Rossanda was born in Pula (Croatia), then part of Italy. She studied in Milan and was a pupil of philosopher Antonio Banfi. At a very young age, she took part in the Italian resistance and, after the end of World War II, she entered the Italian Communist Party (PCI). After a short period, secretary Palmiro Togliatti named her responsible of culture in the party. She was elected for the first time in the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1963. In 1968 she published a small essay, entitled L'anno degli studenti ("The Year of the students"), in which she declared her support to the youth movement. Rossanda was part of a minority inside PCI that was against the Soviet Union, and, together with Luigi Pintor, Valentino Parlato and Lucio Magri founded the party and newspaper il manifesto. This caused her expulsion from the Communist Party after its XII National Congress held in Bologna. At the 1972 elections, Il Manifesto obtained only the 0,8% of the votes. It therefore merged with the Proletarian Unity Party, forming the Proletarian Unity Party for Communism. She later abandoned party politics but kept her role as director of il manifesto. Rossanda is currently is a member of the editorial board of Sin Permiso.

André Gorz, pen name of Gérard Horst, born Gerhard Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was an Austrian and French social philosopher. Also a journalist, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after World War Two, in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots, he became more concerned with political ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left movement. His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, just distribution of work, social alienation, and Guaranteed basic income

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. He declined the award of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." In the years around the time of his death, however, existentialism declined in French philosophy and was overtaken by structuralism, represented by Levi-Strauss and, one of Sartre's detractors, Michel Foucault.