulation of capital as the most important thing, and that was enforced by imposing a certain amount of accounting discipline or self discipline at all levels, at the level of the urban commune itself, at the level of its subordinate organization, each factory, each service center, each canteen, and at the level of each individual which had to account for their own individual productivity. And given the tension I explained that I talked about earlier, if you emphasize and almost exclusively the accumulation of capital and productivity, then all the other stuff, equality, political change, liberation, transition to communists, refrain, social relationship kind of goes out of the window. Production gets, as I say, accumulation of capital through production becomes central. And this means that, for example, there is an emphasis of simple tasks, simple labor that can easily be decentralized. So women start taking their work at home, doing sort of very trivial tasks at a piece rate wage in the house themselves. So they become like we are familiar with, for example, rural women working at the loom all the time in the wee hour, night. That's the same principle applied to factory work, basically. And that's a massive consequences for the idea of liberation, because no liberation can be achieved if you're simply adding a more factory like task. In the home, there's no service provided. Women are not workers in that congestion. Workers exist in this system only in the factory. And so for the problems of liberating them from the status of house wife into workers, it's gone. Social services become. They have to be substantially financially viable and self sustaining. And that dooms them basically because they cannot be, especially with reduced rates of attendance. So canteens start closing, childcare centers start not working and closing down. And that brings back the double cheaper burden of women's labor. So this is the process of collapse. And I tried to, to show how it wasn't unavoidable, but how it was unavoidable once you renounced to the other part, to the part of the Green Leap project that were to do with liberation, equality, transform social relationship, and you focus only on production and I tried to, in this chapter, I think at the very end I tried to point how people reacted to this waning and disappearing of the promise of liberation, especially women. And you know, I don't want to overemphasize that, but the women protested, many women protested the closing of factories that they had built out of nothing. They protested the closing of canteens because you know, children were now they couldn't feed the children, they had to go home to feed the children. They protested the collapse of allocations of services and things and products that were guaranteed under the communt. And so I mean it's difficult to see into his perspective the degree leap and the qualitization simply as a top down process that was imposed on people. But I will say it was a participatory project with massive problems and massive issues.
- [54:33]
Mark Baker
Yeah. And one of the interesting things about the last pages of the book is thinking about the ways in which the urban communes which end in a way with a whimper do have, do have a kind of legacy looking forwards over, over the next, you know, the next years and decades in terms of, you know, in terms of female, female workers in particular. But, but one or two other things as well.
- [54:57]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, they, they. I mean the common disappears. It comes in with the whimper. But one thing that I think they leave is the assumption that women work outside the home is a normal thing. And what you see in the following years, not through collectivization but through other forms of recruitment, is the massive increase of urban women who participate in work outside the home. And I don't remember the data, but it's a skyrockets by the end of the 70s, you know, it's the women workers, women workers in outside home is, becomes kind of normalized and widely practiced. And funny thing, some of these factories, the one that are, you know, productive, stay operational and some of them stay operational through the 80s, basically.
- [55:52]
Mark Baker
Good. I wonder if we've probably just got time for maybe one more question before we wrap up and I'd like to ask a big question about how we think about the Great Leap Forward and how we think about the timing of the Great Leap Forward and this question about the party trying to do everything all at once. Trying to solve the contradictions, the limitations of the first five year plan, trying to deal with all the problems of rural cooperatives and all of the older hangovers from before 1949 and all the problems of gender, wages, class. Trying to tackle all of those things with a kind of crash campaign of, you know, just massively increasing labor inputs without really increasing state inputs. So I wonder if is there a. Is there a kind of alternative scenario where something like urban collectivisation might have worked on a slower timescale? Or is there something about the transformation of social relations that means really you have to do it in a kind of rapid crash fashion?
