Burnout
The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
by Hannah Proctor
(Verso, ISBN 9781839766053)
‘Don’t mourn: organize.’ This phrase, attributed to the American labour organizer Joe Hill, who was executed in 1915, sums up much of the Left’s attitude to personal suffering. There’s a tendency for radical movements to see despair and depression as symptoms of a sick society, something that can only be fixed by, is that the Left must both mourn and organize – or suffer the psychological consequences.
