Beyond Neo-Idealism

Colletti’s early years were typical of young Italian intellectuals during the 1940s. During the resistance period, Colletti joined the Partito d’Azione. This was a highly influential group that included the supporters of Justice and Liberty, the anti-fascist organization founded in exile by the liberal socialist Carlo Rosselli.

His philosophical apprenticeship came in the shadow of the great masters of Italian neo-idealism. Colletti graduated in 1949 from La Sapienza University in Rome under the supervision of Carlo Antoni, one of Benedetto Croce’s greatest pupils, with a thesis on “The Logic of Benedetto Croce.” The neo-idealism of Croce and Giovanni Gentile had been under pressure for some time, with the emergence of new philosophical currents such as existentialism, neopositivism, and pragmatism. It also found itself in the sights of Palmiro Togliatti, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Togliatti was promoting a new cultural policy that could attract the sympathies of intellectuals who were escaping the orbit of Croce and Gentile. In line with Antonio Gramsci’s analysis in his Prison Notebooks, Togliatti saw Croce as the supreme ideological guarantor of the alliance between Italy’s southern landowners and the capitalists of the North. According to this perspective, neo-idealism had been able to establish its cultural hegemony in the late nineteenth century because neither of its main rivals — the positivism of the democratic bourgeoisie and the vulgar materialism of the first Italian socialists — had provided a general conception of Italy’s complex history and the short-term objectives dictated by the construction of a recently unified state.

Togliatti thus gave Italian Marxism a “historicist” stamp, because he understood it to be reconstituting the link between past and present, between liberal and democratic attempts at renewal during the Risorgimento and the subsequent efforts of Italy’s communists and socialists during the Resistance and the postwar reconstruction. This line was to become the banner of a new “national” and “popular” culture, around which one could gather the aspirations of intellectuals as well as the masses of factory and farmworkers.

Marxism as Science

However, the Colletti who became a member of the PCI in 1949–50 was not attracted by this “historicist” reinterpretation of Marxism. As he later recalled, he believed that it was necessary to take sides between the United States and the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War and the eruption of conflict in Korea. Philosophically, it was not Gramsci who inspired him but the Vladimir Lenin of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, a work in which the Soviet leader had defended the reality of matter beyond any subjective projection.

Reflecting on his time as a PCI member, he described it as “an extremely important and positive experience” that he would not change even if he had the chance to live his life over again:

The first importance of militancy in the PCI lay essentially in this: the Party was the site in which a man like myself, of completely intellectual background, made real contact for the first time with people from other social groups, whom I would otherwise never have encountered except in trams or buses. Secondly, political activity in the Party allowed me to overcome certain forms of intellectualism and thereby also to understand somewhat better the problems of the relationship between theory and practice in a political movement.

Colletti’s adherence to Leninism is very visible in his first articles, which were published in an important theoretical journal of the PCI, Società. Colletti used a pseudonym, Giovanni Cherubini, as he was working at the Italian Foreign Office during this period. Yet his Leninism did not amount to dogmatism: for Colletti, Lenin’s work had to serve as a tool for criticizing contemporary philosophical currents. His 1952 essay “Strumentalismo e materialismo dialettico,” for example, used Lenin’s realism as an antidote to John Dewey’s pragmatism, which studied the interaction between human beings and nature without reference to class relations and the transformation of the means of production.

The turning point in Colletti’s intellectual career came with the publication of Logic as a Positive Science by Galvano Della Volpe in 1950. He quickly became a follower of Della Volpe, who had been a critic of neo-idealism since the late 1920s. But it was only after World War II that Della Volpe formulated his original philosophical position. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of Karl Marx’s youthful works such as the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, On the Jewish Question, and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Della Volpe saw Marx as the “Galileo of the moral world” because he had transported the experimental method of the natural sciences to the historical and social sciences. Both Galileo and Marx made use of the circle of induction and deduction: by collecting a mass of empirical material, they had risen to a set of simple abstractions and determinations, from which, as natural laws, they returned to the same empirical material with which the circle had begun.

Colletti took up and extended the ideas of Della Volpe, notably in two works: his introduction to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (1959) and “Marxism as Sociology” (1959). In the former, Colletti attacked the metaphysics constructed around the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (“sublation”), arguing that Hegel neglected the primary task of any theory of knowledge: explaining how knowledge is formed when starting from two different sources — sensibility and intellect, being and thought — the products of which are complementary.

