Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century

Review | Burnout

Samuel Kelly

Samuel Kelly reviews Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, a timely exploration of the emotional toll of political struggle, offering ways to navigate despair and sustain hope in our movements. 

In Burnout Hannah Proctor provides – amongst many other things – an account of the work of psychiatrist Robert Coles. Coles drew ‘on his observations of ‘veteran activists of the civil rights movement in America,’ [to] describe the ‘exhaustion and despair’ produced by sustained political organising.’

In this section, Proctor describes Coles’ argument that it was a loss of hope and a sense of powerlessness that generated burn out, frustration, and exhaustion within social movements. A quote from one of his interviewees reads ‘I feel betrayed by the movement, and I guess it’s easier to get angry at [the movement] than at the white world. […] my hate for the movement is a release.’ The feeling of betrayal is ubiquitous in our moment of struggle and the choices for your avenue of release ever proliferating. 

Betrayal may, in fact, be the defining mood amongst the British left since the total destruction of the socialist project within Labour. Perhaps there has never been so many ways to lash out at others within and beyond your movement too. The furious pleasure of a letter to the editor no longer requires you to actually write, stamp, or post your thoughts, simply fire away on your choice of website. Despite a handful of (what we might call) victories, such as electoral gains for independents at the last election and a revitalised Palestinian liberation struggle, there is no shortage of the kinds of defeats that generate this desire for release.

‘When movements are crushed, strategies fail, solidarity crumbles, energies wane, people turn on one another’, Proctor writes, they ‘reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the structures they are fighting, the dejection incurred can be as psychologically profound as the elation that preceded it.’ This is one aspect of burnout, a term that refers to the various forms of exhaustion and frustration generated by political struggle. 

There are no obvious and appropriate responses to these dynamics and Proctor doesn’t succumb to the temptation of easy answers. Rather, she provides heuristics and taxonomies – put more simply, she provides more accurate ways of describing these experiences. Terms provided in Burnout, such as ‘patient urgency’ and ‘anti-adaptive healing’ are not simply academic exercises but instead provide genuinely useful shorthand for describing ubiquitous experiences of struggle.

The descriptive and analytic tools are already being put to good work. Nihal El Aasar, writing in Parapraxis, states that the book ‘highlighted the importance of examining subjective experiences of defeat to complement material analyses.’ El Aasar builds on the work in Burnout when asking why, in the wake of the ongoing Gaza genocide, ‘the response of the Arab masses has not been sufficient to meet the political demands of the moment.’

She looks at how the counterrevolution (and subsequent political repression) that followed from the Arab Spring has led to a situation where ‘There are now young people in Egypt who have never participated in a political demonstration, voted in a student union, or filed a union motion.’ This in turn has led to ‘political adventurism, confining political expression to disparate actions that single out actors, resulting in detainment and more repression.’ In her essay El Aasar returns to chapters in Burnout which address ‘melancholia’ and ‘nostalgia’. Also included in the book are chapters on depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. The only surprising absence from this list is a chapter on anxiety, however this is addressed by the author in the acknowledgements section of the book.

Whilst many books have addressed the ‘protest decade’, most notably Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn, few have managed to grasp the emotional, subjective and experiential qualities of these years successfully. Proctor’s book is not only focused on the ‘protest decade’ or ‘the long 2010s’, her examples date as far back as the Paris Commune, but the book does feel like it’s directly addressing a transition between cycles of struggle. We might want to bookend this cycle with the 2008 financial crash at one end and the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 at the other.

Bevin’s book is one of the most vivid and widely read accounts of this period, meaning it has informed many of the discussions about the decade. In his Brooklyn Rail review of If We Burn, Jasper Bernes argues that ‘Bevins’s journalistic approach can lead us to attribute the effects of these uprisings directly to the ideas of their participants’ therefore missing the fact that ‘in mass action, effects are not the result of individual intention, first, because people act together and therefore the effects are extra-individual and second, because they act in conflict with reactive and sometimes proactive forces’.

It is exactly at the point where the individual and the extra-individual interact that Burnout is most helpful. The book is best at unpicking moments when the feelings and intentions of individual participants in struggle become part of a collective process of desire (if they were ever separate) and writhe up against the cold impersonal forces of history. It’s because of this that the insights provided in Burnout are essential in any attempt to account for the failures of the decade that precedes the current one, if not many more that precede that one too.

Another account of the ‘protest decade’ comes from The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger. Writing more recently, this time on the state of US politics, Jäger describes how, throughout the 2010s, ‘the secular decline in American membership organisations only accelerated; unions, clubs, associations, political parties and now—spectacularly for American life—churches continued to lose members.’

In an echo of Nihal El Aasar’s description of younger Egyptians, Jäger described the problem of movements built on political engagement that is ‘low-cost, low-entry, low-duration’ or ‘political engagement as fleeting as market transactions’. If we wish to build movements on sturdier foundations, we need both an account of the limits of ‘low politics’ and a model for organising that requires more time, commitment, effort and reward. If this is the case, it’s necessary to provide resources to address the psychic stresses produced by a more committed form of organising.

In Burnout there are very few grand proclamations about periods of recent struggle or strategic interventions about what comes next. However, in arguing for an ‘attentiveness to psychic life’ that might ‘accompany or enhance militancy without embracing mainstream psychiatry’ there is an implicit suggestion that if we are to go beyond ‘low politics’ towards a more sustained and prolonged form of political struggle we need to be able to look after each other a bit better. 

In Britain people continue to build trade unions, tenants unions, mutual-aid and anti-raid networks, workers’ parties and encampments, however there is a gaping absence where a single coordinating formation should be. Despite the inroads made by independent candidates there is no suggestion of a new party formation and similarly, despite its own successes, there remain reservations about The Green Party. Essentially, we’re still caught within the conditions created by the experience of defeat. If we want to overcome these conditions, we need to be able to understand them. Burnout is as good a place to start as any in this task.

There is much to despair about the low ebb of working-class militancy and lack of political institutions in our period of struggle, however, the task of rectifying this remains. There is no way in which that happens without long and difficult discussions, meetings, and actions – numerous small wins and failed attempts. This is the gap Proctor is referring to when discussing ‘patient urgency’. The gap between the urgency of what our moment demands and the patience required to build it.

If, as part of this process, you and all your comrades read Proctor’s book, you will still disagree on things; but you might find a better way to disagree. The task is not to disaggregate the personal from the political, ignoring the distress to get on with building a movement, but to muddle your way through them with more skill, hopefully long enough to build something that might change the world for the better.

Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat is published by Verso

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