Metodo scientifico e democrazia rivoluzionaria. Lucio Colletti nel dibattito marxista italiano

Heavily influenced by Galvano Della Volpe’s original interpretation of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an extension of Galileo’s scientific revolution to the social realm, throughout the 1950s and 1960s Lucio Colletti defended a scientific approach to Marxism as opposed to the “Historicism” prevalent in Italian Marxism at the time. Unlike Della Volpe, however, Colletti considered scientific Marxism to be incompatible with “the Italian road to socialism” promoted by the Italian communist party. Scientific method, Colletti argued, demands all capitalist economies to be understood by referring to the “general” form of capitalism, irrespective of the alleged “backwardness” of Italian capitalism. Accordingly, the transition to socialism implies the revolutionary socialisation of the means of production in “backward” and “advanced” countries alike. Towards the end of the 1960s, Colletti reinforced this view by showing that Marx’s labour theory of value had to be interpreted as a theory of exploitation. However, the crisis of global communism and of Marxism in the 1970s led Colletti to conclude that Marx’s labour theory of value is in fact non-scientific, and that Marxism as a whole violates rather than fully instantiating the principles of scientific rationality.