it becomes startlingly clear that the longest-lasting strands of Marxist discourse are those grounded in defeat, hinging on the experience of one reversal aft er another. [...]

That is how we can approach, on one hand, the statement made by Perry Anderson when he relaunched the New Left Review in January 2000:

The only starting-point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat . . . No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon . . . But if the human energies for a change of system are ever released again, it will be from within the metabolism of capital itself. We cannot turn away from it. Only in the evolution of this order could lie the secrets of another one.

And alongside it, this remark by Fredric Jameson:

The vocation of Utopia lies in failure . . . its epistemological value lies in the walls it allows us to feel around our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerest induction, the miring of our imaginations in the mode of production itself, the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself.