Tag: from the ashes

Samhita Mukhopadhyay interviewed me for The Meteor! She writes:

Collective grief plays a profound role in our politics; it can unite us and inspire change. But we don’t often give grief the space to truly transform us into better political citizens.

Read the whole thing at The Meteor.

I spoke with the excellent Hannah Proctor once again; this time she interviewed me about my book for the Baffler:

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?

After our panel at the Socialism conference, I spoke for a bit longer with Kelly Hayes and Eman Abdelhadi about grief, organizing, and the struggles we’re in right now. Kelly ran our conversation in her newsletter (which you should subscribe to!) and then it was reprinted in Truthout.

This is why, I think, we do this work, at the end of the day: we are the kinds of people who can’t simply go through the world unhurt by all that is going on around us even if we, at a given time, have managed to insulate ourselves from being materially damaged by it. We see what is happening in the world, from Gaza to our own neighborhoods, and it hurts. We might have the best political analysis in the world, but we got there because we cared about the world around us.