Rossana Rossanda, who died aged ninety-six in September, was one of the figures who did most to inspire and lead Italy’s dissident-communist manifesto group. Its peculiar history, especially after its main leaders were kicked out of the Communist Party (PCI) in 1969, was characterized by its new and original approach to the role the working-class party should play in the process of political and social transformation. In particular, its discussions set this theme in relation to the mechanisms that could drive the formation and definition of political consciousness among the working class itself.

Such debates returned attention to the tangled question — a fundamental issue ever since Lenin’s 1902 text What Is to Be Done?  — of the relationship between spontaneity, consciousness, and organization. Italy’s 1970s were an especially important testing ground for these debates, given both the upsurge in working-class militancy and the hesitating response of the near-two-million-member PCI. But even within the manifesto group this gave rise to two essentially different political-strategic proposals, as articulated by Rossanda and her comrade Lucio Magri, best known to Anglophone audiences as author of The Tailor of Ulm.