The psychology of political defeat

Some years ago, I was at a Celtic Connections folk concert in Glasgow. Following what seemed like an endless succession of dreary songs lamenting working-class defeats, the friend beside me muttered in despair “my god, have we not had any victories?” The short answer is, of course, “yes, we have!” Both big and small, from the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 to the release of two detained asylum seekers through mass direct action at the 2021 Battle of Kenmure Street in Glasgow. Yet, the list of working-class defeats would undoubtedly be much longer.

This is scarcely surprising, given the vastly superior material and ideological resources that the ruling class has at its disposal. The social democratic parties and the trade union bureaucracy, which have played a part in propping up the system for decades, should not be forgotten here either. The 40+ years since the implementation of the neoliberal model of capitalism have been particularly short of victories on our side, prompting the hedge fund billionaire Warren Buffet to acknowledge in 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

As its title suggests, the focus of Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat is on the ways in which activists on the left have experienced defeats, from the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 to the collapse of Corbynism in the 2019 general election. She insists on “the possibility, indeed the necessity, of acknowledging the magnitude of psychological questions in left-wing political movements, an acknowledgement that need not reduce social problems to individual ones in the process”.1

Hannah Proctor, a Glasgow-based academic and also an activist, having participated, for instance, in the Kenmure Street battle mentioned above, begins her book with her own reaction to the crushing defeat of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 General Election: “I walked home weeping from a friend’s flat at 6am, with already peeling ‘Vote Labour’ stickers covering my coat”.2

I was reminded of George Square in Glasgow on the night after the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014. The previous day, the square was filled with thousands of people, many from the poorest housing schemes, fervently believing that “another Scotland”—a fairer, more equal Scotland—was possible. Now, groups of young people sat around in tears, desolate that the chance to build a different kind of Scotland was denied to them by the victory of the No campaign. In words that could equally apply to the experience of these young Scottish campaigners, Proctor writes:

The subjective transformation instigated by such experiences outlive the return of routine, but living through the reinstatement of the status quo is emotionally transformative in its own right: tears wept at the possibility of such a ruptural moment, tears wept because the crack in the social order has closed up again. This book is concerned with relations between floating feelings of freedom and hard tears that follow.3

The argument that material and ideological factors by themselves are insufficient to explain working-class defeats and that the psychological factors contributing to these defeats also need to be considered goes back to the German Frankfurt School in the 1930s. That group of Marxist intellectuals sought to fuse Marxism with insights from psychoanalysis. In works such as Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980) and Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (Verso, 2019), they tried to explain the failed German Revolution of 1923 and pointed to unconscious factors contributing to the rise of the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, the writings of these thinkers have become popular once again in recent years in seeking to explain the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing populism more generally.

Although sympathetic to this general approach—“sometimes historical circumstances demand that Marx be read alongside Freud”—Proctor’s concern in this book is a different one. There is a substantial literature exploring the factors motivating right-wing movements, she argues, but much less attention has been paid to the psychological impact of defeat on our side: “there seemed to be no equivalent resources for enabling people on the left to work through our own psychological experiences”.4 In Burnout, she seeks to address that gap.

She is not the first person to do so. In Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2021), the Italian Marxist academic Enzo Traverso similarly argues that, in the wake of historic defeats, the left cannot limit itself to theoretical analysis but must address their emotional impact:

The memory of the left is a huge, prismatic continent made of conquests and defeats, while melancholy is a feeling, a state of the soul and a field of emotions. Thus, focusing on left-wing melancholy means going beyond ideas and concepts.5

The concern of both authors is with how the left can be rebuilt in the face of a rampant neoliberalism and the failure of global social movements over the past two decades to come anywhere near meeting their objectives. Both draw on the writings of Walter Benjamin, particularly his brilliant, if enigmatic, “On the Concept of History” (available online, 1940). Yet, there are also differences between them.

For Traverso, there is a date, 1989, when a whole historical epoch, which began in 1917 with the October Revolution, ended. This was when “memory” replaced “utopia”:

The year 1989 stresses a break, a momentum that closes an epoch and opens a new one…the twentieth century had experienced a symbiotic link between barbarism and revolution. After the shock of 1989, however, the narrative vanished, buried under the debris of the Berlin Wall… After having entered the twentieth century as a promise of liberation, communism exited as a symbol of alienation and oppression.6

The view that the collapse of what Traverso calls “State socialism” was “a defeat so heavy that many of us preferred to escape rather than face it” is not one that would be shared by most readers of this journal.7 Rather, the collapse of the brutal state capitalist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe represented, in Chris Harman’s phrase, a sideways rather than a backward step.

