Dissemination and Reception of The Communist Manifesto in Italy: From the Origins to 1945

Contrary to the predictions that after 1989 Karl Marx would fall into oblivion, Marx has returned to the attention of international scholars. One hundred and sixty years after it was written, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is celebrated as the text which contains the most formidable prediction of capitalist development on a world scale. This article considers how the writings of Marx and Engels were translated and assimilated in Italy, from its first appearance in 1889 to 1945 and, more generally, explores the misinterpretations of the fortune of Marx's works in Italy. From a close examination of the press of the newly established workers' movement and the first socialist writings, the reality of a counterfeited and theoretically impoverished 'Marxism' emerges. Antonio Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, which were published between 1895 and 1897, were the only works in Italy that offered a rigorous interpretation capable of measuring up to the European levels of Marxism. Through the historiographical reconstruction of translated works and the development of the interpretations of Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, this article considers the debate on the 'crisis of Marxism' of the late 19th century in which Benedetto Croce was the most important figure, the limitations of the diffusion of Marx's theories in the Italian Socialist Party, the struggle between reformist and the union-revolutionary revisionism of the early 20th century and the repression of 20 years of fascism.