The urban and rural collectivization campaign of the Great Leap coincided with a nation-wide debate on the law of value, bourgeois right, and the socialist economy. This chapter demonstrates how what appeared to be an abstract discussion among economists, social scientists, and party theoreticians was in fact intimately connected with and relevant to the praxis of urban collectivization. This was neither the case of a theoretical position or an ideological argument at the top fueling a policy change at the bottom, nor that of a political experiment at the street level which needed to be justified and rearticulated at the level of Marxist theory. Rather, the two aspects – as it often is for Marxist politics – were interdependent, co-determined, and yet always in a state of profound tension. Understanding the Great Leap Forward requires insights into both theoretical abstraction and the world of quotidian praxis.