Fighting Like Hell

From the climate crisis to racist police violence, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the genocide in Gaza, grief, loss, and mourning are central both to political catastrophes and to struggles to transform our deathly social conditions. In From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, Sarah Jaffe explores the politics of grief by interweaving descriptions of her own wrenching, and often physical, experience of mourning the death of her father with discussions of loss in the context of a range of social movements. Death might be a fact of every life, but many premature deaths have social causes; they are neither random nor inevitable. Drawing on interviews with activists and organizers, Jaffe speaks with many people who were galvanized by experiences of loss to fight for a more just world: relatives of black people killed by the police, community organizers in the aftermath of natural disasters, family members of people who died of Covid.

The temporality and emotional intensity of grieving is anathema to the demands of capitalist workplaces. Grief, like revolution, creates a rupture with what came before and changes our sense of past, present, and future. Jaffe reminds us that although we walk with ghosts, grieving the losses of the past amid the ongoing injustices of the present can nourish and inform attempts to create a more caring society. We spoke last month about her book and the need to grieve the dead while fighting like hell for the living. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Hannah Proctor

Hannah Proctor: I wanted to start by asking you about the relationship between grief and revolution. You associate both terms with rupture, but how would you distinguish or connect these two modes of rupture?

Sarah Jaffe: In China Miéville’s book about The Communist Manifesto he writes about the idea of rupture as something that is a definitive break with what came before, and this was exactly how I found grief to be. It was really powerful to have that lens to think about 2020 when we had Covid and then the George Floyd uprisings. I’ve been covering social movements, protests, and uprisings for a long time, and that moment felt like something very different. I think it really did come out of a sense of collective grief. Coming out of lockdown onto the streets to say that we can’t tolerate this anymore.

HP: You claim that grief is about the future, which I found interesting, as mourning is often talked about in the sense of coming to terms with a loss in the past. You also talk about the time needed for grieving and the nonlinearity of grief as an experience. Is there something political about a future-oriented understanding of grief?

SJ: The most shocking thing to me about my own experience of grief was that I wasn’t sitting around remembering when my dad took me for a pony ride when I was six; I was realizing that I wouldn’t get to win an argument with him in the future. It was about not being able to imagine how life goes on without this person, which relates again to the question of rupture.

I argue that grief isn’t work. You hear about the “seven stages of grief,” but you can’t force yourself to grieve on a schedule. I went to a conference the week after my father died. I was moderating a panel and one panelist was talking about organizing in the workplace, and I just suddenly glazed over. There’s no words for it. It’s just not something you can do on the clock.

I kept thinking about Walter Benjamin saying that revolutions are humanity reaching for the emergency brake. That’s what you want to do when grief takes you: whatever you’re doing in that moment you need to pull the brake. The George Floyd uprisings felt like massive numbers of people trying to pull the brake.

I remember being in New York after Hurricane Sandy and watching community organizers and all of these people who had already been working to change the world leap into action to provide the kind of care people needed. I spent a lot of time writing about that. I was looking at the things that all of these people were making, which were not supposed to expire once the immediate disaster was over. But how do we think about this as a transition to a different future?

Sandy was bad enough, but I also think about Hurricane Katrina. I also went to Puerto Rico for this book, and I write about Hurricane Maria. Those events really did change everything about the way that the people who survived thought and organized and worked, even if they had already been on the radical left. How do we take these moments of really unfathomable loss to build something?

HP: Your book emphasizes the importance of community organizations, mutual aid, and care. You talk about the different contexts of “organized state abandonment” and discuss how different organizations have worked to fill the gaps. How does your examination of mutual aid and care relate to your understanding of grieving?

SJ: I’m Jewish, so I think first and foremost of sitting Shiva. There is a culture of mutual aid around grieving—people bring you food, you cover all the mirrors in your house. You’re not supposed to worry about what you look like; you’re just supposed to sit there and grieve. Then seven days are over and you’re supposed to be done, which is, of course, not a thing. My friend Dania Rajendra, who is one of the people the book is dedicated to, told me about a friend of hers who would say, “I’m sitting Shiva today.” She’d say this whenever the grief came to her, rather than doing it for a set period of time, which I loved.

