‘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 ending capitalism. The argument Hannah Proctor makes in Burnout, is that the Left must both mourn and organize – or suffer the psychological consequences.
But how can we ‘fight while healing’? Unpicking the contemporary obsession with ‘burnout’, Proctor traces how the word originally applied not to those burdened by succeeding within capitalism, but to organizers who ‘devoted their free time to projects that sought to transform society’. Herbert J Freudenberger, who coined the term in the 1970s, observed the exhaustion of volunteers in New York City’s free clinics.
