Questions on Revolution & Care in Contradictory Times

Sean K. Isaacs

Burnout:
The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
By Hannah Proctor
Verso, 2024, 263 pages. $24.95 paperback.

“EVER TRIED. EVER failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This line from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho could be read as the history of the Left, a history of defeats with a seemingly never-ending persistence and desire to get back up and try again.

But what happens when we don’t have the capacity to try again, when the structures of exploitation and oppression are so overwhelming that we can’t even get out of bed, let alone organize politically — and when Communist states haven’t lived up to their promises of freedom, when the organized Left has been decimated by repression, and when the continuous stream of political disappointments have left the individuals involved exhausted, depressed and bitter?

How do we deal with the ongoing trauma of capitalist and state violence while attempting to build a better world?

These questions are central to Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, a book that grapples with the emotional effects of political defeats on the individuals who have faced them, without descending into individualist psychology.

Proctor moves between multiple levels of emotional response, from the historical legacies of left-wing melancholia and nostalgia to personal experiences of depression, burnout, exhaustion and bitterness, to the need to deal with ongoing trauma while mourning political and personal loss.

While the book is built around concrete examples of these sentiments — including Proctor’s own experience with depression and burnout — it constantly returns to the dialectical relationship between the subjective and objective.

For Proctor, subjective experience is internal to broader, structural conditions and current forms of resistance to oppression and exploitation, and she consistently returns to the core question of how to change the world, all the while acknowledging the psychological and emotional barriers to political activity.

Patient Urgency

Proctor suggests “patient urgency” both as a way of describing the uneven temporalities of social and political change and as a political imperative, a way of engaging in efforts to make the world better while reducing the harm done to ourselves in the process.

She insists that patience is necessary, even as the need to act becomes more pressing. The book weaves between these multiple and diverse rhythms, showing that while the time of revolution may be a quick, sharp break with the status quo, the time of individual healing and change can be much slower and longer.

These times are themselves placed in relation with the standard time of capitalist life, and Burnout shows the contradictory nature of these temporalities, with an emphasis on the tension between the desire for change, the need for individual and communal forms of care, and the violence of capitalist society.

Proctor acknowledges these temporal contradictions internal to capitalism and traces them by examining a variety of social movements and their responses to political defeat. In a chapter on depression, she considers her own experience following a move to Berlin and, while acknowledging that it was preceded by a period of intense political activity, insists that attempts to link her depression with political burnout seemed too easy.

Indeed, she argues that feelings of depression sever such a connection between the past, present and future. Of course, this does not deny the connection between the experience of depression and structural forces, and it is precisely this relationship that Proctor illuminates.

In an engagement with the revolutionary events of 1968, the slow, mundane time of the capitalist present is contrasted with experiences of intense political activity and social and personal transformation. The latter brought about “a temporal shift and a sense of euphoria” (82) for those involved, where the time of revolution represents a break with the ordinary time of daily life under capitalism.

Yet, once the movements of ’68 were defeated, many participants found it difficult to cope with the return to the normalcy of capitalist temporality. While some were able to find a place in the system that they struggled against, others were unable or unwilling to reincorporate themselves into society — they couldn’t adjust their transformed rhythm to the time of capital, leading to despair and depression.

Healing Beyond Therapy

Instead of pushing aside the potentially devastating feelings of depression and the all-too-real trauma that can result from intense political engagement, Proctor proposes “anti- adaptive healing,” a process of acknowledging the emotional damage endured through struggle against structural and institutional forms of violence, “without affirming its structures in the process.” (16)

This requires going beyond therapeutic solutions, which individualize traumatic symptoms, and moving towards collective recognition of emotional harm and community-based solutions that can be undertaken alongside and as a part of the ongoing, broader movement seeking to transform society.

While the book doesn’t go into much detail in terms of concrete proposals, Proctor points towards a few examples, including the networks of community care that were established during the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, as well as forms of mutual aid employed by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

While acknowledging that creating and sustaining these networks of care can itself be a cause of burnout, Proctor insists that they are necessary.