I think that there’s something meaningful about doing things for other people when you are feeling disconnected and unmoored. Grief is nothing if not disconnecting and unmooring. Particularly in political moments where it feels like everything is so horrifying the first thing that you do is ask about the immediate mutual aid.

The response that people had to the recent fascist riots in England was to come out on the streets to resist. The response to the genocide in Gaza has been to come out and protest. Of course, that’s about trying to stop what’s happening, but it’s also about a need to come out and be with other people because it is too horrific to bear alone. There’s a line in the book from the activist-scholar Aviah Sarah Day saying that every time we reckon with the disposability of people in Palestine we’re also reckoning with how disposable we all are to capital, to the world, to the states that we live in. We are grappling with the fact that it could be us. Going door to door to check on people after a hurricane or buying groceries for a neighbor during the pandemic—it’s all a way of dealing with horrific moments of loss.

HP: In your discussions of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel you talk about both Gillian and Jacqueline Rose. You draw on Gillian’s discussion of “Holocaust piety” and her sister Jacqueline’s work on Zionism. How have you made sense of “weaponized grief” in the context of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza?

SJ: I turned in the first draft of the book on September 15, 2023, and very soon after that this nightmare began. I tore a big chunk out of the book’s first chapter and wrote five thousand words in a kind of rage haze.

I sat down and read Jacqueline Rose’s books on Zionism in that moment. I was speaking with friends of mine who are Jewish, who consider themselves on the left, but who have this attachment to the idea of a Jewish state as representing safety. That idea is very hard for people to let go of. Jacqueline Rose finds a way in these books of saying that she understands where the impulse to create this state came from, but also discusses all the reasons that it was doomed from the start. Both of the Rose sisters write with a sharpness of thinking combined with generosity that I really want to emulate. Gillian wrote about “Holocaust piety” back in the 1990s. It’s only gotten worse since then. She criticizes the idea that there was this one awful event that was the worst thing that could have ever happened and which was somehow disconnected historically from other forms of colonial violence, genocide, industrialized death.

I was talking to young anti-Zionist Jewish organizers who are active in the Palestine solidarity movement, and it’s so infuriating to constantly have your Jewishness invoked to justify horrifying things. When the UN ambassador showed up during the genocide with a yellow star on his jacket, he was criticized by the head of the Holocaust museum in Israel, who said we are no longer in that position, we are no longer powerless. But it was almost as if what happened to people in Auschwitz was their own fault. Grief is weaponized but also denied. Gabriel Winant wrote a piece in Dissent where he talked about Israel as a machine for weaponizing grief. It was already being weaponized before, but it has become so much worse. It’s like the United States after September 11. Becoming the victims made it possible to strengthen our imperial might around the world.

HP: You cite the famous line from Walter Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History”: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” I’ve been thinking about a letter Max Horkheimer wrote to Benjamin to express his skepticism about Benjamin’s approach to history in which he says that “the slain are really slain.” He was wary of Benjamin’s version of messianism because the dead are dead, and past injustice cannot be rectified. But obviously Benjamin was writing at the same moment he was attempting to flee Nazi Europe, so it’s not as if he was a detached intellectual removed from the horrors of the present. What did you find compelling about Benjamin’s argument?

SJ: It makes me think about research on generational trauma, which again gets weaponized in ways that I find really disgusting. The Hamas attack did not set off in me some deep fear of annihilation because I’m aware that the geopolitics of where I live is very different than the geopolitics of the state of Israel. The thing that is most likely to kill me is the lack of health insurance in America. There are limits to the insistence on trauma being handed down.

