Hannah Proctor and Astra Taylor

One obvious way a group can hang together is by having a strategic focus, such as the Debt Collective’s focus on debt, which is a concrete hardship people endure day after day. Who isn’t worried about paying their bills? Having a clear economic and material analysis can guide and ground activist work in very useful ways.

There is so much in the world to grieve and to organize around. You and I are talking in the middle of a genocide. Grief is a paradoxical force. There is the real risk that grief can become so demobilizing that it halts political action. At the same time, the current protests against the war in Gaza show that grief can also be galvanizing. I often wonder: Can we mourn and organize simultaneously? Can we mourganize?

hp In your book Solidarity, you talk about social debt: the idea that everyone is born indebted to those who have come before. You discuss how social debt can be the basis for a commitment to future generations and how it is central to the concept of solidarity. I have written about interdependence and reciprocity, the question of repairing past harms on an individualized level, and the way the past influences psychological experiences in the present. Your book made me think so much more about building a social relationship with the past and about interdependence across time.

at The ancient Romans had this idea of collectively held debts, obligatio in solidum, which, along with the concept of mutual obligation, was incorporated into the Napoleonic code. Social debt became a metaphor that political philosophers and statesmen took up in the late 1800s. By thinking about debt metaphorically, they came up with concepts that still resonate today.

These thinkers were called the “solidarists” because they put solidarity at the center of their philosophy and politics. They used the idea of social debt to argue that we owe a debt to our ancestors that we must pay forward. None of us is autonomous. We speak in languages we didn’t invent. We walk on roads we didn’t pave and eat food we didn’t figure out how to cultivate. We have social debts to everyone that came before us. The solidarists also talked a lot about “reparative justice,” anticipating current discussions of that concept. In their formulation, reparative justice was not based on revenge. Instead, it was a way to forge new communities, to build relationships of redress and reciprocity.

hp That leads me to reflect on the legacies of solidarity. How do past moments of solidarity endure into the present? We are speaking on the fortieth anniversary of the 1984–85 miners’ strike here in the U.K., during which thousands of members of the National Union of Mine Workers went on strike to oppose pit closures. The strike ended up being a profound defeat for workers and the trade union movement. The devastating effects of that, along with the ongoing legacies of Thatcherite economic policies, are still felt in Britain today. And yet, when you read accounts of people who were involved in the strike as it was happening, you see all the incredible forms of solidarity that emerged. The heart-warming 2014 film Pride dramatizes the bonds forged between members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, an organization that formed in London, and miners in South Wales. Those involved underwent profound personal transformations as part of their collective experiences. Did those positive experiences also have lasting effects despite defeat?

There are fascinating accounts from groups like Women Against Pit Closures; many of the miners’ wives found themselves thrust into a social and political context that was completely new to them. Solidarity was a practice that created new communities, activities, and routines. And people who have witnessed police violence or the way the mainstream media misrepresents social movements are unlikely to forget about those experiences. The subjective changes people underwent as a result of the strike were in some sense lasting, but that in no way compensates for the reality of the defeat. I wanted to find a way of thinking about those two realities together: honoring positive subjective experiences of solidarity without ignoring the material legacies of political defeat.

at In Burnout you use the phrase “transformative solidarity.” Interestingly, my coauthor, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, and I had settled on that as a key term. We wanted to acknowledge that there are negative forms of solidarity, which we call “reactionary”: antidemocratic, exclusive forms of group cohesion. Then there is the kind of solidarity that can be both personally and politically transformative. The word “transformative” suggests that even in devastating defeats, there can still be an ember that might kindle some future shift or change, often because individuals have been profoundly altered by their experiences.

I grew up in Georgia around a very marginal, countercultural community. I didn’t learn what a labor union was until I moved to New York as a twenty-year-old graduate student doing a master’s thesis on the topic of political defeat. As a teenager in the 1990s, I became interested in the 1960s. We were in the shadow of that period of collective awakening and experiencing a backlash against it. I wanted to understand what qualifies as a victory and what is regarded as a loss. If you learn something or set the stage for future effort or progress, is a loss really a failure? For a while, it seemed we had escaped the shadow of the sixties—like we were breaking new ground thanks to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous-led anti-pipeline resistance. But the sixties are in the air again, as evidenced by the coverage of the anti-war protests on college campuses. The challenges Biden faced this summer were reminiscent of those faced by Lyndon B. Johnson—a liberal president mired in an atrocious and unpopular conflict that forced him to reconsider running for reelection. Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran instead, losing to Richard Nixon. While Johnson’s decision caused upheaval among Democrats, Biden’s decision to bow out of the race had an energizing effect on Democrats. People went from feeling that defeat was inevitable to at least feeling like they had a fighting chance.

