In truth, the Manifesto of the Communist Party had already pointed out that “the proletariat will use its political supremacy” and control of the means of production “to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible,” and in particular, to develop “new industries” that no longer have a national basis and “whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations.” Nevertheless, the general problem to which Marx and Engels drew attention acquires a very special urgency in the East. Having shaken off the colonial yoke, the countries and peoples that have become independent are striving to consolidate themselves economically: they no longer want to depend on the alms or arbitrariness of their former masters; they consider it absolutely necessary to break the monopoly of the more powerful countries on more advanced technology.
In fact, we find the same orientation that we had already found with Mao in Vietnam. While the war for independence and national unity was still in full swing, Le Duan, the First Secretary of the Workers’ Party of North Vietnam, declared that the most important task after the assumption of power was a “technical revolution.” Since “the productive forces play the decisive role,” it is therefore a matter of making a thorough effort aimed at “changing the backward state of our national economy and pushing forward the development of productive forces.”
In the West, on the other hand, when the movement to support the Vietnamese revolution was growing stronger, and the influence of China was becoming more noticeable, a completely different tone was heard among the Marxist left. In Italy, Mario Tronti published a book that rapidly became a great success. One of his central theses: the socialist revolution “will abolish work. And in so doing, it will abolish class domination. The abolition of work by the working class and the violent destruction of capital are one and the same.” Tronti published his essay in 1966, the year in which the “Cultural Revolution” was breaking out in China. And at this point the comedy of misunderstandings reaches its peak. [...]
We should not forget that as early as 1937, Mao’s essay “On Practice” had taken up a motif from the Manifesto of the Communist Party, emphasizing the central importance of “activity in material production” and the development of productive forces with the aim of increasing not only social wealth but also “human knowledge.” Indeed, “small scale of production limited man’s outlook,” and because of this educational function, the activity of material production will not disappear even “in a classless society” in communism. In the West, however, the “Mao Cult” could readily be combined with the expectation of an end to work; the essay “On Practice” was often quoted but with reference only to class struggle, suppressing both the struggle for production and the struggle for scientific innovation.
In Western Marxism, the populist halving of the main slogan of the “Cultural Revolution” corresponds to the halving of Mao’s teaching. The latter felt obliged to eliminate two kinds of inequality: the inequality existing within the Chinese people, but also, and perhaps even more, the inequality that separated China from the most advanced countries. With a significantly accelerated development of the productive forces, overcoming the first contradiction also would have made possible the overcoming of the second. [...]
But in the West, the “Cultural Revolution” was distorted to become the sum total of Mao’s teaching and work, and the Chinese Revolution in its entirety was reduced to a slogan: “it is right to rebel.” The great revolutionary, already cut in half as outlined above, was now reinterpreted as an anarchist. Although anarchism had been defeated with much effort during the time of the Second International, it loudly returned in the movement of 1968.
Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo (2017).
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