Walter Benjamin’s messianic historical materialism is getting at something about the ways we can’t escape history entirely. At Standing Rock the bulldozers that were coming through to dig the Dakota Access pipeline literally turned up graves. Rather than thinking that we can bring back the dead, it’s important to think that things can get worse. In terms of Holocaust piety, the dead are being used in many cases in ways they would not want to be, in that they’re being used as justifications for war.

I contrast at some point, Mother Jones saying, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” with the famous Joe Hill phrase “Don’t mourn, organize.” I think we have to mourn and organize.

Grief is inevitable. We’re still mortal—Peter Thiel is not going to solve that. We’re all going to die. People we love will die. But often it will not be dramatic or horrific. It will just be a thing that is a natural outcome of being human. We can’t solve grief. We’re going to have to do it. But there are so many horrific ways to die that we can stop, that we can change. During Covid, people I talked to who lost parents couldn’t be there with them. I was upended by the death of my father, but I could see him. I could visit him in the hospital. I could say goodbye.

What does justice look like in an expansive way that reaches into the past as well as into the future?

HP: You are clear in the book that grief is not work. Capitalism cannot accommodate grieving. The book interweaves your personal experiences of grieving your father with your political arguments and in relation to work you discuss that the valorization of hard work was something you learned from him, so I wanted to ask you to reflect on the relationship (or non-relationship) between work and grief, and how your understanding of that was shaped by your own experiences.

SJ: I wrote a whole book about work: Work Won’t Love You Back. I start that book with a chapter on unwaged work in the family. I quote Silvia Federici saying, “We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.” Just one of my favorite lines ever. Then I started thinking about what’s not work.

A couple of years ago I was somewhere with a friend and we had this big argument because I was asking how he’d been doing and I was sad that he didn’t want to talk about things at that moment. The next day I said something like, “I’m still trying to earn your love, and you’re trying to tell me that I have it.” And he said that was right. It really was a light bulb moment for me. Sometimes love is just there and it’s not work at all.

I write about my parents’ obsession with having a super baby somewhere in this book. There was this pressure really early on to teach me to read, to teach me about geography and art and all these things. It turned out my parents didn’t really value any of this stuff for its own sake but valued it because that’s what they thought a proper middle-class child should be into. And weirdly, you know, reading a lot of books from a very young age made me a communist. My father was incredibly hard working, and he could never deny that I was also incredibly hard working, even when I was working at something that he thought was a waste of time, like writing left-wing books. I’ve always been really productive and learned that from a young age. What grief taught me was that sometimes I just couldn’t anymore. Finally, there was a wall in my life that I couldn’t scale by just working harder. That was really difficult for me (even as I was literally already in the midst of writing a book about how work is bad). But it has, among other things, given me much healthier relationships with the humans in my life because I’ve learned to stop anxiously working at things all the time and have learned to accept that the people who care about me really care about me. I don’t have to constantly be scrambling.

HP: I really like this idea of identifying things that are not work. I get worried sometimes when concepts like emotional labor are extended to friendships.

SJ: Right, like “Venmo me for my emotional labor.” Sometimes care is also work, and sometimes people are also getting paid for care, and sometimes unpaid care is still also work but being kind to a friend isn’t necessarily work. We can hold complicated things like this in our heads at once.

HP: You make an interesting point about “critical nostalgia” in relation to the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, saying that obviously there was a necessity to fight to preserve those jobs, and the working-class communities that existed in mining towns, but that it was also important to acknowledge how brutal and dangerous it was to be a miner. It made me think about an argument that Jacqueline Rose makes in a London Review of Books article about mourning that was written during the pandemic, in which she highlights the importance of ambivalence toward the lost object. There’s a danger in idealizing the lost person or thing.

SJ: I took the term “critical nostalgia” from the wonderful historian Ewan Gibbs, who wrote an excellent book about deindustrialization and the mining industry in Scotland. I read about this in his book and then the interviews I did really confirmed it. You would get people who had been through the strikes, who had been at Orgreave (where they were all beaten and arrested and charged with rioting), and they were not particularly sentimental about their jobs. Nobody said working in a mine was amazing.

