Take for example the prominence of Che Guevara on the streets of Paris during May ’68, or the Paris Commune’s declaration of a “universal republic”, a phrase borrowed from 1789 revolution. Yet the legacies of these struggles become part of what Walter Benjamin calls the “weak messianic power” of the past, which nurtures the revolutions of the future. Every revolutionary opportunity of the past 200 years, from 1847 to the Paris Commune, from the Spartacist Uprising to the October Revolution, ultimately ended in defeat. In Left-Wing Melancholia, Traverso makes a persuasive case that the melancholy of defeat has always been “a hidden dimension of the left” (38). As Traverso points out, “the history of revolutions is a history of defeats” (32). It wasn’t that the left was not used to dealing with the consequences of defeat.

If history’s first serious opportunity at establishing a really-existing communism had rapidly disappointed, the ultimate collapse of the project, grotesquely different from the spirit of its beginnings, felt like a historic defeat to anyone still sympathetic to the initial spirit of the revolution. What came down with the wall was not only the grim reality of a failed utopia, but also more than 200 years of continuous struggle. The impact of 9 November 1989 on the hopes of the left cannot be underestimated. The dialectic of the twentieth century was broken” (2). As he puts it, “an entire representation of the twentieth century.

It also refocused the lens through which the past was viewed. The collapse of the Soviet Union, as he makes clear, had an impact not only on the future direction of the countries of the Soviet Bloc, but also on the future of the left. Traverso sets out the argument of Left-Wing Melancholia against the background of a political landscape thrown into disarray in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Enzo traverso left wing melancholia