Rossanda, Rossana (b. 1924)
Authors: Simone Anna 
Published: September 2017

A key figure in the political and cultural debate of the Italian left, Rossana Rossanda was born in Pula in Istria (now Croatia) in 1924. A few years later she moved to Venice where she spent most of her childhood. Her family gave her a lay education. In the early 1940s she attended the University in Milan, where she met Antonio Banfi, an anti‐fascist activist and professor of history of philosophy and aesthetics. Attending his courses, she engaged in studies and researches on Karl Marx's works, read through the lens of Italian “historicism.” In the same period, the impending World War II led her to embrace the cause of militant anti‐fascism and the Italian Resistance, together with her university professor. After the Italian liberation from fascism in 1945, she joined the Italian Communist Part (PCI) and was later put in charge of its cultural department. In 1963 she was elected deputy to the Italian parliament. In 1968 she wrote her first successful book,
L'anno degli studenti
(The Students' Year), but in the summer of that year, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, she developed a critical position toward the imperialist policies of the USSR and tried to shift her attention to the forms of class struggle in the West. In June 1969 she founded and, with Lucio Magri, became co‐editor of the political review H Manifesto, which was then in opposition to the ideas of the PCI. More specifically, the review criticized the Soviet model of real socialism and its imperialist policies over Prague. Together with Aldo Natoli and Luigi Pintor, who also worked for the review, Rossanda was expelled from the PCI for joining its critical left wing. In 1971
Il Manifesto
became a daily paper, the only independent paper of the Italian left. Rossana Rossanda was its editor only for a short period, but through its columns and several important books such as
Appuntamenti di fine secolo
(Issues of the End of the Century, written with Pietro Ingrao and others) and
Brigate Rosse: Una Storia Italiana
(The Red Brigades: An Italian History) she sparked off and animated the political and cultural debate in the Italian left. For many years she has been a keen observer of Chinese communism as well as of Italian and French political and cultural processes. A friend of important intellectual figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and others, Rossanda has always taken a critical stance on justicialist policies in opposition to representatives of the Italian movement of the 1970s (such as Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, and others). Her positions, however, have always differed from those of Italian workerism and autonomism in general. Together with the
Il Manifesto
group, she attempted to combine the new subjectivities of the movement, emerging all over the world in the 1970s, with the tradition of the workers' movement connected with the PCI. In recent years Rossanda has been at the forefront of the Italian political debate thanks to the publication of her first autobiography,
La ragazza del secolo scorso
(The Girl from Last Century), which quickly became a bestseller. In it she describes her communist history, arguing that it is the only possible history of the twentieth century.