MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Haud forrit!
HENRY BELL recommends a handbook for comrades to bear the pain of living in the gap between communist dreams and capitalist reality
DIMINISHING NUMBERS?
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Burn Out: On the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Hannah Proctor
Verso, £14.99
BURNOUT is now ubiquitous as a term to describe the exhaustion of working too hard in a capitalist world. But, as Hannah Proctor notes in her new book, capitalism does not have the monopoly on this kind of nervous collapse. Burnout is two-sided: it is experienced by those struggling to defeat the system just as much as those struggling to succeed within it.
Proctor first encountered burnout in activist circles, where it was used to describe the physical and emotional exhaustion of those who take part in prolonged political organising, and the psychic distress of those who experience political defeat. These are the objects of this book which elegantly and forensically investigates the historic suffering of revolutionaries and the pain of living in the gap between communist dreams and capitalist reality.
More from this author
HENRY BELL notes the curious confluence of belief, rebuilding and cheap materials that gave rise to an extraordinary number of modernist churches in post-war Scotland
HENRY BELL takes issue with the assertion that basic income is a remedy for poverty when it doesn’t address the inbuilt inequality of capitalism
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
HENRY BELL is moved by the account of scientists under seige in Leningrad who preferred to starve rather than sacrifice their life-saving work
