Why is it important to pay attention to negative feelings like depression, exhaustion, bitterness, and mourning? What is lost when we ignore those feelings?

Both in my personal experiences and in my academic work researching revolutionary histories, the psychological toll of political struggle came up as an issue again and again, albeit in different ways at different historical moments and in response to different experiences of organizing. Yet there didn’t seem to be anything that explicitly thematized or theorized those experiences, nor were there many resources available for people on the Left to help to make sense of these emotions as they arise.

When writing the book, I thought a lot about the aftermath of big historical movements, but I was also interested in the exhaustion that comes from prolonged organizing and from trying to sustain long-term momentum, especially in the face of interpersonal tensions. How do we think about interpersonal tensions from a political perspective?

I’m interested in asking whether downplaying the significance of these experiences — or treating them as individual rather than collective problems — might actually exacerbate them. If you minimize your own emotional experiences, what collective implications does that have? Could there be a way to acknowledge these feelings, instead of pretending that you can just get rid of them? That was my starting point for the book.

What personal experiences shaped your desire to write Burnout?

When I started writing the book, I was very allergic to the idea that I would include myself in it. I’m just a boring academic, and I was writing about actual revolutionaries, so it felt almost ridiculous to put myself in the book. But the more I wrote, the more perverse it seemed to write a book about how “the personal is political” without talking about myself.

The 2010 and 2011 student movements in the UK really shaped my interest in this topic. I had the peculiar experience entering into that movement as it was already waning. I didn’t experience the height of the movement — I only experienced the aftermath. That was quite a formative experience for me.

Another important experience was being involved in ongoing forms of organizing — not as part of some huge movement, but just showing up to weekly meetings and trying to campaign for local changes. The middle section of the book is about ongoing forms of struggle and day-to-day “spadework,” a term that comes from Ella Baker.

I end the book by talking about an experience that I had here in Glasgow. In May 2021, there was an immigration raid at Kenmure Street that was resisted by people in the local community. It happened just as people were beginning to emerge from COVID lockdowns. I wanted to end the book by reflecting on the powerful emotional experience of being on the streets with other people, which felt especially significant after a period of total isolation.

Of course, political struggles are not just about feelings, but those kinds of positive experiences are also very subjectively significant; they change people. I don’t want to imply that people are only formed by how awful and depressing everything is — experiences of solidarity and victory are really important as well.

You write that “even revolutionaries who were dismissive of psychological questions and theory often described in practice being surrounded by people breaking down, falling out, sinking into depression or seeking psychotherapeutic help in response to their political engagements.” Could you talk about the image of the selfless revolutionary and its tensions?

I think revolutionary self-sacrifice and what Huey P. Newton calls “revolutionary suicide” is an extremely important and inspirational tradition within revolutionary struggle. Recently, we had the extreme example of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation: an instance of self-sacrifice for a political cause that I certainly would not want to characterize as pathological or as anything other than a powerful political act.

However, most people involved in political struggle are not going to literally give their lives to a cause in that way, and they will have to keep living while struggling. In the book, I look at historical examples of people who did try to live in total commitment, and what happened when they couldn’t.

I talk in the introduction about Che Guevara’s Congo Diary, where one sees this contradiction quite clearly. On the one hand, Guevara says the ideal militant should be very strong and disciplined. But then he talks about his experience of actually being there and finding it really difficult. He’s critical of himself for having emotional outbursts or wanting to withdraw from the group to read. It wasn’t that easy in practice to be the ideal militant who sacrifices their individual interests for the sake of the collective.

I don’t have a problem with rhetorical statements of total political commitment — the question that interests me is how things can unravel in practice. In the chapter on bitterness, I talk about the Weather Underground in the United States, where very small militant groups adopted processes of self-criticism among themselves. They would spend hours berating one another for the ways they deviated from being the perfect revolutionaries.

By all accounts, this was a horrendous experience. It didn’t make people better revolutionaries; it just made them feel terrible. There was a sense of absolute political purity, where even spending time reading a poem would make others ask, “Why are you indulging in that bourgeois activity when you should be out giving flyers to workers?” I’m interested in these places where the rhetoric of absolute commitment and self-sacrifice comes into conflict with the reality of just being a person.

Why is it important to historicize and denaturalize experiences of political burnout? What historical examples of burnout do you discuss in the book?