For Colletti, if Marxism wanted to have a philosophical basis, it needed to stop looking to Hegel, as Engels did in his Dialectics of Nature and Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks. Instead, it should turn decisively toward Immanuel Kant.

Colletti knew that this was not the first time in the history of Marxism that the cry Zurück zu Kant (“Back to Kant”) had been raised. In the period leading up to World War I, amid the “crisis of Marxism” associated with Eduard Bernstein’s critique of Marx, there had already been an appeal to Kant by figures such as Karl Vorländer, who supplemented historical materialism with the finality of the will, or Max Adler, who sought to replace the dialectical materialism of Engels and Georgi Plekhanov with a “critical” epistemology grounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Colletti’s Kant is also the philosopher of the Critique of Pure Reason. Yet in contrast with Adler, he does not draw from the Critique an explanation of the genesis of our judgments. His Kant is the “materialistic” one of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. From Kant, Marxism can learn how to gain access to the natural sciences but not to the historical-social or moral sciences, for which Marx has already created the fundamental concept: the “social relations of production.”

What are the “social relations of production”? In “Marxism as Sociology,” Colletti defines those relations as the production of things (the relationship between man and nature) in an organic and unitary bond with the production of human relations (the relationship between men and other men). Outside this nexus, which is always historically determined, one can only find the indeterminate abstractions of naturalism and Darwinism, which put the production of things outside the production of human relations, and of historicism and idealism, which put the production of human relations outside the production of things.

Leaving the PCI

Looking back from the 1970s, Colletti insisted that he had never subscribed to the personality cult built up around Joseph Stalin. His reaction to Stalin’s death in 1953 was very different, he recalled, from that of most communist or pro-communist intellectuals: “They felt it as a disaster, the disappearance of a kind of divinity, while for me it was an emancipation.”

This shaped his response to Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing the crimes of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956: “While most of my contemporaries reacted to the crisis of Stalinism as a personal catastrophe, the collapse of their own convictions and certitudes, I experienced Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin as an authentic liberation.”

The events of 1956 had a profound impact on Colletti. He assisted with the drafting of the Manifesto of the 101, a document criticizing the position of the PCI on the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Yet he remained active in the cultural life of the party during those years. From 1957, he belonged to the editorial board of Società, a theoretical journal linked to the PCI, later closed down in 1962 for its “extremist” tendencies.

Colletti ultimately left the PCI in 1964. He gave the following explanation for his departure a decade later:

My decision to leave was the result of the overall evolution of the Party. In one sense, the process of renovation for which I had hoped after the Twentieth Party Congress had failed to occur — but in another sense it had occurred, in a patently rightward direction. I slowly came to realize in the period from 1956 to 1964 that both the Soviet regime itself, and the Western Communist Parties, were incapable of accomplishing the profound transformation necessary for a return to revolutionary Marxism and Leninism.

In 1966, he founded La Sinistra, a monthly publication that found sympathy with left-wing socialists and communists as well as the growing subculture of student protest. La Sinistra urged support for the great anti-imperialist battles unfolding in countries like Cuba and Vietnam and called for the intensification of workers’ struggles.

His political thought drew on the ideas of Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, stressing (like Trotsky) the necessarily international character of socialist revolutions and (like Luxemburg) the new, democratic relations of production that ought to spring from them. He was indicating more and more clearly his distance from Della Volpe, who in the 1960s had argued for the continuity between liberal democracy and socialist democracy.

We can measure the distance between the two men by looking at their interpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While Della Volpe sees Rousseau as the link between bourgeois-democratic and socialist freedoms, Colletti presents him as the theoretician of Jacobin, revolutionary democracy, to whose political thought Marx and Lenin merely added greater consideration for the economic foundation of every political regime.

Communal and Commercial Modes

Colletti’s philosophical distance from Della Volpe also increased. In the second part of his book Marxism and Hegel and his introduction to Marx’s Early Writings (1971), Colletti chides Della Volpe for the purely methodological character of his Marxism, as a tool in the service of both the natural sciences and the historical-social sciences. His deeper exploration of the concept of “social relations of production” made him realize that cooperative relations between humans are a constant throughout history. What changes between one mode of production and another are the modalities with which these relations are articulated.