As a graduate student, my default conception of political action was the anti-war movement, but when I started to learn about union organizing, I thought, This is what I’ve been looking for. I had been craving something more concrete, more robust, than cultural politics or the radical theorizing of academia. I collected mentors, people I thought I could learn some skills from. One woman, a lifelong activist, told me something that stuck with me and that I think is often the case: “People do not burn out because there is too much work. People burn out because of hurt feelings.” We all know that the Left can be very judgmental. And there is a tendency to talk about personal conflicts in political terms, masking interpersonal issues as strictly ideological ones. Conflicts are harder to resolve when their true causes are obscured.

hp I was ambivalent about using “burnout” as a title because of the word’s use in a liberal self-help context. But then I learned that the term came out of the U.S. free clinics movement of the late 1960s, which offered nonjudgmental healthcare to marginalized communities. It was applied to people working in a social justice context who were committed to reciprocal and nonhierarchical forms of care but who were exhausted by excessive emotional and physical demands.

The psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger took the word “burnout” from the drug users he treated in the clinics and applied it to his own experiences as a clinic volunteer. Today, people tend to understand burnout to be extreme tiredness from overwork. However, the term originally referred to an experience of grief within a political context. It had to do with the emotional strain that comes from disillusionment with a collective project and from interpersonal tensions within political organizations.

at We live in a world where people are really interested in self-help, self-care, and therapy. I don’t think we can ignore those impulses or the fact that people are genuinely suffering. Those who come to organizing spaces need to process the heaviness of their lives, which could be due to discrimination, poverty and debt, mistreatment on the job, anxiety about climate change, or just feeling lonely or disrespected. The Left needs to engage emotions without getting mired in them. The challenge is to lean into feeling and channel it in materialist, strategic directions—in ways that build new, formidable coalitions instead of further alienating and atomizing us.

The discourse tends to frame emotional labor only as an oppressive activity. As in, “I’m having to do the emotional labor of talking to someone who’s not as enlightened as I am about gender issues or racial justice.” But that’s what organizing requires! It about bringing folks along with you.

hp Yes, and I think we should be careful not to characterize things like being supportive of our friends as “emotional labor.” I also absolutely agree that it is important to recognize how nourishing solidarity can be. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest on the Left in psychoanalysis, therapy, and mental health—more so than five or ten years ago. I don’t want to be dismissive of whatever helps people, but, as a historian, I wanted to think critically about the histories of some psychological concepts and therapeutic approaches. I am not calling for a return to the wholesale rejection of psychiatry that was common on the Left in the sixties and seventies, but I do think it is helpful to think historically about diagnostic categories.

For example, there is very interesting scholarship on the complicated history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosis that was formally established in 1980 due in part to activism among U.S. veterans of the war in Vietnam. In the book, I give the example of psychiatrists who worked with survivors of political repression under the Pinochet regime in Chile and became critical of the concept of PTSD. Rather than understanding trauma as a single external event located in the past, they interpreted it as an ongoing process. They argued that the political origins of their patients’ traumatic experiences needed to be acknowledged as part of the treatment. They recognized the interconnection between social and psychological trauma and reconceptualized their therapeutic approach accordingly.