Proctor’s focus is both broader and narrower than Traverso’s. It is broader in that she discusses a wide historical spectrum of defeats and does not share his belief concerning the epoch-ending impact of the collapse of “socialism” in 1989. In another respect, however, her focus is narrower. She is critical of theoretical accounts like Traverso’s and those of left academics like Wendy Brown and Jodi Dean. These writers present melancholia as a shared disposition or mood. However, for Proctor they “do not really convey anything about defeat as something people actually experience” so that “these accounts lack any sense of genuine emotional distress”.8 Her aim seems to be to construct what might be called a politics of lived experience of defeat. The book is structured around eight concepts, each associated with a particular type of emotional and psychological response to defeat: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma and mourning.

Her choice of example to illustrate left-wing melancholia, a clinging to the past, is an unfortunate one. Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-born Marxist sociologist, co-founder of the journal New Left Review and of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall and his colleagues at Birmingham did valuable theoretical work around the moral panics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including exposing the deeply racist assumptions and motivations around the phenomenon of mugging. His political contributions, however, including his analysis of Thatcherism, were far less useful. Proctor, while acknowledging the limitations of Hall’s analyses for revolutionaries today, writes:

Hall provided insights into the left’s incapacity to make sense of, let alone respond to, the phenomenon of Thatcherism. Hidebound by outmoded analyses that applied sclerotic ideological formulations to the world, rather than developing theories that grasped the changing realities of class relations in contemporary Britain, the left, Hall contended, was more attached to tradition and to a nostalgic image of the past than the right… To rid itself of melancholic attachments to the past, according to Hall, the left needed to engage with the material realities of the present and dispense with outmoded assumptions.9

In fact, Hall’s “insights” were far more damaging to the left and to the class struggle than Proctor appears to recognise. As Alex Callinicos argues in a retrospective piece in this journal following Hall’s death in 2014:

At the height of his influence during the 1980s he was, together with Eric Hobsbawm, in the intellectual vanguard of the attempt by the Eurocommunist monthly Marxism Today to marginalise those trying to defeat Margaret Thatcher’s government using the methods of class struggle and to rally support behind Neil Kinnock’s project of moving the Labour Party to the right.10

So, in Hall’s case, dispensing with “outmoded assumptions” involved attacking the left in the Labour Party around Tony Benn, mainly through Marxism Today, a magazine which, as Callinicos comments, “by the end of the decade…had drifted into an embarrassingly crass celebration of the ‘New Times’ of globalised multicultural hyperconsumerist capitalism that displayed the worst of postmodernism”.11

The next response to defeat considered by Proctor is nostalgia. Here, she is on stronger ground. She distinguishes between two different types: morbid nostalgia, which is backward-looking and stultifying, and political nostalgia, which is forward-facing and energising. The first type could be represented by the embalmed body of Lenin, still on public view in a mausoleum in Red Square more than 100 years after his death in 1924. This was ideologically useful for Stalin and his successors, who wished to cloak their counterrevolution by claiming continuity with the leader of the October Revolution. However, nostalgia, including nostalgia for defeats, can also play a positive role as Proctor shows in her discussion of the ways in which revolutionaries down the decades have remembered the Paris Commune. Lenin, for example, apparently danced in the snow in 1918 to celebrate the fact that the Bolshevik experiment had outlasted the Commune.12 Similarly, in his commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, Michael Löwy cites Che Guevara as an example of “the dialectic between past and present”. The latter, despite (or because of) his execution by soldiers in Bolivia in 1967, became an icon on the international left for decades after his death.13

Proctor begins the next chapter, which is on depression, with her own experience of this debilitating condition in the years following a move from London to Berlin and a withdrawal from political activity. What surprises her about this depression is her inability to make sense of it: “The depression I experienced seemed to have nothing in common with arguments I read and wrote about in my academic work concerning the social, historical and political origins of depression and psychic distress”.14

Her suggestion is that the experiential non-relationship between politics and depression could also be thought of as “a problem of scale in which an individual loses all sense of their connection to larger structural forces (which should not be confused with actually being disconnected from them)”.15 Mental distress might be overdetermined, shaped both by personal biography and structural factors. However, while a focus on personal experience can be illuminating, it would have been good if this chapter had also discussed these “larger structural forces”. Neoliberal policies and the impact of austerity are among the reasons why the number of people on anti-depressants in Britain doubled in the decade to 2018. Yet, the impact on working-class mental health and confidence of the defeats that workers suffered in the preceding decades is also worthy of discussion, especially given the theme of this book. In particular the defeat of the 1984-5 miners’ strike led to historically low levels of class struggle and contributed to what one commentator described as a shift “from picket lines to worry lines”.16 Instead, the chapter focuses on the descent into extreme mental distress of two leading figures of second-wave feminism, Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone—distress, which may indeed be linked to the decline of the women’s movement in the 1970s, as Proctor suggests, but it is hardly representative of the wider experience.

