Loosen the contradictions

To: Retort
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Cuddly-Marxist-philosophers-eulogized-by-very-rich-industrialists


Guardian
November 8, 2001


Lucio Colletti, who has died of a heart attack aged 76, was a much-loved
philosophy professor at Italian universities who dedicated most of his life
to studying and teaching Karl Marx - and ended his days as a parliamentary
deputy for the party of premier Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's richest
capitalist.

Yet in spite of those contradictions, Colletti will be remembered as someone
who tried to come to terms with the failure of the communism for which, like
so many of his generation, he had held high hopes when fascism was engulfing
Europe. As a young man eager to study philosophy, he had to wait till the
fall of fascism in 1945 before he could enrol at Rome University. He first
taught at the University of Messina, but in the early 1950s was awarded a
philosophy chair at Rome.

He joined the Communist party of Italy (PCI) but was already an irascible
comrade, particularly after the 1956 Soviet party congress, when Nikita
Khrushchev denounced Stalin. After the suppression of the Hungarian
revolution that year he was one of the 101 PCI intellectuals who published a
manifesto denouncing the party's failure to distance itself from the Soviet
Union.

The PCI's founder philosopher was Antonio Gramsci, but Colletti preferred
another Marxist thinker, Galvano Della Volpe. One of the most conspicuous
victims of the 1960s radical wave at Rome University, he had no sympathy for
the 1968 movement. In 1974 he abjured Marxism, expressing his views in an
interview with Perry Anderson published first in the New Left Review and
later expanded in Italian as a pamphlet.

He became an outsider on the Italian left just when the PCI, under Enrico
Berlinguer, was winning more electoral backing. After publication of his
Twilight Of Ideology (1980), Colletti decided that the moderate socialism
within a market society proposed by Bettino Craxi, the new secretary of the
Socialist party (PSI), might be the solution he hoped for. After Soviet
Communism's collapse and the debacle of Craxi's brand of socialism, Colletti
was ready to support the first to come along with an attractive pro posal
for a renewal of Italian society, but many were surprised that he should
have felt attracted to Berlusconi, who puts private interests before public
service.

Colletti ran in a safe seat at the 1996 elections, which Berlusconi lost. He
was re-elected this year and though he has often been critical of
Berlusconi's actions - such as the way the G8 affair in Genoa was
conducted - he remained a loyal supporter to whom Berlusconi paid tribute
after his death, praising "his courage in rejecting communism".

He is survived by his second wife, Fauzia, and their daughter Giulia, and a
daughter by his first marriage.

· Lucio Colletti, academic, born December 8 1924; died November 3 2001