| Abstract | This began as a review of Enzo Traverso's Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History and Memory. But a review is usually a conclusion, the verdict on a closed book. This is, in fact, the beginning of something else.This is, in fact, the beginning of something else.The most raging, downwardly mobile, insecure, isolated, almost eclipsed social forces turn out to have a trump, after all.The axis of global reaction encompasses Modi, Erdogan, Putin, and now the president-elect of the United States.The history of the Left is a history of defeats.But from the crushing of the Paris Commune came, thirty years later, an age of mass socialist parties all over Europe.Even the brutal murder of left leaders from Che Guevara to Victor Jara summon mass funerals, not as a symbol of “the end of a communist hope” but as “one of its expressions”.The sudden outbreaks of collective grief over dead celebrities are not in this sense fraudulent or mawkish.For what collapsed with the disintegration of the USSR was not just an appalling dictatorship, but an “entire representation of the twentieth century” filled with revolutionary hopes.Given the drastic contraction of historical possibilities disclosed by this process, the momentous defeat of left-wing struggles and working class movements unveiled, the absence of mourning is striking.And the internalised stigma and guilt arising from the reduction of communism to its “totalitarian dimension” became, even in dissident, anti-Stalinist…
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