An interview with Enzo Traverso: “The Left is a history of defeats”

The failures of the Left:  “And even when revolutionaries did manage to overthrow the established powers-that-be, things almost always went badly… That is why melancholia is a fundamental dimension of left-wing culture. It was long repressed by a dialectical vision of history: however painful defeats were, they never put in question the idea that socialism was the inevitable horizon. History belonged to us. That allowed us to get over defeats. Today these resources are exhausted and left-wing melancholia is coming back out into the light of day.”