This demand for care and militancy is itself an acknowledgement of the multiple temporalities internal to social movements. Returning to the need for urgent patience, Proctor shows that the sharp, fierce time of revolution needs to be tempered by the longer, slower and gentler time of care.

While protests and riots in the streets create temporal breaks in the present, they also represent the possibility of healing past trauma caused by histories of oppression and exploitation. In this sense, political struggle is both a demand for a different future and a way of collective healing, a process of overcoming the violence done by the state and capital.

This healing takes time, however, and it is through creating new institutions of care that those fighting for a better world can engage in a slower, less intensive time of healing — allowing both for the trauma caused by oppression and exploitation to mend and for individual transformation to take place, so that forms of domination are not replicated in left-wing organizations and future societies.

Debating Melancholia

While Burnout considers the multiple and diverse temporalities internal to the struggle for a better world, it is largely critical of attempts to relate the broader, historical symptoms of political defeat to current movements.

In a chapter on melancholia, Proctor cites Walter Benjamin as a critic of the left-wing melancholic and Enzo Traverso.

In Proctor’s view, Traverso “treats communism as a finished product and speaks of the paralysis of the utopian imagination and the hollowing out of the emancipatory promises of liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. In his account, history has been displaced by memory, meaningful struggle by vapid contemplation.” (36)

Yet in his book Left-Wing Melancholia, Traverso insists that melancholia is neither a resignation to defeat, nor a reactionary impulse. Rather, melancholia is both a symptom of the long history of political defeats and a potential source of future struggle.

When viewed as an ethical commitment to past movements, Traverso suggests, melancholia seeks to redeem the defeats of the past as part of a renewed struggle for a different future.

Similarly, as Daniel Bensaïd has shown in Marx for our Times, Benjamin’s vision of communism is one of messianic redemption, the realization of the potential of the past. However, this view of redemption is not a reactionary demand for a return to some imagined or reified past, but a retrieval of revolutionary experience as part of a project intent on creating a new future.

Proctor is more open to this view in her chapter on nostalgia, where she distinguishes between nostalgia in its “moribund” and “political” forms. The latter is exemplified by Rosa Luxemburg, who views past defeats as experiences to draw from in order to understand and resist current forms of domination.

Here we can see parallels with Traverso’s understanding of left-wing melancholia, where the past is not a reified, static thing, but continues to exist in relation to the present and future.

Nostalgia Looking to Future Hope

For Proctor, “’[p]olitical nostalgia’ looks to the future rather than the past. It does not result from a displacement from a pre-existing home, but instead evinces a desire to feel at home in a just world.” (54)

Political nostalgia so conceived pairs fruitfully with what Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have called “revolutionary Romanticism.” Like Traverso, Benjamin and Luxemburg, the revolutionary Romantic tradition views the past as an important element in the fight for an emancipatory future.

Rather than viewing the past as something that was, revolutionary Romanticism sees the past as an unrealized possibility, utopic in the etymological sense. And while revolutionary Romanticism draws on the past for inspiration, it is more than an idea; as indicated by Luxemburg, past defeats are also material experiences that can be drawn upon in the present.

For Traverso, a revolutionary project that looks to the past does so not out of an idealist nostalgia, but to draw inspiration from those who engaged in their own resistance against capitalist domination, and to relearn and establish those forms of revolutionary institutions and infrastructure that have been lost or left unrealized.

As Proctor shows, the Russian Revolution drew inspiration from the Paris Commune, not just ideologically, but materially as well, as a concrete example of collective life and struggle.

It is when Burnout moves to more particular symptoms of defeat — trauma and mourning — that Proctor seems the most open to the relationship between past and current forms of struggle. There is a sense of hope in the commitment to the belief that the world can change for the better.

Proctor is certainly no optimist — she is all too aware of societal injustice — but she remains committed to an open and contingent view of history. As Terry Eagleton argues in his book Hope Without Optimism, while an optimist remains cheerful by ignoring the actual conditions of the present, hope persists in the face of injustice, remaining committed to the possibility of a better future.

