The author provides a review of the events of the Gramsci centenary. He discusses in detail the addresses delivered at the Gramsci conference in Formia in 1989, enumerates the schools of Gramsci research in Italy, reviews the reception of Gramsci in Hungary and reports on the Gramsci conference held in Szeged in 1991.

Similarly to Abascal-Jaen, Löwy too, discusses the Vatican's relationship to capitalism and analyses the encyclical letter called Centesimus Annus. He interprets the role of the Church as a third force in the context of capitalism-socialism, and he too, arrives at the final conclusion that the anticapitalist remarks of the encyclical letter do not offer an alternative but rather serve the easing of the existing capitalism and thus its indirect justification.

In connection with the Hungarian edition of I. Deutscher's book on Stalin, the reviewer underlines three circles of problems: the analysis of Stalin's personality, the social-institutional background of Stalinism and the integration of the Stalinist "primary accumulation of capital" into the idea of world system, stressing the important role played by the war culture of modern capitalist civilisation, that is agression as industrial enterprise and intellectual product.

The author sees the collapse of the East European systems as advantageous from the point of view of the future of left-wing thinking. Similarly to Betto, he too points to the common roots of Christian and Marxist norms whose essence is the inseparable unity of solidarity and individual autonomy and he juxtaposes this to the other line of thought of the age, the nationalism involving the interests of multinational capital.