BOOK REVIEW: Don't Get Burnt: Lessons From Radicals About Sustainable Organizing

Don't Get Burnt: Lessons From Radicals About Sustainable Organizing
by Brenna Silbory

While success in radical politics can provide an exquisite degree of shared euphoria, not to mention significant and even revolutionary material gains for movements and communities, defeats and disappointments are also ubiquitous. Some defeats are mundane, but others can change and separate even the most driven, committed and productive people from political work altogether through the constellation of painful experiences often summarized as "burnout."

These organizers' psychologically charring experiences and the resulting metaphorical ashes may be largely invisible to, or even exiled from, the movements whose revolutionary fires they once proudly shared. The loss in these cases is mutual: movements grow weaker with every needless organizer casualty, and people who burn out while engaged in solidarity work can suffer intensely in isolation. As California DSA State Committee member Michael Lighty put it, "Pacing ourselves as activists to ensure we are active for the long-term and have a full life that includes downtime may be the greatest challenge for deeply committed DSA activists. The temptation to be all-in all the time within DSA can mean activists burn brightly, but briefly -- moving on to other organizations, other places or out of the movement."

Is burnout inevitable given the enormity of struggle radical movements face? Is it preventable? How? Is it possible to heal burnout while continuing to fight difficult political battles? Exploring these and many related questions, Hannah Proctor's Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso 2024) is a tender historical collage of the complex and common experiences of difficult emotion among radicals across generations and continents. Its full picture poignantly depicts the very depth and breadth of humanity that ultimately motivates Left organizing for liberation and collective power. It also provides sobering, provocative and hopeful implications for advancing the sustainability and development of Left organizing.

The Personal is Political, Interpersonal, Spacial and Temporal

The concept of burnout was originally developed to describe the "phenomenon of fatigue and encroaching cynicism among people who devoted their spare time to projects that sought to transform society" particularly in the "militantly compassionate" free clinics first established in San Francisco in the late 1960s and related projects like hot lines, queer centers and crisis intervention efforts.

Critically, Burnout distinguishes between "forms of mental suffering that arise from living in the given structures and systems of the world and those that arise from fighting against those structures and systems." Starting with the Paris Commune of 1871, Proctor draws from scholarship and historical accounts as well as fiction and film, with the understanding that "the motley array of anarchists, social democrats, socialist feminists, Maoists, Communist Party apparatchiks, black nationalists, ultraleft militants and libertarians that populate these pages would have vehemently disagreed with one another on many issues."

Indeed, the scope of her study is extraordinary. Accounts from the UK and US focus on the 1960s to the present, include the Civil Rights Movement's Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), feminist collectives, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, the UK miners' strike of 1984-5, ACT UP during the AIDS crisis, Black Lives Matter, and the 2019 and 2020 campaign defeats of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders respectively, among others. Outside of the Anglosphere, the book also gleans from post-1917 Bolsheviks, Maoist land reformers in China, the Algerian anti-colonial experience, the Pinochet regime's targets in Chile, Vietnamese war survivors, Indonesian communists persecuted under Suharto, the Arab Spring's aftermath, and others around the world.

The resulting collage is more than a catalog of suffering because it is impossible to separate the hardship movement participants endured from the dynamism, collective joy, revolutionary achievements, and rich interpersonal connections that often accompanied it. However, burnout in this depiction is a commonplace, even though its thorough examination and prevention in political movements is not. The book fills a significant hole and invites further study.

Burnout is a particular threat to the most committed radicals, including individuals who achieve extraordinary revolutionary objectives. For example, among Russian Bolsheviks post-October Revolution, "After years of hardship and struggle, bodies failed, but exhaustion was also psychological, prompted by political disappointments, the disorientation of shifting from insurgent opposition to ruling elite, and, for some, despair over the course the new society was taking." Party defections and suicides were widespread, especially following purges and brutal suppression of political efforts party leaders deemed counterrevolutionary. These leaders themselves frequented Soviet sanitoria to attempt to recover from exhaustion and assorted nervous conditions.

The twentieth century's Civil Rights Movement in the United States, for all its successes, also produced widespread burnout, including among SNCC activists. According to a movement psychiatrist, their depression "frequently emerged only after prolonged periods of political engagement during which its effects were successfully kept at bay. This slow gestation made symptoms, when they finally emerged, difficult to treat." Meanwhile, the long-term, "unglamorous but necessary forms of organizing upon which political change depends" formed what SNCC's Ella Baker aptly deemed and exemplified as "spadework."

Anyone who has spent prolonged time working physical soil with a literal spade knows how it can leave you weary and aching all over. In many cases, political radicals labor against the most extreme forms of brutal, deadly and totalizing repression. The complex interplay between individual and shared experience of such repression is frequently challenging to navigate in movement circles.