The term “burnout”, the subject of the next chapter, has become ubiquitous, usually referring to the experience of working too hard in a neoliberal world. Proctor addresses that experience and the limitations of the standard neoliberal remedies (yoga, get more sleep, write a list and so on). She distinguishes between the forms of mental suffering that arise from living in a neoliberal world “and those that arise from fighting against those structures and systems”, with her focus mainly on the latter.17 She notes that “movement burnout is real” but argues that “collective action can be an antidote to the grinding burnout of living under capitalism”.18 The main focus of the chapter, however, is on the “structures of community care” that activists have thrown up over the decades, from the Free Clinics movement in Los Angeles in the 1960s to the Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the austerity of the last decade, driven by the European Union. The aim of these initiatives is often twofold: to care for those suffering poverty and ill-health but also to care for their carers (often the same people). Proctor recognises both the strengths and the limitations of what Michael Lavalette has elsewhere dubbed “popular social work”.19 According to her, “Those models of networked care come closer to providing an antidote to burnout than anything else I have come across.” Importantly, they are “short of social transformation, and there’s the rub…only so much can be done in the absence of a society in which people’s needs are adequately met”.20

The next chapter addresses the theme of exhaustion and what Proctor calls “the psychological toll of keeping going over long periods of time, experiences of engagement in different cycles of struggle across lifetimes, and efforts to sustain momentum in the face of disillusionment”.21 She documents the “epidemic” of mental distress amongst the Bolsheviks in the post-revolutionary Russia of the early 1920s, hardly surprising perhaps given the years of revolution, civil war, famine and New Economic Policy. Less positively, she attributes a tragedy of these years, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, to “the craven hypocrisy and stark betrayal” of Lenin.22 She fails to mention the fact that Victor Serge, whom she quotes approvingly elsewhere in the chapter, argued that the alternative would have been counter-revolution. More generally, the narrow focus on the experience of exhaustion means that the momentous political struggles of the 1920s—and their contribution to the “nervous conditions” experienced by many—are barely mentioned. This is reflected in the fact that the name Stalin never once appears over six pages of discussion of this period.

That same neglect of politics, and its relationship to emotions, is evident in the second half of the chapter. Here, she discusses exhaustion among activists in the US, both during and after the movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The dominant ideology on much of the North American revolutionary left was Maoism, which substituted voluntarism and moralism for a sober Marxist analysis of the real possibilities in the situation. A typical character discussed by Proctor is Velma from the novel The Salt Eaters(Random House, 1980) by Toni Cade Bambara: “She inhabits a world of staunch Marxist-Maoist-dialectical-historical-materialist(s), a world in which the struggle came before attending to personal needs”.23

Such characters have no time “to sit down, sleep, stop, eat a sandwich”.24 To be fair, we have all known such characters and in periods of high struggle, are likely to have been there ourselves. Nor can it be denied that being politically involved over years or decades can indeed be tiring and get in the way of personal life. But Proctor’s conclusion, “the urgency of revolution conflicts with the patience required to perform spade work or to fashion a self—it is exhausting!”, in this context understates the toxic dominance of Maoism within the American movement of the 1960s.25 More generally, it points to the importance of a political perspective based on a sober analysis of the real balance of class forces, rather than on wishful thinking.

That largely uncritical understanding of Maoism is carried over and amplified in the next chapter, whose theme is bitterness. The chapter explores “how urgent quests for immediate subjective purity were forced to contend patiently with the often slow pace of individual transformation and deal with behaviour that did not rigidly conform with a particular revolutionary line”.26 As Proctor correctly notes, left-wing political groups can sometimes reproduce structural issues and prejudices of the societies they want to transform. It is crucial that any such prejudices and oppressive behaviours and attitudes are challenged. Within the Socialist Workers Party, for example, the period since the crisis of 2013 has seen major changes in the procedures for dealing with unacceptable behaviours, an Expected Behaviours protocol, and more recently, an increased awareness of how language can trigger painful emotions. This is an ongoing task. It is, however, a million miles away from the communist self-criticism and Maoist practices of “speaking bitterness” to which this chapter is devoted.27

