This book takes a sympathetic yet critical look at China’s revolutionary and socialist culture. Its focus is on the intimate connection and tension between the writer and “labour” – a concept encompassing socioeconomic production as well as the reproduction of social relations and human life as a “species being” (p. 218). In conventional accounts, the writer under socialism is often portrayed either as a cog in China’s propaganda machine or as an exiled spirit struggling to carve out a space of autonomy. Against such a “depoliticized Cold War notion of modernity” (p. 4), and against the embrace of liberal capitalist modernity that closes off “certain possibilities” (p. 218), Kindler provocatively rearticulates the larger role of writers in socialist China. Rather than mere writers, they emerge as “cultural workers,” on par with factory workers and peasants in the fields. They labour intellectually and physically for social change as well as for self-transformation. An eminently historical-materialist thesis, this argument suggests that people are both the producers and the products of history, making history on the basis of what they think, feel and write.

Traversing the Yan’an era, the industrial campaigns of the 1950s and the radical experiment of the Cultural Revolution, the book portrays writers who strove for “a different, more egalitarian kind of society, in which cultural production was no longer the property of the intellectual as “the arbiter of enlightenment and pedagogy” (p. 2). Kindler delineates the historical vicissitudes through which writers integrated pen and body, rendered cultural work “adequate to the demands” (p. 2) of revolution, and moved to “a rhythm that would eliminate and transcend “the division between those who wrote and those who worked with their hands” (p. 2). This analysis reinstates Mao’s vision that intellectuals must integrate themselves with the labouring masses – becoming a voice that reflects their social and political conditions and concerns and directing their activity toward political action.

Going beyond literary history, the book tackles the challenges and unfinished motifs surrounding the writer–labour nexus in Chinese socialism. Though often forgotten, these motifs continue to haunt contemporary post-socialist production: the re-entrenched and ever-intensifying class divide between mental and manual labour, the rural–urban gap, gender inequality, the bureaucratic hierarchy and professionalization of writing, and alienated, solipsistic subjectivity.

In this highly theoretical study, the revolutionary vision of the cultural worker is enriched by resources drawn from early Marxist-inspired ecofeminists. He-Yin Zhen, an anarcho-socialist feminist, offered radical notions of unalienated labour and the ecological reproduction of life, seeking to abolish both wage labour and reproductive domestic labour borne by women’s unpaid service. Echoing contemporary discussions of ecofeminist care labour, Kindler recovers from early feminism a vision of the universality of female labour.

This immaterial and affective labour is presented as a transformative form of biopolitical production that creates ideas, sensibility, care and solidarity as indispensable components of material production. In Ding Ling’s apt words, such labour “generates shared feeling” (p. 217) and reshapes social and emotional bonds. Writing and culture, as material labour, operate both on the level of bare life and on bios – cultural and political striving for a good life. The writer–labour nexus thus becomes a focal point for rearticulating the Marxist notion of associated labour, in which all workers labour to meet life’s necessities while enjoying the right to the fruits of their own work. In chapter one, Kindler links the Mass Production Movement to the Rectification Movement in 1940s’ Yan’an by identifying an aesthetic of beauty in embodied labour, as well as in the mutual transformation of culture and economic production.

Writing labour, however, is “not a coherent and homogeneous political discourse” (p. 5). It is ruptured by creative, uneven and multiple temporalities arising from the everyday economic and social contexts of labour and reproduction, and from fluid social relations. Two conflicted forms of temporality – the telos of revolutionary modernity and the multiple trajectories of quotidian life – prove difficult to synchronize into a unified formula. Writing possesses its own temporalities of individuality, independence, interiority and imaginative freedom, and the imperative to force cultural activity to conform strictly to labour rhythms ultimately destroyed writers and depleted living cultural resources. Kindler diagnoses the failures of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution through the lens of discordant temporalities found in theoretical statements and literary texts. In the 1950s, the state ideological apparatus, in attempting to unify disparate temporalities, reproduced and re-stratified the old divide between mental and manual labour. Writing literature, Kindler cautions, is “work according to a complex rhythm not synchronized with the labor of factory or field” (p. 7).

While Ding Ling was upheld as an exemplar of the writer attuned to the labouring masses and social production, it is through her trials and exile that she remained committed to the intimate connection between writing and labour in her later work. Kindler aptly describes her as the last figure of Maoism in a quotidian, grounded sense. Ding Ling’s story “Du Wanxiang” marks a turn toward quotidian temporalities of maternal care and affective labour, moving away from the state-sponsored injunction of the good life.

The book demonstrates deep and nuanced theoretical engagement with key texts of Marxism and Maoism. Kindler cuts through conventional misperceptions to retrieve neglected insights and provide a revisionist understanding of art and society, writing and labour. He deftly mobilizes theoretical frameworks to illuminate the literary texts under analysis. Engaging and challenging to read, the book is an excellent text for a graduate seminar that rethinks China’s revolutionary culture.