I looked at self-help books on burnout, which were quite funny and predictable. They suggest an individualistic approach to the problem: have a bubble bath or make yourself a nice dinner or get enough sleep. But then, in my discussion of the free clinics—where I also consider forms of activist mutual aid such as those that sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—I noticed a tendency in myself to romanticize small-scale initiatives for embedding care within political movements. Those kinds of initiatives are necessary, but they are not an end in themselves. Little groups of activists without medical training are no substitute for a healthcare system. My concern was that celebrating these kinds of small things too much could leave bigger questions about infrastructures of care unanswered. An emphasis on small-scale action in the present risks taking emphasis away from the broader structural context.

at You must have both. If you want to build solidarity and keep people coming back, there has got to be some of that emotional work, some taking care of each other, because to be able to undertake the massive struggles we need to wage, people have to feel connected and committed. For example, we are up against entrenched industries with huge amounts of capital invested in climate destruction. We need folks to stay engaged for the long haul. How do we build our movements so they are less inclined to burn people out? How do we create conditions under which we can turn post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic strength and growth?

hp I don’t have any straightforward answers. I have been reading about self-criticism and consciousness-raising practices that people on the New Left in the West took up in the late 1960s, partly inspired by accounts they read of practices in Maoist China. Even the gentler forms seemed to have a tendency toward dogmatism and often ended badly. To take an extreme example, accounts of self-criticism sessions within the Weather Underground, in which group members berated each other for hours on end for being insufficiently revolutionary, emphasize how puritanical, corrosive, and counterproductive the process of criticizing an organization from within can become. Later reflections by members of that group are self-critical in a more open, positive sense, assessing problems with greater tolerance for contradictions.

Douglas Crimp’s famous essay “Mourning and Militancy” emerged from the AIDS crisis and Crimp’s experiences in ACT UP New York, which, when he joined it, was already riven with internal divisions. Crimp talks about mourning in the literal sense: people were dying within the movement. He argues that despite the urgent need to keep organizing, it is also necessary to take time to mourn, that not mourning has psychic and political consequences. Although he was looking from a psychoanalytic perspective at the question of how to mourn within an ongoing political movement, he challenged Freud’s concept of “normal mourning” as an individualized process that comes to an end. But Crimp’s investment in the unconscious meant that he was not interested in drawing a sharp distinction between inside and outside, with the bad external world causing psychological suffering in a very neat way. Violence is located out in the social world but also plays out within individuals. It is important not to downplay the very real violence of the social world, but it is also crucial to confront its complex psychic consequences. Crimp was arguing that activists need to practice mourning and militancy simultaneously.

at We are back to mourganizing! In retrospect, I see that I was naively optimistic that the COVID-19 pandemic would reveal our society’s shared vulnerabilities. Instead, a lot of people fled from that potential awareness; they didn’t want to face their fragility and interdependence. Unfortunately, we have not had a collective grieving or processing of the experience; instead, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the authoritarian backlash. There are real dangers to not mourning: to not facing that we can be devastated by a virus, by climate change, by war. Does that feel resonant to you?

hp Absolutely. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a public acknowledgement of our dependence on people the media suddenly started to call “essential workers” and of our reliance on global supply chains and of the critical issues of vaccine management. What seemed like a public wake-up call that things had to change has been quickly forgotten. It is almost as if the pandemic never happened, which is very disturbing. Perhaps this forgetting should not be surprising, since denial and disavowal also characterize attitudes to climate change.

The George Floyd uprisings in 2020 were acts of mournful militancy or, as you say, mourganization. They erupted after months spent in pandemic lockdown. “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a strange slogan because mourning is so often the occasion for protest; the two practices flow into one another.

I am thinking about the Palestinian cause in relation to what you write about creating solidarity beyond borders, especially when protesters chant: “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.” Again, the question of mourning is central to this movement. I remember a 2021 online discussion among Angela Davis, Mike Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in which they bemoaned the death of Left internationalism, but perhaps that is starting to return.

I am wary of overemphasizing the emotional aspect of political struggle at this moment. There is an urgent need to do everything possible to stop the Israeli state’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza, which is happening with the complicity of our own governments. Now, when so much requires immediate action, when climate change is underway, it might seem counterintuitive to make a case for patience. But then, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has been a long one, and, obviously, the call for a ceasefire is only a transitional demand. I am interested in that tension between urgency and patience.

at Everything is urgent. If you take in all the grief and horror of the world, it can be overwhelming. Channeling your gaze, and therefore channeling your energies, sometimes requires willfully not taking in all the bad stuff.

The emotional aspect is always going to be there. The question is, do our emotions open us up and connect us to others, or do they make us more solipsistic? Is protest simply a means of self-expression, or is it an opportunity for true solidarity-building?

