Lucio Colletti, the Italian philosopher and political theorist, is a pupil of the late Galvano Della Volpe, whose interpretation of Marxism he has developed and extended in a number of important essays, including introductions to the Italian translations of Il’ienkov’s Dialectic of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital and of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (the latter, together with other material, has recently appeared as a book: Il Marxismo e Hegel, Editori Laterza, Bari). In the early fifties as a militant in the Italian Communist Party, he collaborated in the production of the journal Società until its closure by the pci in 1957. More recently he edited the non-party monthly La Sinistra from its foundation in late 1966 until it became a weekly at the beginning of 1968. Throughout his career he has developed a consistent left-wing critique of the policies of the pci and of the Soviet camp, as the essay we publish here shows.