At its extreme was the Japanese United Red Army, which, in 1972, retreated to the mountains to engage in self-criticism sessions, an exercise that left 12 members dead, tortured and beaten to death for inadequate self-criticism. Less violent but psychologically no less destructive were the self-criticism sessions organised among Chinese villagers by the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s, described by William Hinton in his book Fanshen (1966, Monthly Review Press). According to Proctor, Hinton’s book, and the model of group self-criticism it contained, was adopted by the Weathermen in the US in the 1960s and also by the early women’s liberation movement in the form of “consciousness raising” (or as she dubs it, “consciousness sinking”). The result in the latter case was that “women who could not remould themselves quickly enough were often trashed”.28

No one could disagree with Proctor’s conclusion that continuing to struggle for a better world will require a patient attitude to ourselves and one another. However, it will also require a very different kind of politics from the one described in this chapter. It will require a politics that locates social problems not in the psyche of individuals but in capitalist social relations and in the collective struggle to overthrow these relations. This is a struggle in which, as the young Marx put it in 1845, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice”.29

The last two chapters, on trauma and mourning, are in some respects the strongest in the book. The discussion of trauma highlights the limitations of the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a way of making sense of the emotional impact of these events on those affected. It focusses on the 1965 massacre of the left in Indonesia by the dictator Haji Mohamed Suharto’s forces and Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. PTSD was initially developed in part by Vietnam War veterans as a way of understanding the painful emotions that their experience of war had left them with. Yet, the diagnosis has become increasingly decontextualised, depoliticised and disconnected from the structures of capitalism and imperialism and now often refers to almost any event likely to be experienced as overwhelming. Proctor argues that there is a difference between wounds that are accidentally inflicted and those deliberately inflicted by oppressive regimes and actors: “socially inflicted wounds cannot heal fully in the absence of changed social conditions”.30 The chapter ends with an insightful discussion of the movies of the Chilean filmmaker Patrizio Guzman, which explore the post-Pinochet experience. Guzman, she suggests, offers an alternative model to that of psychiatry for understanding historical trauma arising from political repression.

Finally, most people on the left will be familiar with the injunction of the Swedish-American labour organiser Joe Hill shortly before his execution by the US state in 1915: “Don’t Mourn, Organise!” The question posed in the book’s final chapter is “rather than turning to organising as a substitute for or sublimation of mourning would it be possible to mourn and organise?”.31 In answering that question, Proctor—and separately, Enzo Traverso—turn to a 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy” published by the art historian and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp in the journal October. The essay addresses the impact of the AIDS crisis in the US in the 1980s, as well as the astonishing collective response to it. As Traverso explains, “Far from spreading passivity and favoring a retreat into a private sphere of suffering, this trauma [in response to the AIDS pandemic] inspired a new form of militancy, a militancy coming from mourning, which drew its strength from within melancholy and bereavement”.32

Since then, we have seen many other examples of such “mournful militancy”: in the monthly silent marches organised to mourn the criminal loss of 72 lives in the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the murder of George Floyd and in the widespread support for the family of Sheku Bayoh, a black African man who died in police custody in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy in 2015. The most powerful current example of “mournful militancy” is the astonishing global movement that has emerged in response to the genocide being inflicted on the people of Palestine by the Israeli state. Faced with such barbarism, Proctor argues:

Mournful militancy is not a lament but a demand. Mournful militants do not look melancholically at the past but intervene with rage and with care in the present for the sake of the living. Without a social reckoning, mourning is impeded, which is another way of saying: no justice no peace.33

Clearly then, “mournful militancy” is something to be valued and nurtured. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, Michael Löwy comments:

It is clear the remembrance of victims is not for him a melancholic jeremiad or a mystical meditation. It has a meaning only if it becomes a source of moral and spiritual energy for those in struggle today… [For] Benjamin, the emotions of the oppressed are a source of action, of active revolt, of revolutionary praxis.34

We need that emotional energy to drive and motivate us. As Proctor shows, albeit unevenly, an awareness of that emotional dimension of the struggle has the potential to strengthen our movement. However, as she herself acknowledges, emotional awareness by itself is not enough. Nor can it be a guide to strategy. Rather, as Benjamin understood better than most, it has to be directed by a historical materialist understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, of the nature of fascism and reformism and of the forms of organisation required both to overcome the unevenness of the working class and to smash the capitalist state. Otherwise, like Sisyphus, we are condemned forever to repeat our mistakes. Understanding the emotional impact of defeats can indeed be valuable and important. Even more important, however, is learning the political lessons of these defeats with a view to avoiding them in the future.

Iain Ferguson is a long-standing member of the SWP in Scotland and author of Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress, 2nd edition (Bookmarks, 2023).

Notes

1 Proctor, 2024, p2.