Lucio Colletti and the Crisis of Italian Marxism
The Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti was one of the outstanding postwar Marxist thinkers. But Colletti’s subsequent drift to the right symbolized a wider shift in Italy’s whole political axis as its once-powerful left-wing movements went into decline.
Lucio Colletti’s metamorphosis from Marxist theoretician in the 1950s and ’60s to right-wing parliamentarian for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in the 1990s is a complicated one. (Universal Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The name of Lucio Colletti, one of postwar Italy’s leading Marxist philosophers, encapsulates the alternation between “progress” and “reaction” that the country has experienced since the fall of fascism.
Colletti himself had intense, firsthand experience of Italy’s economic and political growth after rising from the destruction of war to became a world industrial power by the mid-1960s.
His trajectory also symbolized the subsequent period of decline — economic, political, and cultural — as the country’s whole axis shifted to the right.
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