Proctor, like Eagleton, retains hope in this adversarial sense, and she advocates for a process of healing from the recurring trauma of living in and fighting against an unjust world through acts of resistance. This form of anti-adaptive healing seeks to move from trauma, which has been depoliticized and dehistoricized, to a future-oriented, transformative form of political struggle.

Mournful Militancy

Proctor calls this form of action “mournful militancy,” rising from the ongoing trauma and sense of loss that continues from the past into the present. Here, political activity is a moment of healing and resistance, an expression of the anguish of past defeats and a demand for a better future.

While Proctor insists that this is incompatible with melancholia, she draws upon collective revolutionary memory as the basis for struggle in the present in a way similar to Traverso’s left-wing melancholia. Despite Proctor’s rejection of the term, this left-wing melancholia underpins the book, particularly in its understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future.

But what form does this take and how to ensure that mournful militancy does not itself result in burnout, depression, exhaustion, bitterness and trauma? While the book does not offer much in terms of concrete strategy, Proctor’s emphasis on both militancy and care points in a fruitful direction.

At various points, Burnout references the sphere of social reproduction, the times and places where human beings are reproduced through activities like cooking, health care (including mental health), and education.

Proctor highlights the “insurgent social reproduction” enacted during Black Lives Matter protests, the “networks of care” formed by ACT UP New York, and the importance of social reproductive work — often done by women — that allows for political activism to happen at all.

While these activities are often not as glamorous as taking to the streets, they are essential to the longevity of social movements. And while the rhythm of social reproductive work is slower than that of revolutionary interruption, Proctor argues that revolutionary politics depends on these forms of militant care. Urgent patience is required.

But might there be some concrete strategic direction for militant political action that simultaneously strengthens these networks of care? The revival in Marxist social reproduction theory has shown that struggles over social reproduction have been some of the most militant and effective in recent times, including the Chicago teachers’ strikes of 2012 and 2019 and the nursing strikes throughout the United States, both prior to and during the Covid pandemic.

While social reproduction strikes often begin with traditional working-class demands — higher wages, better working conditions — they have also included demands that go beyond the immediate interests of workers.

The Chicago Teachers Union in 2019 fought for resources for racialized and homeless students, while striking nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts insisted on the ability to safely and properly care for their patients during the Covid pandemic.

These demands for control over the way labor is performed make social reproduction strikes about both “bread and roses,” as the authors of Feminism for the 99% put it. Burnout points to some concrete instances of militant care, perhaps best exemplified by the Black Panther Party, whose historic free health clinics were provided as a community-based solution to the crisis of the U.S. health care system.

Surfacing Hope

Despite itself, a hopeful quality runs beneath the surface of Burnout, occasionally coming to the surface more explicitly.

While Proctor wrestles with the contradiction between the urgent need to change the world and the slower pace at which we ourselves are changed, she remains not only committed to fighting for a better world in the face of nihilist resignation, but continually is drawn to the dream of revolution.

Eagleton calls this “hope against hope,” the commitment to the struggle for a better world in the face of systems of oppression and exploitation. This fidelity to the fight against injustice persists for Proctor because she views political activity as inherently meaningful — part of a fulfilling life project.

Her revolutionary dreams are not only the expression of a desire for a better future but a continued relationship with the past. This utopian vision of the future which draws from the past underpins the Romanticism of Burnout, even though Proctor at times writes against this tendency.

The attentiveness to the multiple, diverse and contradictory temporalities internal to capitalism, of production and social reproduction, and the tensions between the time of revolution, the time of individual transformation, and the time of self and collective forms of care makes this book an important practical resource for those engaged in political organizing and activity, as well as a theoretical contribution to understanding the contradictory rhythms that we experience as we act against the exploitation and oppression of capitalist society, even as we live in it.

July-August 2025, ATC 237