The nostalgic fall-golden-age narrative is right-wing, not Marxist, in origin.

Evidence

A nostalgic-Utopian triad thus emerges which is handily identified as the Marxist “vision of history”: a golden age before the fall, that is to say, before capitalist dissociation, which can optionally be positioned where you like, in primitive communism or tribal society, in the Greek or the Renaissance polis, in the agricultural commune of whatever national or cultural tradition before the emergence of state power; the “modern age” or in other words capitalism; and then whatever Utopian vision can be appealed to replace that. But the notion of a “fall” into civilization, the modern, the “dissociation of sensibility,” is rather, unless I am mistaken, a feature of the right-wing critique of capitalism which preceded Marx, and of which T. S. Eliot’s view of history is still the most familiar version for humanists; while the Marxian conception of a multiplicity of “modes of production” makes this nostalgic and triadic narrative relatively unthinkable. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 727

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that the triadic fall narrative often attributed to Marxism actually derives from the pre-Marxist right-wing critique of capitalism, e.g. T.S. Eliot.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘decline narrative’ in cultural criticism (Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility) is inherited right-wing thought, useful for the parody/pastiche versus waning-of-affect argument.