PARTISAN
REVIEW
245
dictions. (This clearly was one aspect in the struggle between Mao
and Liu Shao-Chi, whom Mao saw as ignoring the contradictions of
socialism itself.)
Western Marxism, unlike Maoism, was developed in a Christian
culture whose everyday life has long been sedimented with millenarian
religious fantasies often sublimated into a political vision of some final,
climactic coming. Western Marxism's conception of socialism and
communism have rested tacitly upon the millenarian and other back–
ground assumptions characteristic of Christianity. Maoism, however,
is the first Marxism that matured in a non-Christian civilization.
Nourished in a deteriorating Confucian culture that has no concepts
of salvation or of an afterlife, and which is oriented to an immanent
order rather than one that is transcendental, Maoism is the most realis–
tic of Marxisms.
It
regards those Marxists who think socialism devoid
of contradictions as naive if not as faintly uncivilized.
There are, of course, various other conditions under which a
theory may undergo change. One of these is when the social strata
that had created and had fostered the theory itself changes or passes
away. And so it is with Marxism. It is not only the change in the
everyday life of industrially advanced societies, and not only its move
from the everyday life of a Christian to that of a Confucian society,
but, also, a change in the social strata with which Marxism has been
intimately associated that promises a radical change in Marxism. Here
I refer
not
to the passivity and accommodation of the
proletariat
and
its failure thus far as the promised historical agency of socialism, but,
also, to the changes and crisis of the
intelligentsia,
the social strata
by which Marxism was created, that brings us to the deepest level in
the crisis of Marxism.
The most profound indication of this development is to be found
in the societal re-mapping proposed by Maoism which has sought to
lay the groundwork for the elimination of the academic intelligentsia.
As
Robert Guillain remarks in
Le M onde,
"It
is no over- simplifica–
tion of the massive series of reforms [of the "Cultural Revolution"]
... to say that their key objective - defined by Chairman Mao
him–
self - is the elimination of the 'academic intellectual.'"
As
the in–
tensity of the Red Guard movement subsided, it became increasingly
evident that the elimination of the academic intelligentsia was one of
the most important items on the agenda of the Cultural Revolution.
