Books

For fiction, either robot and monk or the wayfarer chronicles by Becky Chambers.

This might seem like the opposite of what you asked, but it might just help you: "Burnout - the experience of political defeat" by Hannah Proctor. We all know the cycle: capitalism/imperialism/patriarchy causes a crisis-->raised consciousness-->revolutionary action-->partial gains-->violent reaction-->temporary stability-->new crisis It will only end with the worldwide victory of the revolution. As long, as the cycle goes on, we will keep experiencing both victories and defeats. Of course this can be tiring and it can lead to burnout, especially for very active comrades like yourself. The book is about acknowledging that, collecting accounts of different kinds of defeat and about "anti adaptive healing". But only you can decide, if it would be too triggering right now to read it.

Here's are some quotes from the book:

I started this book with the conviction that it was important to acknowledge the emotional toll of political defeat. I wrote this book because I felt suspicious of rhetorical appeals to hope that failed to account for the difficult emotional realities of political defeat. I finished this book reminded that experiences of political struggle can also change people positively and in lasting ways.

As winter turned into spring, I received a message saying there was an immigration raid happening near my flat in Glasgow. I went with my flatmate to Kenmure Street where people were milling around an immigration enforcement van surrounded by cops. Someone was underneath the van to stop it driving off, we were told, with the two detainees inside. Over the course of the next few hours the crowds grew. I emailed to cancel my psychoanalysis session and stayed on the street. I saw people I hadn’t seen for months due to Covid-19 lockdowns and met others for the first time. Strangers shared water and snacks. Someone let me into their flat to use their bathroom. It seemed as if the cops were about to kettle the crowd or charge into it at any minute. Rumours and photos of the cops’ activity on neighbouring streets circulated. As more and more people arrived, the atmosphere grew thick. We waited. We remained together. We gossiped. We shouted: ‘These are our neighbours, let them go!’ After hours on the street, the rumour rippled around that the people in the van would be released. Shortly afterwards, they were. They emerged waving. In that moment, when the crowd erupted and the row of cops shrunk back, it was as if the darkness of all the previous months spent in isolation had suddenly lifted. Three days later we took to the streets again to protest Israeli air raids on Gaza City.

Asked in a 2016 interview to respond to Raymond Williams’ dictum that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, Mike Davis rejected the premise that it is necessary to have hope in order to fight to overthrow capitalism. In this book I have tried to make the case that the damaging psychological consequences of engaging in that fight should be acknowledged and can be mitigated. But the fight will not be painless, requiring something like despair of the intellect, hope of the will. Davis can have the final word:

‘Hope’ is not a scientific category. Nor is it a necessary obligation in polemical writing … I manifestly do believe that we have arrived at a ‘final conflict’ that will decide the survival of a large part of poor humanity over the next half century. Against this future we must fight like the Red Army in the rubble of Stalingrad. Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely

I hope you can give yourself permission to take time and space to heal, you deserve it. Let me close with these words by Huey Newton:

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.

I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism.

The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.