Even outside of life-threatening contexts, exhaustion in political spadework can give rise to in-fighting, which further imperils group success. Bitterness can result from abusive in-group dynamics, like coercive forms of "self-criticism," objectification of radicals as mere militant "tools" undeserving of their own complex and valid emotional lives, and a multiplicity of betrayal experiences. Trauma can arise from life-changing events that overwhelm and change body and mind without adequate stabilizing support, not only due to torturous violence, but also the pressure-cooker of functioning in a relational context harshly shaped by broadly oppressive social and political forces.

Possible Antidotes

Burnout is not a self-help or how-to manual but its wide-ranging treatment of the phenomenon does provide a cornucopia of possible antidotes. By overlaying divergent communities and events across common features of political burnout like moribund meloncholia and nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning, Proctor further extracts and develops themes like "anti-adaptive healing," "patient urgency," and "mournful militancy."

Proctor follows bell hooks in declaring "her desire to ‘politicize movements for self-recovery’ by recognizing systemic causes of psychic distress." Drawing from anti-colonial, abolitionist, feminist and other scholars and Left movement leaders, she develops and advocates for the pursuit of "anti-adaptive healing." This refers "not only to the contradictory endeavor of striving to heal psychic wounds in a wounded and wounding social reality (without affirming its structures in the process), but also acknowledges the psychic damage that can be incurred by fighting to transform social reality (so as to make it less psychically wounding)." Both internal and external realities cause suffering and so shifting both are important to healing, even as it "was always already too late to be a perfect revolutionary."

In spite of her skepticism of the psy-disciplines, Proctor acknowledges that some individual psychotherapeutic approaches can bear fruit, especially those that validate and explore common experiences of (survivors') guilt and self-castigation around perceived personal "weakness" in the context of collective struggle. Though she doesn't cite it, the Power Threat Meaning Framework developed in recent years by British psychologists and mental health service users and other providers might be of particular interest to radicals seeking alternative models for understanding and healing psychic distress in the context of political repression. The Framework's starting point is to inquire how power is operating in your own life, and how it has affected you.

Framing the "conflict between social struggle and weariness [as] a conflict between urgency and patience," Proctor returns repeatedly to the theme of "patient urgency." Living in the sliptream of time is tricky. Simultaneously navigating collective trauma due to past events, the brutality of a repressive present, and demands for a more livable future requires an expansive relationship to time. The Black Panthers' "survival pending revolution" mutual aid model continues to influence movements' efforts to organize for change while easing hardship in the present. Intersectional recognition that the intergenerational consequences of capitalist repression are not evenly distributed across identities invites load-shifting away from those particularly vulnerable to burnout. Even the "respite gained from withdrawal" from grueling Left political work is only ever partial so long as the social conditions that prompted it persist. Better are efforts like the solidarity clinics set up during Greece's 2010 anti-austerity uprisings under a framework of "networked reciprocation," a form of mutual aid that recognizes "carers also needed to be cared for." Otherwise, they burn out.

IWW leader Joe Hill's defiance on his way to his execution famously gifted generations with the slogan "Don't mourn, organize!" But Proctor investigates the psychic costs of not mourning. She gently argues "militancy cannot function as a substitute for mourning but instead results from the socially enforced disavowal of grief." She advocates instead for "mournful militancy," which makes space for emotional ambivalence. Radical communities that can do this together are more likely to retain organizers than those who shame sufferers. During ACT UP's survival struggles amid the AIDS crisis, "celebratory nightlife and group experiences as forms of care" advanced collective joy amid sickness and death, making space not only for grief and love but anger sufficient to galvanize action. "When mourning is obstructed, mournful militancy smashes through the poisonous complacency of the murderous present." It is "not a lament but a demand."

Shifts in perspective also can provide portals to healing. A Pinochet regime survivor's love of astronomy and the ancient light of the stars provided a path through the time-melting features of trauma and its psychic fragmentations: "She found she could mitigate her own personal pain by looking into the galaxies which gave her a different sense of time and cycles of existence." And the "disappeared" who the regime dumped out of airplanes were part of this, even in death: "the stardust in the skies is materially no different from the fragments of bone scattered across the desert."

We are all part of an enormous, even transcendent, continuum. Even when we drop out or expire, what we are part of lives on, through each other and the worlds we build and share. This awareness opens up freedom to rest when we need to and heal as we must, without compromising our political commitments.

Burnout isn't necessary or good for organizing, and political organizations, including ours, are wise to create cultures and processes that reduce it. We can enhance, rather than undermine, our fellow comrades' well-being, even as we engage, and overcome, difficult struggles.