Hello and welcome to politics theory other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Hannah Proctor.

For anyone involved in organising on the left or indeed anyone involved in political struggle more generally,

political defeats are inevitable.

But while there's a broad literature on epochal left defeat, such as the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile,

the 1984 minor strike in Britain,

or the defeat of the left in the Spanish Civil War, those accounts rarely focus on the emotional

experience of participants in those struggles after defeat. How they coped, how they didn't,

and what intellectual and organizational resources they drew on to navigate the world

after the barricades had come down, after a strike was beaten, after the attempt to stop a war

had failed. In her book, Burnout, The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, Hannah Proctor

seeks to address this lack of focus on the emotional and psychological side of political adversity.

In our conversation, we talked about why there is a lack of literature on this topic

and how her approach contrasts with what's come to be known as left melancholia.

Amongst other aspects of the book, we discussed the practice of Maoist self-criticism

and its influence on the American and European

New Left, the accounts of women involved in the 1984-85 minor strike following its defeat

at the hands of the Thatcher government, and about the Paris Commune of 1871, and the fate

of the communards who were exiled to the French penal colony in New Caledonia.

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