From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire

Grief restructures the world of those who undergo it, and as such is a potent political force, according to this unique and captivating account. Drawing on the loss of her own father, journalist Jaffe (Work Won’t Love You Back) illustrates how processing grief requires time and attention—the kind of time and attention that is purposefully limited by capitalism, with its tight control of bereavement leave, “personal days,” and workers’ bandwidth for caring for themselves and others. Jaffe then turns to society-wide acts of “collective mourning”—protests and demonstrations over deadly issues like police brutality, global warming, the war in Gaza, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviewing activists in the U.S. and Europe, she draws a striking connection between political resistance and personal grief, outlining how grief is an emotion that gives individuals atomized under capitalism an avenue by which to feel a sense of community with others, and showing how political protest is, similar to bereavement, a unique period of “taking time off” to mark and memorialize death. Jaffe writes with clarity and force (“Capitalist society has pathologized grief in order... to insinuate that... if we insist on feeling it, we are the problem”) and highlights a fascinating range of voices from the world of grassroots activism (“Hope is a discipline,” one organizer insightfully tells her). This pulses with vitality. (Sept.)