UC Irvine

James Martin astutely reads the haloed place Gramsci holds in the post-war Western Marxist tradition as exactly where strident divergences in that tradition have emerged, most particularly between those who, according to him, remain mired in varying modes of left melancholia and those who have successfully mourned the loss of what we used to call the socialist alternative. My response questions the validity of this alternative by reconsidering Traverso's arguments in defence of left melancholia as a call to action, on the one hand, and by questioning why we should mourn the loss of real world socialism rather than seizing upon Gramsci's pessimistic utopianism as a way to reenergise socialist strategy in an era of escalating inequality and populist authoritarianisms.