Marzia Maccaferri is a historian at Queen Mary University of London; her research focuses on the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s thought in the British context.
In the 1970s, a reform trend in Europe’s Communist parties promised a radically democratic socialism. “Eurocommunism” sought an alternative to the exhausted Soviet model — but it was unable to answer the profound social upheavals taking place in the West.
Antonio Gramsci was twentieth-century Italy’s greatest intellectual. Fifty years ago, the English translation of Selections from the Prison Notebooks allowed his unorthodox Marxism to spread worldwide.