How do we feel in the wake of political defeat?

burnout syndrome Mapping a global community of what people did next by Hannah Proctor

At 10pm on December 12, 2019, I burst into tears and didn’t stop for weeks. I spent long days campaigning for Labor during the election campaign, writing demos about the Grenfell Tower disaster and the rise of fascism, and spent years supporting Labour’s social democratic project. The magnitude of our defeat was unbearable. I ran through the Kubler-Ross cycle of sadness, skipping the denial (the exit polls were too obvious) and the bargaining (what’s the point?) and went straight to anger and depression. Around February, my tears stopped and I started to feel more energetic. I poured it into a futile attempt to stop the right from taking back the Labor Party. But my fleeting hopes of renewal were dashed by the Covid-19 lockdown, which forced me to organize against the Blair Restoration and the victorious Conservative Party’s authoritarian anti-demonstration laws. became impossible. The exhaustion I’ve felt ever since brought me down and I wondered if I would ever recover, and if so, how. Without realizing it, I had been waiting for a book like Hannah Proctor’s that was “addressed to burnt-out comrades.”

burnout syndrome This is not a guide to curing the “emotional experience of political defeat.” The book offers some recommendations from people whose movements have been shattered or collapsed, from the Paris Commune to the present, but the main consolation is that they are shared across time and space. It’s a feeling. Its chapters explore the emotions that activists commonly feel after defeat: melancholy, nostalgia, melancholy, burnout, fatigue (and “the fatigue that comes from fighting the causes of fatigue”), bitterness, trauma, and It is structured around mourning. Proctor pays close attention to the political history of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the 1871 Commune and his 1984-1985 miners’ strike, second-wave feminism and the Black Panthers, and much more. Masu. She questions left-wing criticisms of psychotherapy, which seeks to reconcile individuals with a sick society rather than encourage them to change, arguing that therapy helps people and groups understand their struggles and It highlights the times that helped prepare them for new battles. She is open to Huey Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide,” in which people subordinate their physical and mental health to exercise, which is “not a death wish, but more of a death wish.” “It expresses the desire to live in a world with less,” she says. If it might end up being destroyed along the way. Throughout the book, Proctor argues that such realism is essential for radicals if they are to avoid the psychological collapse that accompanies the rise and dash of hopes.

She also analyzes a wide range of literature and film, and considers how fiction, memoir, and documentary can give us access to different psychological aspects of vanquishing on an individual and collective level. She does this because of how certain works (particularly her 1970s Weather Underground and documentaries about the Japanese Red Army) explore the reasons for people’s reactions to defeat, and what they did next. Not just to understand, but to think about how revolutionary it was. The activity has similarities to the practice of art. Pursuing it makes oneself an outsider, with significant financial and emotional repercussions, and posthumous recognition is a poor reward for a lifetime of (often unrewarded) toil. Extreme activities, such as the process of creating or enjoying art, often cause bursts of energy. There were times when artists, writers and filmmakers tried to join the rebellion, especially in Paris in 1871 and in 1968. In his book, which was written out of “suspicion about rhetoric’s appeals to hope” after the defeat, Proctor delves into the participants’ depression, apathy, blame, and suicide. Her chapter on nostalgia made as much of an impact as her post-’68 films like Romain Goupil. Mourir a Trante Anne (Half a life, 1982) or by João Moreira Salles. In this intense moment (2017), following the work of Chris Marker A smile without a cat (1977) charted the defeats of global rebel forces by generation.

Proctor proves particularly astute in his exploration of artistic responses to the disasters of the 1970s and 1980s. She delves into the work of Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman. battle of chile (1976-9) About the Government of Popular Unity and its death in the CIA-backed Pinochet coup as a case study in how to process trauma through art. burnout syndrome How Proctor had to deal with his own personal history before tackling Chile’s national memory, and how his filmmaking exemplifies Freud’s “compulsion of repetition.” This section stands out, as it quotes Guzman as saying: A traumatic moment – ​​“back to a time before it was ruins and ashes.” Guzmán’s film cycle began as follows. Chile, stubborn memory (1997) returns from exile and interviews the people featured in the earlier films about how they survived under Pinochet’s regime, then explores the search for bodies by thousands of “disappeared” people and their relatives. I created a trilogy that dealt with it in a roundabout way.in my fantasy country (2022), Guzmán chronicles the radical upsurge in 2019, when protests against subway fare hikes turned into a revolt against the neoliberalism introduced in Pinochet’s constitution, and how feminist arts collective Las Tesis took to the streets and in films. It stood out among the Guzmán concluded on a note of hope that the constitution would change with the election of left-wing activist Gabriel Boric, but that hope evaporated amid a mishandled referendum and right-wing protests, with many It was a major setback for the last of the militants. Movements around the world in the 2010s.

The collapse of hope at the many crossroads that Proctor describes, from the defeat of the Spanish Civil War to the crushing of the Labor left in the early 2010s, does not mean abandoning the struggle. Mr. Proctor concludes by quoting Mike Davis, who argues that hope is not a “necessary imperative of polemical writing,” saying, “Fight with hope, or fight without hope, but fight absolutely.” He concluded with a prompt. The movement that Proctor and I became interested in and involved in was born out of the recognition that social conditions are bad, have gotten significantly worse in our lifetimes, and are likely to get even worse in the future. . Whether we fight this problem through activism, electoral politics, writing, filmmaking, art, or any other means, let the optimism of our will distract us from the fact that our struggle is painless. It cannot be put away. The more people write books like this, the more burnout syndromeperhaps we can overcome our suffering and continue the fight.

Burnout: The emotional experience of political defeat. Written by Hannah Proctor. Verso, £14.99 (softcover)

Juliette Jack is a London-based writer, filmmaker, and soccer player.