Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue 1981 he was in the 1950s and 1960s one of the most erudite members of Britainampampamprsquos Marxist Left being a militant within first the Communist Party then the New Left and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics and that in the wake of the collapse of the statecapitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe the powerful and optimistic revolutionary Marxist ethics of liberation he articulated in that period is arguably as salient to anticapitalist activists today as it was half a century ago.Paul Blackledge DPhil 1999 York is the author of Perry Anderson Marxism and the New Left 2004 and Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History 2006.Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood 2000 and the Deutscher Prize winning Discovering the Scottish Revolution 2003.