Mike Phipps  reviews Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, by Hannah Proctor, published by Verso.

Simon Bolivar famously said that to make a revolution was to plough the sea. The French revolutionary Saint-Just said, “Those who make a revolution half-way have only dug a grave for themselves.” In short, radical political activism is never guaranteed to be rewarding.

Mostly, defeat is the default outcome of such activism. But there is a contradiction, which Rosa Luxemburg identified: “The whole road of socialism  – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned  – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those ‘defeats’, from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?”

“You can learn more from a failure than from a success – if you recognise it as such,” the late Mike Marqusee agreed.  In any case, even victories may not endure, or may have to be constantly defended.

Burnout considers the emotional experiences of political defeat and “asks how activists, organisers and revolutionaries in various left-wing groups, parties and liberation movements have worked through the emotional impacts of their political experiences, whether collectively or in isolation.”  It analyses “the psychic aftermath of cycles of struggle, the emotional fallout of defeated movements, the ongoing strain of day-to-day organising ‘spade work’, and the corrosive interpersonal tensions that emerge in radical political groups.”

The traditional stereotype of a revolutionary activist is someone who sets aside all personal life for the sake of the ‘cause’. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian fighter whose image circulated widely following her involvement in the TWA 840 plane hijacking in 1969, is an extreme example. She underwent plastic surgery in 1970 to make her face less recognisable, in order to participate anonymously in further militant actions “but also to evade her status as a revolutionary icon. She endured the painful procedures without anaesthetic, a decision she framed in her autobiography in terms of her revolutionary commitment.”

These sentiments are extreme. But they are not to be disparaged. Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton, learning in 1970 that suicide rates among black people in the US had doubled in the past ten to fifteen years, far surpassing the suicide rate for white people, declared it was better to fight than suffer this “spiritual death” – even if the consequences could be fatal. He saluted those who give up the ‘I’ for the sake of the ‘we’.

But when the struggle was ‘in abeyance’, he also embraced survival strategies that both served the community and integrated the revolutionary activist into it. These strategies included grocery giveaways, free medical clinics, community ambulances, breakfast clubs, prison bussing programmes, sickle cell anaemia screenings and so on. Others too have understood the danger of making the model revolutionary an unachievable ideal and have shifted the focus onto the quality of work they do in the community.

The problem is that routine work can seem humdrum once one has tasted the possibility of success – only then to suffer a defeat. The sense of futility or despair is compounded by the fact that the defeat suffered – the miners’ strike or the end of the Corbyn movement are recent UK examples – has meant that society has moved on in another direction, embracing different values.

Political burnout is different from other kinds – for example that associated with one’s job. In politics, there are long periods when, whatever activity you undertake, you may not make much difference. Then there are other times when everything you do takes on the utmost importance and could be what separates success from failure. Understanding the difference between the two and locating which period you are in is the key not just to success or failure but to personal wellbeing.

Failure to do so not only ‘burns out’ the activist who maintains a level of political activity that is not justified by objective conditions. It also marginalises the routinist who cannot abandon customary methods of political work even when a radically more favourable situation demands it.  For all their claim to study the actual political situation at any given time, revolutionary left groups in particular fall prey to both failings.

Burnout is not a new problem. The Old Left response to psychological issues was to dismiss them as individualistic. But while “individual suffering originates in sick societies and that true psychological wellbeing requires social change, simply stating that all mental suffering is caused by capitalism leaves the problem of fighting to transform social conditions in the meantime unsolved.”

Much of the New Left was even more hostile: psychiatry was a form of state oppression which demonised people who did not conform to an insane world. But while psychiatric hospitals may be part of the carceral state, and psychoanalysis patriarchal, that should not invalidate the need for a collective therapy that might make activists function more effectively.

Today, this observation seems less controversial when one looks at the need to heal the legacies of colonial violence or the post-traumatic stress incurred as a result of other violent clashes with the state. These critically serious issues rightly get more professional attention, burnout less so. And even if it is now acknowledged in social movements, “self-published materials that circulate within them, detailing practical techniques for dealing with personal and interpersonal issues, can sometimes be uncritical of mainstream psychiatric or neurological concepts and self-help techniques.”

Hannah Proctor looks at the history of these problems for radical activists from the Paris Commune onwards. Why did so many Old Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution succumb to exhaustion and depression – long before the rise of Stalin? For some, it was a way of cloaking political disagreements that could not be expressed. But for others it reflected the shift to a less favourable international situation and the personal strain placed on activists who had to evolve quickly from insurgent opposition to ruling elite.

The book covers the women’s movement and black liberatory politics as well as  the workers’ movement. Some experiences inevitably seem more relevant than others: the sessions of self-criticism orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party and their imitators are at the less helpful end of the spectrum. There is also a lot of material here that goes far beyond political burnout, including the experiences of the victims of torture and other state violence.

Equally, there is a danger in over-generalising across movements and epochs. The despair felt by the militant who has adopted terrorist methods – who ultimately despises the mass of people, who must be shocked out of their perceived conformity – is very different from the despair experienced by someone who believes in the potential of the mass movement and has been defeated as part of that movement.

Ultimately, I was left thinking that some of the burnout discussed in this book could be tackled by reframing the political on a broader basis. The most successful mass movements embody all aspects of society – not just the political, but the social, sporting, entertainment, youth work, artistic, cultural and much more. The British labour movement, now basically the Labour Party and the trade unions, hasn’t looked like that for some time. But countless historical and international examples continue to show what’s possible, if we are willing to look.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.