Speaker: Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona

In the years between 1958 and 1962, the Urban Commune movement was promoted as a radical effort to change the daily lives of city residents. By inserting women into the “productive” life of factory work, the movement also aimed at achieving a new form of everyday, based on a true equality of gender relationships, one achieved through the shared creativity of manual labor. While the movement failed, it nonetheless brought to the fore some of the crucial tensions that marred the search for a socialist everyday: between participatory democracy and state hierarchy, between production and liberation, and between labor and gender equality.