About il manifesto global

Three days before Christmas, in 2000, reporters at the Italian daily newspaper il manifesto assembled in the newsroom of their Rome headquarters for the usual editorial staff meeting. At the same time, a strange man approached the front door with a package decorated in holiday gift wrap and set it on the floor. The man was Andrea Insabato, a right-wing hardliner, and the gift was a bomb. But he set it incorrectly, and it erupted before he could dash away. “There was a huge explosion,” said Riccardo Barenghi, editor of the paper at the time. “The front door had been blown in, and on the landing there was an injured man in a pool of blood.” All the journalists, gathered inside for their meeting, were unharmed.Il manifesto is the kind of newspaper that makes stupid people want to blow it up.Il manifesto was founded in 1969 on the idea that truth and freethinking are more important than everything else, including profit. The paper pays for its editorial idealism in the form of lost advertising. But we more than make up for this in the support of tens of thousands of subscribers who believe a better world is possible. There are no owners (il manifesto is a cooperative), and the editor and managers are elected every four years by the employees. We maintain a newsroom in Rome and correspondents around the world, filing dispatches from Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Havana, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Until 2016, il manifesto published only in Italian. (Pick up a paper from a newsstand next time you're in Rome.) But that changed with the launch of il manifesto global, an English-language digital publication bringing translations of our reportage, news analysis and commentary to an international audience.Global is now part of a conversation about what it means to be a world citizen in a system riven with injustice and inequality. We ask cutting questions and challenge prevailing dogmas. As our former longtime editor, Norma Rangeri, wrote: “The shape of our paper, its character as an independent publication answering to no master, and our cooperative of journalists and technicians, have always been a happy anomaly, a heresy, flesh-and-blood evidence that the market is not an absolute monarch, and that we are not bound by its laws.”

Our story

After the Italian Resistance and the fall of fascism in 1945, Italians formed a robust communist party that held popular sway in the country through the 1980s. But during the worldwide cultural revolution of the late '60s, the far left began to splinter.Il manifesto was founded in 1969 as a monthly review by a group of members of the Italian Communist Party and leaders of the Italian “1968 movement” who opposed the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia the year prior and were critical of Soviet communism generally. This angered party officials, and at the end of 1969 the founders were cast out of the communist party. On April 28, 1971, il manifesto became a daily newspaper and has outlasted both the Italian Communist Party and the Soviet Union.Il manifesto has for decades been unaffiliated with any party or political doctrine, though such affiliations are common in Italy. However, we have kept the heading “quotidiano comunista” on our front page as an acknowledgment of our historical and cultural heritage. Every story told or untold is biased. We have an identity, and our reporters have points of view, but these are declared and well-known. We believe the more dubious journalism is the kind that feigns objectivity while concealing bias. You will never find orthodoxy here. And that's partly why il manifesto is still publishing every single day after half a century, surviving mostly on subscriptions and donations. We oppose the plutocracy of old and new oligarchies, imperialism in all its forms and environmental destruction. We are against dogmas, but we are resolutely for peace, social solidarity and economic justice. We advocate inalienable human, civil and cultural rights in an age of globalization that too often runs roughshod over democracy.

You can join our movement

Il manifesto global is made possible thanks to our subscribers. A subscription is just $1.99/month, which helps cover the cost of our small team. Become a subscriber