Vladimir Lenin is credited with saying that “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”[1] Anyone who lived through the decade between the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, which touched off the season of uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring, and the COVID-19 pandemic knows this truth in their bones. From 2010 to 2020, a global wave of uprisings, from Brazil to Japan, Tunisia and Egypt, Libya and Turkey, rose against systems of exploitation, corruption, and criminalization with a fervor unmatched since the movements from the 1960s. The 2010s birthed not mere protests but networks and organizations, seismic events that made people believe the world could change.
In nearly all of these cases, the aftermath of the struggles was grim: military coups, civil wars, the return of authoritarian rule, and the quiet reassertion of neoliberal power. Occupy Wall Street dissolved without denting the stock market. Gezi Park was cleared and activists landed in prison or were silenced. Infrastructures of resistance—encampments, citizen assemblies, mutual aid networks—proved their fragility against the racialized-capitalist world order. If decades happened in those weeks, what do we make of the long years that have followed, when euphoria faded into fatigue and sometimes disillusionment? This question has created lived consequences for those who gave their bodies, time, and hope to the collective struggle.
What remains largely unspoken in this litany of political uprising and retrenchment is the emotional wreckage: the exhaustion of those who believed they were building a better world only to see it shattered and their hopes still unrealized. Defeat is inevitable in political work, but what happens when defeat becomes the dominant outcome? Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024) arrives in the wake of renewed global anti-imperialist mobilizations for Palestine and the reinvigoration of anti-fascist struggle across the globe. Written by a scholar who grasps both the historical weight and contemporary urgency of her subject, the book is a rigorous and humane study of what happens when political movements’ demands go unattended, when barricades fall, and activists are left to reckon with the emotional aftermath.
Proctor refuses to separate the psychological from the political. The phenomenon of burnout, she argues, is not an individual weakness but a structural condition produced by repression, fragmentation, and the accelerated tempo of capitalist time. Personal breakdowns mirror political ones. To feel defeated is not to fail privately but to experience, in one’s own body, the implosion of collective horizons. Structuring the book in three parts—“Historical Symptoms”, “Survival Pending Revolution”, “Concepts Transformed”—which cross-reference each other in a tapestry of emotions and historical moments, Proctor’s method is not linear but constellational. From 1848 to 1968 to today’s burnout culture, the case studies she deploys illuminate one another, revealing recurring patterns in how bodies and minds collapse under the weight of failed projectuality, or respond to defeats by counter-organizing, creating, and commonizing.
By analyzing an archive of fictions and biographies, including Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone, as well as psychological literature as Robert Coles' Social Struggles and Weariness, Proctor’s records of fatigue, melancholy, rage, and the strange relief given by artistically expressing oneself amid revolutionary exhaustion, are anatomized both on an intimate and scientific level. She highlights the left criticism of psychotherapy as an attempt to reconcile individuals with a sick society rather than encouraging them to change it and presents counter-examples, such as during the AIDS crisis in the US, when grassroots, community clinics helped people or groups understand their struggles and ready themselves to fight anew, moving from “anti-adaptative feelings”, to “anti-adaptative healing”.
One of Proctor’s sharpest insights concerns the political dynamics of time itself: “people’s relation to the past is also unstable, liable to change”, she writes. Defeat is not a single event but a process unfolding over years, even decades, like grieving a world that is fatiguing to bring about. What follows is mourning, reassessment, and sometimes renewal. Some militants disappear into silence; others find new ways to continue. Proctor doesn’t prescribe a correct path; rather, she asks how people invested in changing society could simultaneously be concerned with healing their internal reality.
Proctor’s tone allows the reader to sit with discomfort without turning it into spectacle. Each chapter centers on an affect: exhaustion, melancholy, betrayal, recovery, for example, and traces it across contexts, revealing defeat’s recurring phenomenology without erasing historical specificities. The result is both theoretical and practical: by documenting how earlier generations survived their defeats, the book offers a usable construction of the past for the present. How did movementists cope with disillusionment? What mistakes did they repeat? Thinking of the current generation of students invested in actions against climate change or encampments to demand their universities cut ties with the State of Israel, I ask myself, will future generations already be burned out?
Burnout could not be timelier. Contemporary activism is often marked by guilt, exhaustion, precarity, and despair. The acceleration of digital life, the relentless visibility demanded of organizers, the collapse of boundaries between political and personal—all have conspired to produce a new terrain of fatigue. We talk about burnout more than ever, yet we still lack collective strategies to counter it. And that is why Proctor’s book offers a vital historiographic intervention. Radical history tends to celebrate victories while ignoring the far more common experience of failure. Proctor insists that the history of left defeat is equally important: understanding how movements fail is essential to building sustainable forms of resistance. If burnout is structural, then recovery, too, must be.
As we look back on a decade of revolts and social movements, which, emotionally, have endured in those who lived through them, they become a lens to participate in the wave of movements to come. Burnout invites us to reconsider the temporality and the infrastructure of revolutionary meanings. Too often, we pathologize revolutions as symptoms of a broken world and imagine them as sudden ruptures, weeks that can span decades, flames that burn fast and bright. But, as Proctor notes in bringing up the Black Panthers’ holistic approach to social change, revolution also happens through the slow, patient labor of care, construction, and endurance. Perhaps, then, the question is not whether it’s better to burn out than to fade away, but how to inhabit the struggle within the long, uneven durations of history, where revolution, like healing, takes time.
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- Footnotes
[1] The attribution is a condensed paraphrastic quote from the 1918 pamphlet The Chief Task of Our Day, credited to V. I. Lenin. In the translation printed in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works vol. 27 (Progress Publishers, 1965), Lenin writes: “In the space of a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal of monarchies. In the space of a few months, we passed through several stages of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and of shaking off petty-bourgeois illusions, for which other countries have required decades.”
Image:
Arturo Kameya, Pan duro, 2024, © and courtesy of the artist
