![]() ![]() ![]() He argues, however, that such melancholia has always been a feature of leftist thought and that it can be generative: melancholy has prompted revolutionary movements, stirring leftists to try to redeem those that struggled and failed before them. Melancholy still floats in the air as the dominant feeling of a world burdened with its past, without a visible future” (pp. 18-19). ![]() Traverso captures such feelings succinctly: “new collective hopes have not yet risen above the horizon. As Enzo Traverso describes in the opening moments of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, the collapse of “actually existing” socialism symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the hegemonic consolidation of neoliberalism has rendered the idea of a socialist alternative to the present order anachronistic, a utopian holdover from another era best placed in a museum to collect dust. Marxists in the United States and Europe often claim it is easier for people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Published on H-Socialisms (January, 2018) ![]() Reviewed by Sean Cashbaugh (Stevens Institute of Technology) New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. ![]()
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