Abstract
What happens to radical energy in the face of defeat? Answering such a question appears imperative to any understanding of the ebbs and flows – or indeed crashing waves – of radical practice, and yet we often focus on the good times: flourishing movements, successes and generative prefiguration, skirting over the pain and emotional horror of defeat as we do so. Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is a timely and engaging account of how to maintain hope through failure and in despair-inducing circumstances. Written in lockdown and the wake of Corbyn’s 2019 electoral defeat, the book charts a history of left-wing and activist psychological distemper thematically through eight emotional concepts: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning. Proctor uses these emotional themes to ask important questions regarding the role of individual emotional strain in collective movements and revolutionary struggle, the different practical methodologies for expressing and working through pain and turmoil, and the role of organized psychiatric, psychological or psychotherapeutic healthcare practices in revolutionary movements.
To this end, Burnout draws both on a vast array of historical cases of political loss and setback as well as cultural artefacts that illustrate their associated emotional experiences, including Bambara’s (2021[1980]) The Salt Eaters and Guzmán’s (2010) Nostalgia for the Light. Additionally, Proctor weaves her own emotional experiences throughout the book, opening some chapters with personal accounts of her relationship to the sentiment under study (see, for instance, the particularly stark first-person account of the feelings of emptiness and atemporal nothingness accompanying a period of depression, p. 63). Such authorial self-reflection is no mere stylistic choice, but rather integral to the substance of the text: Proctor analyses her emotional experiences as themselves historical artefacts, grounded very clearly in response to particular historical events. By blending personal account with historical and material artefacts, the book emotionally and reflexively engages the reader, particularly in interrogating where the boundaries between individual and collective experience lie.
Particularly striking is Burnout’s approach to juxtaposition within its thematic clusters. Examples are brought together across time, space and medium to provide critical insight. To take one example, the chapter on ‘Bitterness’ includes an account of ‘criticism-self-criticism’ described by Hinton (1966) in his influential account of revolutionary practices in 1950s China, alongside similar approaches by members of the United Red Army in Japan, a radical women’s group in 1970s Clapham and the People’s Republic of Yemen (pp. 130–31). Such juxtaposition enables Proctor to trace common desires across these very different movements and parse central tensions between personal experience (including personal happiness) and political change. Simply bringing together these important but disparate discussions in a constellation around resilience and defeat is already a valuable contribution of the volume.
The book primarily addresses organized responses to political defeat by examining the relationship between community approaches and the psychological impact of these events on individuals. It does so via materially situated analysis of myriad rich and informative examples (some of which are new to organization studies), including the free clinic movement, the work of the Combahee River Collective and Victor Serge. Proctor groups the thematic chapters into three broader sections, covering past attachments (melancholia, nostalgia, depression), survival pending revolution (burnout, exhaustion, bitterness) and anti-adaptive healing (trauma and mourning). Yet despite their role in structuring the volume, these emotional concepts are not reified but rather critically engaged throughout the text. For example, the chapter on trauma strongly critiques the development of PTSD as a politically-charged diagnosis from its conception as a response to the guilt experienced by American soldiers in Vietnam (a diagnosis that turns active participants into passive victims) to its contemporary application that erroneously places trauma as an event in the past, as in its applications more recently in Indonesia and Palestine.
This is where, in my view, Proctor’s work offers something particularly valuable for organization studies by elucidating and contextualizing the ‘psychic lag encountered through organising’ (p. 15) alongside an exploration of the complex institutional intersections and intellectual debates surrounding this lag. As demonstrated in the PTSD example, Proctor achieves this elucidation most effectively by historically situating what she refers to as the ‘psy’ professions in relation to cultural, social and political accounts of collective political activism. She integrates into her analysis an overview of how the ‘psy’ professions and their guiding ideas have, in turn, become part of a complicated lineage of emotions examined throughout her chapters, sometimes antithetical to and at other times deeply intertwined with activist movements. Thus, the critique presented is not a facile dismissal of the institutional care professions as part of hegemonic social order. Rather, engagement with and between ‘psy’ professions and activism is charted alongside what are found to be the limits of institutionalized approaches to psychic distress.
In this way the seams between institutional and grassroots modes of activism are explored. Psychoanalytic concepts are identified as occupying an intersection between political activism and reactionary pathologization, exposing their limits but also the space from which they can be mobilized to constructive ends. Alongside the above-mentioned critical account of PTSD, Proctor uses burnout as a key example of a psychological concept that has, and continues to, shift in meaning and political alignment. First developed by Herbert Freudenberger specifically to name the fatigue and cynicism experienced by volunteers in the free clinic movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in the 1980s the concept became more aligned with social achievement and competition. This is not simply a matter of concept creep and subsumption into wider neoliberal sentiments, but a transformation championed by Freudenberger himself as he moved from his more militant origins towards a career as a corporate consultant. Thus, alongside its central thesis regarding defeat as both a communal and individual phenomenon worthy of interrogation, the book emphasizes that these concepts are slippery, multifaceted and in need of critical delicacy.
Burnout will be of interest to scholars recognizing the utility of psychoanalytic concepts for analyzing organizational phenomena, particularly failure (Callahan and Elliott, 2019; Driver, 2009). It will also be of particular relevance to alternative organizations scholars, particularly those addressing the critical intersection between activism and identity (Reedy et al., 2016), the ‘micropolitics of self-transformation’ (Zanoni, 2020: 8) and the complexities and contradictions at the heart of prefigurative politics (Schiller-Merkens, 2022; Shanahan, 2024). It provides an important contribution to emerging work on affect through its focus on the ‘mutually shaping relationships’ (p. 28) between individuals and collectives, and in this way contributes to evolving understanding of how the personal and the political intertwine.
While not claiming to offer a ‘history from below’ (p. 25), Proctor’s methodology – examining historical defeats, key figures and concepts and cultural milestones – is nevertheless effective in communicating the importance of individual and community activism. Similarly, rather than prescribing an antidote or evaluation, Burnout instead makes a case for attending to the psychic impact of political defeat as a phenomenon that has always been and will continue to be worked through in activist spaces. The book does give space, in the chapter on ‘Burnout’, to an exploration of disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s proposal of ‘care webs’ as alternatives to standard healthcare models, suggesting that ‘movements themselves could and should be spaces of healing’ (p. 101). Examples of such care webs include the Social Solidarity Healthcare initiative in Thessaloniki in the face of the collapse of the Greek public health care system under austerity, and emergency clinics set up to provide mutual aid in response to Hurricane Katrina. Yet Proctor rightfully resists any suggestion that the webs of care model could be a wholesale solution, warning that though ‘models of networked care come closer to providing an antidote to burnout than anything else I have come across’, this is a specifically short-term, small-scale fix. Instead, ‘the only solution would involve a total social transformation, an instructive concrete example, developed within rather than against the state’ (p. 102). The Cuban health-care system is listed by Proctor as the best existing approximation of this vision, with its emphasis on community clinics and acts of international solidarity.
I see Burnout as an act of intellectual solidarity, aimed at nurturing and galvanizing the continuation of the fight for a better world even in the absence of hope. In this way, it offers a dialectical process of understanding individual and collective political action in the context of defeats, both past and ongoing. Particularly given the most recent escalation of violence in Gaza and Trump’s second electoral victory, frank critical engagement with defeat is perhaps more timely than ever. Yet so is this work’s overarching message regarding the necessity of fighting with, without and in spite of hope. Against Raymond Williams’s claim that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible’, Proctor aligns with Mike Davis (p. 213): ‘Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’.
