Il tardo maoismo nella riflessione di Enrica Collotti Pischel

A Marxist intellectual and outstanding scholar, Enrica Collotti Pischel was the author of important contributions on the Chinese communist revolution. She dedicated a significant part of her research activity to studying not only its ideological origins, but also the developments following the seizure of power by the Chinese Communist Party, with particular attention to Mao’s ideological core and the political choices of the late Maoist period. Her writings on the Chinese reality at that time are mainly concentrated in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting her attention to the history of the present and the unfolding of the “Chinese road to socialism”, against the backdrop of the emergence in many Western countries of a new political and cultural radical season. This essay aims to offer some preliminary considerations regarding Enrica Collotti Pischel’s reading of the late Maoism, looking into the way she interpreted the developments of that period and dealt with the theme of Maoism, and whether and how the evaluation of the Maoist experience changed over time, also in consideration of a longer historical perspective.