For Colletti, who was now very close on this question to some theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, there are essentially two modes for distributing wealth and organizing social cooperation. The first is a communal mode, in which the distribution of the means of production and exchange is consciously decided ex ante (in the examples given by Marx: the ancient Indian commune, the medieval patriarchal family, the communist mode of production). The second is a commercial one, in which the means of production and exchange are distributed a posteriori, through the circulation of commodities mediated by money.

In the latter mode of production, however, something strange happens: individuals are independent of each other but also independent of the social nexus that still holds them in its thrall through money. This amounts to saying that individuals are independent of each other inasmuch as they are dependent on the social nexus, on the market, and on the general circulation of commodities.

What makes this possible is an abstract quality of the commodities, their value, which is in turn produced by one of the two properties of labor under the capitalist mode of production: abstract labor. This was the situation that Marx described in Capital in the section on the “fetishism of commodities.”

During this phase of his development, Colletti derives some very significant consequences from this. First, it is not possible to identify the abstraction only in methodological terms (as Della Volpe did) without finding it again in the actual reality of capitalism. Second, if men depend on the abstract labor of the market, without deciding for themselves how, how much, and what to produce, then abstract labor is also alienated labor.

Finally, if individuals are at the same time and in the same respect both independent and dependent, then society is riven by a real contradiction. When Hegel depicted the destruction of the finite by the infinite, he was not describing reality in general but rather the specific reality of modern capitalism — a reality standing on its head, inverted, alienated.

Science and Revolution

The problem at this point for Colletti became immediately political. If capitalism is based on an inversion of reality and not simply an unequal relation of power at the economic and political levels, then this inversion has to be inverted in turn through a revolutionary process. Yet in Italy and other European countries, the explosion of 1968–69 did not lead toward the elaboration of a new revolutionary strategy.

The Italian Socialists remained divided from the Communists, while the “New Left” shattered into a myriad of groups and parties that promoted various ideologies — workerist, romantically anti-capitalist, Third Worldist, and neo-Stalinist — none of which Colletti found attractive. Colletti himself was a target for criticism from the students of 1968, some of whom even scrawled the message “Hang Colletti” on the walls of his faculty.

This was the starting point for a laborious revision on Colletti’s part of his whole outlook. One lively document of this reassessment is the interview that he conducted with Perry Anderson in 1974. Colletti renounced “the dogmatic triumphalism with which I once endorsed every line in Marx” and argued that his generation of Marxists had not come to terms with the flaws of Marxist economic theory:

Not only has the falling rate of profit not been empirically verified, but the central test of Capital itself has not yet come to pass: a socialist revolution in the advanced West. The result is that Marxism is in crisis today, and it can only surmount this crisis by acknowledging it. But precisely this acknowledgment is consciously avoided by virtually every Marxist, great or small.

In an essay that Anderson’s New Left Review translated the following year, “Marxism and the Dialectic,” Colletti rejected the idea of dialectical contradiction as unscientific. Since Marxism relied so heavily upon this idea, he argued, it could not be considered a science.

For Colletti, the most recent developments of Marxism by figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser offered further confirmation of this: they served only to separate it irrationally from the requirements of a technically advanced society, in which science has become the main productive force. Revolution is not possible, not because we lack the necessary tools of political transition but because the science that should guide it is not really a science — it is a romantic construction.

Return to Liberalism

Seeking to establish an organic nexus between science and revolution, Colletti retraced with great rigor the fundamental concepts of Marxism, from the “relations of production” to “alienation” and “contradiction.” His attempt to do so was comparable to that of three other great philosophers of Western Marxism: Althusser, Karl Korsch, and Georg Lukács. At some points, Colletti demonstrated a greater will than any of this trio to test the coherence and validity of theoretical assumptions all the way.

Yet one must ask if, in a nonrevolutionary or counterrevolutionary phase like the one that has characterized the capitalist West since the mid-1970s, we should seek the verification of a revolutionary theory like Marxism in its capacity to bring about the transition to a higher social formation. Colletti seems to have believed that it could, grounded in the rationalist and Enlightenment outlook that conferred a special appeal on his best writings.

However, critical rationality and the heritage of the Enlightenment gradually became for Colletti only a polemical tool to be used against any romantic construction, no longer a way of fostering an intellectual effort to reflect social and historical contradictions. In this way, the Enlightenment returned to the liberalism that Colletti had previously channeled into the project of a more complete socialist democracy. The powerful emancipating surge of 1968 ended up cramped in the liberal modernization of Craxi and Berlusconi.