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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.
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