In Burnout, you write about the morning after the miners lost the strike, a choice that resonated with me. I decided to begin my film What is Democracy? by trying to evoke the feeling I get the day after a big protest or event, the moment when people don’t know what to do or what will happen next. That struck me as a more honest approach; after all, a high-stakes election or a big march on Washington are not daily events. How do we think about democracy, and how do we fight for it, day after normal day?

If you choose to be a political person, your life may include some magnificent moments of collective effervescence, exhilaration, and power. But you will also spend weeks or months or maybe years on the organizing, planning, and logistics necessary to manifest those thrilling moments—although sometimes they erupt seemingly out of the blue—and then they are over. We pay a lot of attention to those epic outbursts and uprisings; they are what get remembered and lionized. We need to figure out how to deal with the in-between time, when we are making incremental change or even just holding our ground against the opposition.

hp We need to remember that those more epic moments and the everyday are folded into each other. In Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, the activist-protagonist misses a major speech by a political leader because she is in the bathroom changing her tampon. My chapter on the miners’ strike starts with the morning after because I wanted to think about the quotidian aspects of defeat, how people live through it.

The novel Vida, by the feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy, is about someone in a group like the Weather Underground who was involved in a bombing action. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the event, and the reader does not learn about the bombing until very late in the narrative. The book is mostly about the character’s life underground; she does everyday things in domestic spaces while on the run. Her militant experiences in big protests, and the excitement of those moments, exist only in the background of the book.

I was reading about how some people who had been involved in the women’s liberation movement in Britain turned to psychoanalysis and therapy in the 1970s. A lot of feminists had named the problems with patriarchy and the nuclear family and planned to do things differently in their own lives: raise children collectively, for example, or reject certain bourgeois norms like monogamy or heterosexuality. But then they came up against the reality that even if they rejected these things in practice, doing so was not necessarily easy emotionally. The challenge lay in the tension between their political ideals and how difficult it was to live them out in practice. (Of course, part of the problem was that they had not transformed society as a whole.) Many people ended up abandoning their political ideals rather than cultivating the patience required to make interpersonal and personal change happen over time. Others turned to therapy and psychoanalysis to help make sense of the difficulties they experienced. They did not frame the turn to the psychological as a rejection of their political commitments but as a response to the emotional difficulties of attempting to organize their lives in different ways.

I found it helpful that in your book you emphasize the time and effort required to build movements, but also the time and energy required for movements to be crushed.

at Breaking solidarity, just like building it, takes tremendous effort. How profoundly distressing it must have been to be in the American South during the defeat of Reconstruction. You survived the Civil War, and now you are building a multiracial democracy and making world-historic strides. And then, backlash. In 1898, racist plutocrats and white supremacists staged a coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina and overthrew the new Reconstruction-era government, erasing the gains toward equality. A mob of thousands of white men went on a rampage, murdering Black residents and destroying Black-owned property and businesses. In the wake of the massacre, Jim Crow laws were imposed. During the hundred years between the start of Reconstruction and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, activists kept going. They faced devastation after devastation, and defeat after defeat, but somehow in the end it added up to a significant—and sudden—shift. A shift we owe, of course, to the thousands of people who organized and risked their lives for racial justice.

When we started talking about student-and medical-debt cancellation at Occupy Wall Street, we were mocked. All the experts and mainstream journalists told us that forgiving student loans would never happen. The federal government would never cancel debt. Certainly, the Debt Collective has not won everything we want, but since 2020, the Biden administration has canceled over $140 billion in student loans, liberating millions of people from these financial burdens. Today, people everywhere in the United States know about student-debt cancellation. A bill was recently introduced in the House and Senate that would cancel all medical debt. While it will not pass this session, it is on the official American political agenda. Or think of Kamala Harris, who kicked off her presidential campaign by leaning into the virtues of student debt cancellation and praising policies that make medical debt less onerous. That’s not bad for a decade of work.

We want structural changes, but transformation is also personal. We have to be patient with each other.

hp You are doomed from the start if you are impatient with people who have not already reached a certain level of political consciousness. Organizing relies on the belief that it is possible for people to change.

at Cultivating patience, forbearance, and generosity toward others is critical if we want to bring people into our movements and build power in community.