The essays in this volume cover a period of about thirty years, namely, the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millennium. Marked by a complex set of events, this has been a period of transition of Marxism from a rather ossified to a more flexible and open understanding. This was a time which witnessed the birth of a new kind of interpretation of socialism generated from within the Soviet bloc, identified with Mikhail Gorbachev's ambitious programme of perestroika and glasnost. Suddenly it appeared that Marxism had entered a new age, coming up with a great promise for the future. This, however, did not happen. By 1991, as the Soviet Union, together with the East European bloc, crumbled, Marxism seemed to have entered a period of unprecedented crisis across the globe. This swing of the pendulum of history put Marxism on trial, raising questions concerning its very existence, relevance and future. The situation became particularly complex when, by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, it was evident that the rise of postmodernism was a new and powerful challenge to the universalist claims of Marxism. Besides, the crisis of Marxism sparked off new debates relating to Stalinism and its democratic alternative, recognition of the revolutionary-humanist currents in the Marxist tradition, associated with figures like Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg, who have been traditionally considered as representatives of Western Marxism and excluded from the purview of official Marxism.