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I agree with your positive evaluation about Colletti, say, 1967-1975
(including the introduction to the Early Writings: I may personally testify
that still in 1974 and early 1975, after the Interview, Colletti was a
left-wing critic of the Italian Communist Party; the Introduction to the
Early Writings, however, was never translated in Italian, and he never
wanted it to be translated; Colletti is now a parliamentary for the Right,
and he actually he did nothing intellectually worthwhile after 1976). And
yours is a faithful description of the last chapter of Marxism and Hegel.
However, that's true that the paper on Bernstein, and the boolk Marxism and
Hegel, etc. raised a tension in Colletti, which exploded in the 1974
Interview for the NLR. Indeed, in the same last chapter of M&H Colletti
argued that Della Volpe was WRONG on indeterminate abstractions, and hence
poor against Hegel. Indeed, as Colletti puts it, the late Marx is in
continuity with the young Marx because the latter criticized Hegel for the
inversion of subject and predicate, and the former realized that capital
was based exactly, in *reality*, on thissame kind of inversion. Money,
Value, Capital *are* INDETERMINATE abstractions, against Della Volpe.
Colletti had more and more to recognize that capitalist reality was
contradictory in an Hegelian sense (in the Italian introduction to Alfred
Schmidt's book on Nature etc. he went so far as saying that Hegel was
positively important for Marx, and he spoke well of Backhaus and Reichelt,
i.e.of the new Marxian-Hegelian scholarship in Germany at the time; a pupil
of Colletti, Pennavaja, went to Germany and worked with Backhaus, and she
published in Italian the first, more Hegelian, version of the first chapter
of the first edition of Capital, as well as the Appendix on the Value Form
appended to the same edition, with a long introduction where all the
influences from Hegel were traced, the book was published in early 1976).
Colletti temporarily resolved this contradiction saying that indeed
capitalist reality was "upside down". So, capitalist reality was not true
reality. Hence, Colletti hoped, you may be both anti-Hegelian and fully
recognizing the Hegelian features of capitalist reality.
riccardo
P.S.: in my paper on Rivista di Politica Economica there is some more
considerations on this story.
At 2:22 +0100 29-04-2000, bhandari@Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari
(bhandari@Princeton.ED wrote:
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>Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 20:54:52 -0400 (EDT)
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>From: bhandari@Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@Princeton.EDU))
>To: bhandari@Princeton.EDU
>Subject: Re: [OPE-L:2932] Re: Re: Need 1 and Luxemburgs *Accumulation of
>Capital*
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>Dear Andrew,
>Somewhere in your paper you criticized Lucio Colletti's abandoning of
>Marxism as a science upon belated recognition that Marx indeed accepted
>that dialectical contradictions were at work in bourgeois reality. You seem
>to argue that a postivist philosophy of science undergirded this
>abandonment.
>1. What do you mean by positivism? In Peter Halfpenny's book, more than six
>definitions are offered, and Colletti, quite keen about the historical
>specificity of abstract labor, does not seem to demonstrate that putatively
>condemnable positivistic obsession with eternal laws of nature.
>
>2. What do you mean by dialectical contradiction? Examples of which would
>be? That capital is the product of workers but variable capital is part of
>total capital. Is that really contradictory? Or are the dialectical
>contradictions the three peculiarities of the value form? As I have been
>suggesting, category mistake may be more helpful here than dialectical
>contradiction. I look forward to looking at the beginning of Ryle's the
>Concept of the Mind when I get back.
>
>3. If I remember correctly the last few chapters of Colletti's Marx and
>Hegel book are quite brilliant. He shows that the sensuous, surpra sensuous
>nature of commodities, the centaurs, the metaphysics and theology ( all
>those things taken even by Marxist economists as mere rhetorical flourish)
>are precisely Marx's most important point--the phantasmorgia of commodity
>fetishism, as revealed by painstaking philosophical analysis, is at the
>same Marx's critique of the money driven behavior understood as the apogee
>of human rationality implicity and/or explicitly by the political
>economists (the last few chapters of Maurice Godelier's Perspectives in
>Marxist Anthropology are also quite fine in my opinion).
>
>But I don't have my books with me, so again this is how I understand Marx's
>argument
>
>--value seems to those caught up in everday life to be a unatary predicate
>of commodities though it is at least a second order predicate (I did not
>get through logic as an undergrad)
>
>--there is constant conflict between everyday understanding and
>philosophical analysis about whether value is an intrinsic or relational
>property, subject independent or relational or whether value is a property
>or predicate (I am out of my philosophical depth here, and I think is
>precisely Marx's critique of the political economists that they did not
>understand the nonsense and contradictions of the commodity world, though
>this critique seems to me to apply to most Marxist economists who simply
>gloss over what Marx is trying to do as mere literary flourish, as Colletti
>so brilliantly pointed out).
>
>--money is simply metaphysically ill-formed. That is gold stands for or
>represents (incarnates) human labor. But human labor seems to be a
>construct, i.e., an abstraction, an idealization, a conceptual object which
>is not really subject to change like actual things. Money is thus
>metaphysically ill formed in that there is an attribution of conceptual
>properties to a concrete thing and substantial properties (the properties
>of gold) are attributed to a construct. In being both thing and construct,
>money is metaphysically ill formed.
>
>I think Colletti opened up questions like this. I don't remember Martin Jay
>expressing much real appreciation in that breezy survey for the issues
>which Colletti raised.
>
>Riccardo and Chris A will doubtless have much more to say.
>
>Yours, Rakesh
>
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>From: bhandari@Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@Princeton.EDU))
>To: bhandari@Princeton.EDU
>Subject: Re: [OPE-L:2932] Re: Re: Need 1 and Luxemburgs *Accumulation of
>Capital*
>X-Mailer: Netscape Messenger Express 3.5.2 [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE
>5.0; AOL 5.0; Windows 98; Compaq; DigExt)]
>
>Dear Andrew,
>Somewhere in your paper you criticized Lucio Colletti's abandoning of
>Marxism as a science upon belated recognition that Marx indeed accepted
>that dialectical contradictions were at work in bourgeois reality. You seem
>to argue that a postivist philosophy of science undergirded this
>abandonment.
>1. What do you mean by positivism? In Peter Halfpenny's book, more than six
>definitions are offered, and Colletti, quite keen about the historical
>specificity of abstract labor, does not seem to demonstrate that putatively
>condemnable positivistic obsession with eternal laws of nature.
>
>2. What do you mean by dialectical contradiction? Examples of which would
>be...That capital is the product of workers but variable capital is part of
>total capital. Is that contradictory? Or are the dialectical contradictions
>the three peculiarities of the value form? As I have been suggesting,
>category mistake may be more helpful here than dialectical contradiction.
>
>3. If I remember correctly the last few chapters of Colletti's Marx and
>Hegel book are quite brilliant. He shows that the sensuous, surpra sensuous
>nature of commodities, the centaurs, the metaphysics and theology ( all
>those things taken even by Marxist economists as mere rhetorical flourish)
>is precisely Marx's most important point--the phantasmorgia of commodity
>fetishism, as revealed by painstaking philosophical analysis is at the same
>Marx's critique of the money driven behavior understood as the apogee of
>human rationality implicity and/or explicitly by the political economists.
>
Riccardo Bellofiore
Office: Department of Economics
Piazza Rosate, 2
I-24129 Bergamo, Italy
Home: Via Massena, 51
I-10128 Torino, Italy
e-mail bellofio@cisi.unito.it, bellofio@unibg.it
tel: +39 035 277545 (direct)
+39 035 277501 (dept. secr.)
+39 011 5819619 (home)
fax: +39 035 249975
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