I went to the mining museum in Yorkshire, and the guy who gave the tour was a former miner. After he had finished telling us about how something only qualified as a “major industrial incident” that would result in a mine being closed down if over ten people died, he said that being a miner was the best time of his life. Well, which was it? Ewan notes in his book that a lot of memorials to mining disasters went up around the time of the strike and the time of these mines closing. It was a kind of ambivalent mourning, right? We are sad that this industry is going because we’ve built a whole way of life around it, but we also remember that it was awful and it killed us. So they were both mourning the industry and the people that it brutalized at the same moment.

One of the reasons that so many of the clichés about grief really get to me is that they leave no room for ambivalence. I had a very complicated relationship with my dad, which will come across to people who read this book. We did not get along. He voted for Donald Trump. We fought a lot, but that didn’t make it easier when he died. One of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that all of our relationships are ambivalent. There is complication in everything, even in the best relationships that we have. We know that about family relationships because they are so thorny and messy, but it also characterizes our relationships with things like work and workplaces.

I was going through old articles for another project the other day and was reading something I’d written about Rick Santorum when he was running for president in 2012. Rick Santorum is most famous because Dan Savage used his last name to describe the byproduct of anal sex because Rick Santorum is notoriously homophobic. Santorum was running a proto-Trump campaign, a kind of right working-class politics that then got swept up by Trumpism. My first book begins with this guy talking about how he joined the Tea Party, who said things started to get bad when the BenchCraft plant closed up and left town. I was interested in exploring the effects that deindustrialization had on actual humans and the way that it made some of those workers move towards horrifically reactionary politics, while it made others move somewhere else, somewhere better. It is helpful to think about this as a kind of grief.

Dave Green, who is in the book, really crystallizes this. He was the president of the union at the Lordstown General Motors plant and is now the regional director for the United Auto Workers in that area. He flopped down on the couch and said that if there are seven stages of grief then they were stuck in the middle because they still didn’t really know what was happening to them. That made me realize that it really was a process of grieving.

Nostalgia can flatten that ambivalence. Regular nostalgia can look back and long to bring back the factories or bring back the mines. But trad wives and incels are a morbid symptom of the idea that there’s some ideal time that we need to get back to. Critical nostalgia is different because even if it can still be a little rose-colored, it remains aware that we can’t go back there from here and that the original thing was already flawed. There’s been a rupture.

HP: Earlier the thing that I wrote down in my notebook while you were talking was: “There’s no way back from the rupture.”

SJ: We can wish that things had been different and also be honest that they weren’t. I often shorthand a particular type of thinking as “liberal MAGA,” where there’s this idea that if only we could prove that Trump was a Russian spy or something then we could not only make him go away but make it as if he never really happened. It was also true for those people who became obsessed with the second referendum push around Brexit, right? There was a desire to make it as if it had never happened. All these people went on marches to demand a second referendum without really asking what had happened and why. It was just about undoing something. But we have to deal with the fact that these things did happen: people voted for Trump and Brexit. That is the politics we have. Those are the people we have to organize among, some of whom, hopefully, we can win over to something better, some of whom we’re just going to have to beat in the street when they’re trying to set fire to migrant hotels. Wanting to sweep away some period in order to go back to a mythical promised land. I don’t know, man, I’m too Jewish for that shit.

Though now when I think about it, that’s exactly what the state of Israel is—which is probably why I’m insistent also that Zionism is counter to a lot of Jewish teaching, certainly the parts of it that I value and return to. Anti-Zionist Jewish tradition—the Yiddish concept of “doikayt”—says that we fight where we are, alongside allies, for a livable world for all.

A politics today would take into account all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here: the need for rupture, the need for mutual aid and care, the need for space and time for things that aren’t work, but it’s hard to see how to get there precisely because we haven’t had that rupture yet. But each time there’s a big rupture we get closer to it.