For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton's radical vision is poetry in motion

Is this pessimism?", TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. "Well, yes." How else, he wonders, "are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance... and the almost complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful?"

- Kenan Malik

Published originally in the New Left Review, the essay is part of Those Passions, a new collection of Clark's work. Clark is not a political theorist but a historian of art. A Marxist, much of his work explores the interface of art and politics with considerable nuance and depth, illuminating artists from Bosch to Pollock, Rembrandt to Lowry.

The final section of the collection includes more straightforwardly political writing. For a Left with No Future is the weakest of the essays, whether on art or politics. It is nevertheless perhaps also the most significant, for not only does it provide a new perspective to much of Clark's other work, it also addresses a particularly keen question for our time - how should the left deal with its failure? In its pessimism and world-weariness, it seems to speak to many today.

The title, Those Passions, is taken from Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias, an exploration of the inevitability of oblivion, a description of a half-buried statue of a once-great pharaoh of a once-great empire: “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

That desolate landscape is, for Clark, a metaphor for modern civilisation, made barren by consumerism and the reduction of all to a “spectacle”. Even more, it is a poetic description of the terrain in which the left finds itself. “If the past decade or so is not proof that there are no circumstances capable of reviving the left in its 20th-century form,” he asks, “then what would proof be like?”