Political burnout is something that people have experienced in many different contexts without calling it “burnout” — because that term didn’t exist until a certain point in history, and people had different ways of understanding their experiences. I trace the history of the term because I’m aware that it’s being used in a particular way in a lot of self-help books now, and I didn’t want to use it without thinking about shifts in meaning.

Today, nostalgia is not something that you could get diagnosed with, but in the nineteenth century, it was a pathological condition that had a medical definition. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, for example, surviving communards sent into exile in New Caledonia in the South Pacific ended up diagnosing themselves with this illness called “nostalgia.”

I was interested in the fact that these political radicals had diagnosed themselves with something that sounds so unradical, because the origin of nostalgia is basically a pathological homesickness. Is it a problem for historians of the Left to be nostalgic for past struggles? Is nostalgia, as something that’s backward looking, always going to be quite conservative?

Could you talk about Red Therapy and what you’ve learned from studying that group?

Red Therapy was a group of people who met through their involvement in organizing. They were communists and left-libertarians in 1970s London. Many had been involved in the student movements of the late 1960s. A lot of them lived in squats in East and South London, and they were involved in housing struggles, workers’ struggles, and the women’s liberation movement. Many of them lived collectively and were raising children collectively.

What struck me when I read Red Therapy’s pamphlet was that they didn’t start the group because of how hard it was to exist under capitalism. They started it because they were finding it so difficult to live alternatively. They’d experienced a lot of tensions between themselves and were responding to the difficulties of trying to organize life in a nonnormative way. They drew on an eclectic mix of stuff: anti-psychiatry, Freudo-Marxism, primal-scream therapy. And they were doing therapy among themselves.

This type of therapy is not a solution for serious mental health crises, and I don’t think that Red Therapy intended it to be. But what was interesting to me, having met or read about quite a few of the former members of the group, is that many of them ended up training to become psychiatrists or psychotherapists. Obviously, in some ways, that’s a story of professionalization and of becoming part of the system that you once critiqued. But one member said that he set up free therapy sessions during the Occupy movement in London and so had retained an interest in the relationship between psychological questions and politics. I was interested in how they had carried on being politically committed through their therapeutic practices rather than therapy being seen as a retreat from politics (which some of their comrades claimed at the time).

What is the role of hope in political struggle? Can you talk about whether and how hope is an important part of your project?

While studying the defeat of the miners’ strike in the UK in the 1980s, I read some accounts by women who were involved in solidarity work, such as Women Against Pit Closures. When I first read these, I focused on the devastating aftermath of the strike, but when I was finishing my book I reread some of the same accounts and found real sources of hope in how people described being absolutely transformed by their experiences of political involvement and engagement. It changed them forever.

It is important to hold on to positive experiences in past political struggles. They aren’t meaningless, and they continue to live on. The problem is that they still lost. What do you do with that? I don’t know. It’s hard to draw lessons of hope from it because however incredible those moments of solidarity were and however meaningful they might have been for people, if you lose, you lose — you can’t undo that.

Mike Davis once said, “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.” I was really struck by this because in a way, maybe you don’t need to have hope, but that doesn’t mean you give up. That feels very different than equating hopelessness with giving up. Davis is saying, “Things are really, really bad, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that, but you have to fight anyway.”

I found this idea that you can keep going and keep fighting very helpful. It’s easy to write in a rousing left-wing style, and maybe it’s also strategically useful to do so sometimes, but it felt a bit disingenuous to me given my themes.

I was very struck by the conclusion of Vincent Bevins’s book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, which is about the huge protest movements of the 2010s across the world. He is asking why so many of these movements failed. He talked to lots of people involved in all of these different movements, and pretty much everyone he spoke to said how absolutely subjectively transformative these movements were. People were really changed by their euphoric collective experiences.

But at the same time, they lost. And losing in places like Egypt obviously meant something a lot more severe than people in the UK being sad after Jeremy Corbyn lost the election. Bevins says that some people came to view those feelings as politically meaningless in retrospect as they weren’t grounded in any kind of lasting material change, while others clung to the memory and the sense that what they had felt on the streets at the height of a struggle provided a real glimpse of a different society.

Bevins leaves the question open because it was one that the activists he spoke to also couldn’t make up their minds about. Unlike my book, his isn’t a book about feelings — but it nonetheless ends stuck between these two realities: the fact of defeat and the memory of that almost magical feeling. That’s precisely the kind of tension that I’m interested in.