[D66] Left-Wing Melancholia

[A.O.]

    Mourn, and Organise! A review of /Left-Wing Melancholia/ by Enzo
    Traverso

By Samuel Earle.

Left-Wing Melancholia review

Enzo Traverso, /Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory 
<https://cup.columbia.edu/book/left-wing-melancholia/9780231179423>/ 
(Columbia University Press, 2017)

One hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, we can look back and 
reflect on the strange, sad – some may say even sacrificial – role that 
the Soviet Union would play in both world history and capitalism’s future.

During the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s war effort ultimately 
rescued Western civilisation, its chief antagonist, from Nazism, an 
initial ally. The Soviet Union raised the red flag in Berlin months 
before Hiroshima, were responsible for three-quarters of the Germans 
military losses, and suffered an unparalleled ten million military 
deaths of their own.

But then in the war’s aftermath, having saved liberal capitalism from 
fascism, the Soviet Union may well have saved liberal capitalism from 
itself. The Soviet Union awakened Western leaders and economists to the 
need for economic planning and welfare provision, without which – from 
Keynesianism to the New Deal – modern capitalism would barely be 
imaginable. It was an ironic fate for a state that sought to overthrow it.

But the Soviet Union’s lasting legacy would run deeper still. Finally, 
through its violent descent into despotism and eventual collapse in 
1989, the Soviet Union would not only discredit the ideals of revolution 
and communism on which it was founded, it would also affirm its 
arch-nemesis, capitalism, as the definitive answer to how societies are 
organised. The Berlin Wall fell and with it, an entire representation of 
the world. There were no longer alternatives to capitalism; it was the 
end of a contradiction, some said of history.

This symbolic shift wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union, 
described by the Italian historian Enzo Traverso in his important new 
book /Left-Wing Melancholia/, threw the left into an existential crisis. 
Once characterised by the strength of its convictions, the left found 
itself submerged into a state of self-reflection and mourning – a state 
where, in the eyes of many, it still remains. Robbed of its /telos/, a 
clear endpoint, the left’s utopic imagination was emptied, hollowed out, 
and in its place there lingered only a sense of loss: the loss of a 
political movement, of an historical moment, of a dream – a dream that 
had not simply been destroyed but that had also, in light of the Soviet 
atrocities, become a sin.

Traverso calls this condition “left-wing melancholia”: the overwhelming 
feeling of a movement still burdened by its past, and without a visible 
future.


http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mourn-organise-review-left-wing-melancholia-enzo-traverso/


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