i should read again tony smith's critique of colletti before noting that colletti has had an important influence on me. first and foremost, colletti was important in resisting the emasculation of marx's theory of value: his writings checked the tendency to decouple value and money (last pages of Marxism and Hegel in which colletti so brilliantly notes the structural similarity between marx's critique of hegel's phil of right and marx's critique of the money form, as riccardo's work has reminded us), to reduce the law of value to an equilibrium mechanism (theory of crash), to treat value as a convenient fiction (bernstein essay); moreover, colletti was clear that the sraffian attempt to save marx's value theory implied its destruction. i do not think colletti was successful in saving marx's theory of value from its misinterpretation and dilution but his were important salvoes in the defense of marx's most important theoretical efforts. i also find important colletti's attempt to separate marxism from putatively radical critiques of reason or instrumental reason (such as it is embodied in technology); so for example the critiques of vitalism in marxism and hegel and marcuse in from rousseau to lenin seem to me to be important interventions against the new left, though colletti suffered from a positivist conception of science (yet i think he made a positive reference in the mid 70s or later to such a post positivist philosopher as mary hesse; and one wonders what he would have thought of a dudley shapere). colletti's reflections on the meanings of equality in rousseau's social contract and marx's critique of the gotha programme are also very insightful, i believe. rakesh
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