The collapse of the Soviet Union had dramatic consequences for the anti-Stalinist left internationally. Far from just freeing Marxism of its association with the bureaucratic regimes of the East, 1989–91 brought a wave of capitalist triumphalism. The victory of the new neoliberal managerialism was expressed in not only the rightward turn of social democrats and ex-Communists, but also the inability of anarchists or Trotskyists to fill the “vacuum” they hoped their rivals had left behind.

While the crisis beginning in 2008 has seen episodic breakthroughs for the radical left, from Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain, there has been no revival of the old dissident-Marxist minorities. Recent years have instead seen a renaissance of Eurocommunism — the reform current that emerged in the post-1968 Western Communist parties, rejecting the most authoritarian and class-reductionist aspects of the Leninist tradition.

Having grown out of the libertarian fad that accompanied 2011’s “squares movements,” Europe’s radical left today looks more warmly on the Eurocommunist current and its intellectual forebears in the Italian Communist Party (PCI).