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<h2>Mourn, and Organise! A review of <em>Left-Wing Melancholia</em>
by Enzo Traverso</h2>
<p>By Samuel Earle.</p>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84439"
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Melancholia review"
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<p style="text-align: center;">Enzo Traverso, <em><a
href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/left-wing-melancholia/9780231179423">Left-Wing
Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory</a></em> (Columbia
University Press, 2017)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>This symbolic shift wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
described by the Italian historian Enzo Traverso in his important
new book <em>Left-Wing Melancholia</em>, 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 <em>telos</em>, 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.</p>
<p>Traverso calls this condition “left-wing melancholia”: the
overwhelming feeling of a movement still burdened by its past, and
without a visible future.</p>
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