Thanks to his mastery of the language, he was able to get a resident permit for five months, during which time he worked as a tourist guide, and later on with the French edition of the Moscow Journal, and finally at Mosfilm, where he directed film dubbing.

His experiences during his Moscow stay, in the anxious atmosphere at the beginning of the "purges" and the trials of the Bolshevik leaders who opposed Joseph Stalin, made him keep a critical distance from the Soviet Union, without actually abandoning his Communist convictions.

In the Fifties, Bettelheim began his international activities as an advisor to the governments of Third World countries; he was the spokesperson for Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, for Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and for Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria.

[3] In the Cuban debate of 1963, Bettelheim was opposed to the voluntarist ideas of Che Guevara, who wanted to abolish free market and the production of merchandise through a very rapid and centralized industrialization, morally mobilizing "the new man."

In Cuba, Bettelheim recommended a diversified economy, based on agriculture, prudent industrialization, broad central planning, mixed forms of property ownership with market elements—a pragmatic strategy similar to the "New Economic Policy" begun in Russia by Vladimir Lenin in 1922.

This debate demonstrated the profound differences which, from then on, separated Bettelheim from Marxist "orthodoxy", which considered Socialism as the result of "the development of maximum centralization of all forces of industrial production".

Inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the thought of Mao Zedong, and in cooperation with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Bettelheim was opposed to "economism" and to the "primacy of the means of production" of traditional Marxism: against the idea that socialist transformation of social bonds was a necessary effect of the development of the forces of production (liberating those bonds from them, according to Marxist orthodoxy, since private property dominates them in "bourgeois" society), he affirmed the necessity for actively and politically transforming social connections.

Bettelheim showed that after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had not succeeded in any long-term stabilization of the alliance between workers and poor peasants which had earlier been conceived by Lenin.

"Economistic" ideology (the "primacy of the forces of production"), born in social-democracy and fed by the interests of the "worker aristocracy" and progressivist intellectuals, was resurrected by the enablement of the Bolshevik Party, acting as a legitimization of new technocratic elites which established the same divisions of labor and social differentiations, as had capitalism.

This position also includes a sharp criticism of the international role of the Soviet Union whose politics of development Bettelheim saw as just another variant of capitalist accumulation models.

This theory saw a chance for a disentanglement of the political groundwork in order to practice an alternative development model, one that was not oriented towards accumulation and profit, but rather towards an economy for the everyday needs of the people, with a balanced proportion allowed between agriculture and industry.