This substantial anthology gathers papers and interventions from a 1977 Venice conference organised by the Italian communist newspaper and political group Il Manifesto.

Its central problem is one the twentieth-century left repeatedly postponed: what happens after a revolution when the institutions created to secure socialism begin suppressing the people in whose name they govern? The contributors ask whether these tendencies were already embedded in the prevailing theories of party, state and revolutionary power.

The range is unusually broad. Louis Althusser addresses the crisis of Marxism; István Mészáros examines political power and dissent; Rossana Rossanda considers opposition within post-revolutionary societies; while contributions on Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Eastern Europe, churches, intellectuals, workers’ movements and political prisoners force abstract theory against historical experience. The presence of dissidents alongside Western Marxists gives the collection its productive instability: nobody gets to preserve a clean version of socialism by assigning all failure elsewhere.

Published at a moment when Eurocommunism, the Prague Spring’s aftermath and Soviet dissidence had made orthodox loyalties increasingly untenable, this is less a unified argument than a record of the left interrogating its own machinery. Dense, historically specific and still sharply relevant wherever emancipatory movements acquire institutions, hierarchy and police powers. The revolution eats its children; this book asks whether the recipe was in the manifesto.

Ink Links, 1979. First English-language edition, translated from the 1978 Italian publication. Paperback. Good condition with pronounced creasing and rubbing to spine, edge and cover wear, and light page toning; binding remains intact.