Abstract
This essay reviews the life and work of the Italian Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti (1924–2001). Colletti developed theories of value, aesthetics, law, and politics that are still relevant but that have been strangely sidelined, even within Marxist discourse. In the 1970s, he was described as the most important living Italian Marxist philosopher, eclipsing even such figures as Antonio Gramsci and Galvano Della Volpe. By the 1990s, he was in the arms of Silvio Berlusconi: not so much From Rousseau to Lenin, more From Marx to Berlusconi. By contextualizing Colletti's life and work, this essay suggest reasons for his rightward political trajectory and compares and contrasts his work with that of another scientific European Marxist, Louis Althusser. Colletti and Althusser engaged in a dialogue in their lifetimes, but the legacy of their joint, if conflicting, struggles for Marxism as scientific materialism lives on in today's accelerated culture as a new depression beckons.
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