- [57:06]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, that's a very good question and I'm not sure I have a good answer. So I think the speed of the transformation was a problem. I mean, many of these things that, you know, if when I explain to the book, there's like, you know, canteens with issues of distribution of this and the other, you know, not figuring out how to do certain things, you know, over, try to overachieve, failing or produce certain things. These are all things that could have been ironed out. And some of them gets ironed out over the years. And you clearly are in a situation in which speed is a problem, that trying to do these things too quickly is an issue because you don't have time to experiment, you don't have time to make mistakes, you don't have time to figure out how things are done. Again, this is a massive, as you point out, this is a massive project for social transformation that is something like not even in years, in months. And that's impossible. Let's put it this way, it doesn't make sense. So I think the speed is an issue. The totalizing aspect, I can't think of doing like piecemeal. I think that the totalizing aspect, however, was part of. Of a project. And I can only think it a way that you have to kind of do everything at the same time because the things are connected, because this was not. I mean, and I think that's one of. The point of the book is that we see the Gray Leap as a moment of economic hubris and complete insanity because it doesn't reflect the law of economics. But it was an economic project. It was a project of critique of the economic as we intended and produce a new form of social relationship, a new form of what the economic means under socialism. It was a completely radical rethinking of a bunch of categories that could only happen all at the same time. Because to reframe the idea of production, you need to reframe the idea of social relationship. You need to refrain the working of social relationship in reality. And then you bump into the problem, of course, of the valuation of gender, labor and things like that. So all these things are unfortunately connected. And unless you do the whole thing together, but you can't do it in like you Know the way they do it in like five months. Not even. I remember the first. The first push of the leap between August and in December, what is like, you know. Yeah, five months. It can be done, but I don't. Again, I don't think I want to rescue. And I know it's bizarre because there is a massive famine which kills a million people, and I don't discount that. But by looking at the urban side, I want to rescue the political rationality of the leap in many ways that it wasn't just insane, Obris, but it was a project with massive issues.
- [60:20]
Mark Baker
Yeah, I like that sense of the necessity of tackling things all at once, but not necessarily at quite such a breakneck speed.
- [60:29]
Venmo Advertiser
Yeah.
- [60:30]
Mark Baker
And one of the great things about Urban Revolution as a book is that it will stimulate people to think and to teach in all kinds of different ways about the Great Leap Forward, what the Great Leap Forward was, where it was, who was a part of it. So it's absolutely recommended for all listeners to take a closer look. We've only really scratched the surface of much of the richness of the chapters as we come to close. I wonder if you could just tell us what you're working on at the moment and whether you're picking up on any of the themes from Urban Revolution.
- [61:03]
Professor Fabio Lanza
So I have a vague project in mind right now. This. This book took a lot out of me at this point, and I'm thinking of a new. So I'm thinking of a strange project, and it's a transnational project in three locations. One of them, China, about the idea of the subjective, the political subjectivity of worker and the role of the factory in late 1960s, 1970s, in three places. As I say, China during the Cultural Revolution with factory experiments, workers, university, things like that. Italy with the development of workerism and Autonomia, which are factory center. Rethinking of what a worker is and what society is shaped by a factory. And potentially Detroit in the same period where similar reflection were done by black revolutionary workers, which also opens to the question of workers and race. And I was thinking of doing not exactly comparative analysis, but sort of like extrapolating similar things or reflection on the same issue or similar issues in these three cases. It's kind of a crazy project, but I don't know, the more I read about it, the more I like it.
- [62:34]
Mark Baker
Yeah. And there's been some. Some great work done recently on factories and workers in China, so it'd be great to see that in a. In a transnational frame.
- [62:44]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. And, and, and yes. And the, the, the issue for China is, I'm not sure what the archival situation is. The little I look, it's not great. But I also think that some amount of this could be done with published sources. So we'll see.
- [63:06]
Mark Baker
Good. Look forward to that. In the meantime, we're just about out of time here, so thank you for joining us on the New Books Network. A final thank you to Professor Fabio Lanza. And I will say that Urban Revolution is very reasonably priced from Cambridge in paperback. So do get your hands on a copy and we'll see you next time on the New Books Network.
- [63:27]
Professor Fabio Lanza
Thanks so much, Martin. Thank you.
- [63:29]
New Books Network Outro
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [64:10]
Jay Shetty
Spotify, It's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans, and they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip. They stay for hours. They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans.
- [64:37]
Commercial Narrator
Spotify Advertising, you're among fans.