Grief, mourning, and solidarity

Eric Maroney: I am sitting with Sarah Jaffe, to speak about her gorgeous new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire. The book places stories of struggle and grief in conversation with leading abolitionist, Indigenous, post-colonial, and liberation scholars. It offers a scathing critique of the many ways capital wrenches profit from both our bodies and the land while denying us the space and place to grieve.

The book provides five themes or theses, which you offer as “perhaps a grammar of grief”:  Grief is a Rupture, Grief is About the Future, Grief is not Work, Grief is Anathema to Capitalism, and Grief is a Collective Becoming. The stories you present in the book emphasize the interconnectedness and simultaneity of these themes, but I am wondering if you can talk about one or two that stand out as particularly useful for thinking about the present.

Sarah Jaffe: Early on in this book I reject common models and frameworks for talking about grief.  I am not going to talk about the stages of grief. But instead, I share these things that I learned from the process [of my own grief], which is an ongoing process that sort of never ends. Grief becomes something that you live with.

In some ways the themes I offer are kind of contradictory, right? I just said grief is a process that never ends, but I also argue that it’s a rupture. What I mean by that is that grief is less about a process and more about who you are on the other side of it—that the person you were before cannot understand who you become.

Grief as a rupture also connects to the last theme, which is about the collective nature of grieving. Grief is this thing that will change you, and the only people who can understand it are people who have also experienced it. I have become friends with several people in recent years because I met them and they said something about having lost a parent. And I was immediately like, Oh, here is my grief. Let’s talk about this. That sort of closeness came from being able to share our grief. My friend Nancy, who lost her father, said to me a little while ago, You know, I’m still in the land of the dead.

And I thought, yeah, wow, that’s an accurate description of it. But when you have been through that, the person who comes out the other side is carrying something that doesn’t go back to normal, that there’s no normal to return to. And I think we’re all sort of collectively experiencing this post-pandemic such as we can ever be post-pandemic. Not only is COVID, the virus, still around and still killing people, but we’re still processing it. We’re still living with it. We are not the same people as before. We are not the same Americans, if we can call being American a collective as different communities experience the virus in different devastating ways. We’re still living with that. So yeah, the last one, Grief as Collective Becoming, is the one that I’ve been sort of poking at the most in recent weeks.

Something that I relied on for writing Work Won’t Love You Back was philosopher Eva Kittay’s book, Love’s Labor, which is about care work and specifically about care work for people with disabilities such that they are sort of never going to be in a place to reciprocate that care the same way.

Kittay writes very beautifully about her daughter, who, because of her disability, is never going to be able to care for Eva and her husband in their old age the way that they have had to care for her. In fact, they have a woman who has been the daughter’s long-term caregiver and is a paid nurse—a care worker. The book explores those relationships. And the theory that Kittay comes out with from all of this is, on one level, basic communism, right? It is from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs. But she writes about it as these sort of nested care obligations—that she will care for her daughter to the best of her ability. And she will try to provide this care as best she can though her daughter is probably going to outlive her, but that is about community. It is not so that her daughter can turn around and reciprocate it at some point, which is often how we think of the family.

And I think of grief this way because the people who were there for me were people who were already in the land of the dead. And because they had already lost that person, they had already been through that. I couldn’t retroactively go back and support them through their grief, but often what you can do is pay it forward. I can’t go back and care for someone who experienced loss in the past, but I can care for the next person who has lost. And so in some way that necessarily makes grief collective because you don’t know who is going to be there for you and you don’t know who you’re going to be there for.

I don’t want to say it is a responsibility to be there for other grievers, but it is a connection, a form of solidarity, something that you pay into your community that makes that community what it is. And that is something that I wish I’d figured out how to articulate this more specifically in the book. That thinking about that kind of solidarity that comes from knowing and that is paid out into the world like. That’s the best answer I can give as to why I wrote this book.

EM: I appreciate that answer. I was wondering if maybe you could connect that line of thinking a little bit to organizations and social movements. Throughout the book, you’re doing this really beautiful dance where you’re moving back and forth between the sort of individual and intimate grief of losing. The book’s through line is, of course, the loss of your father, but it’s also losing relationships, losing homes, places, people.

But, then there’s also this examination of how these ideas of grief kind of play out in our movements and our organizations. So, thinking specifically about grief as collective, how can that help us think about our movement work?

SJ: Yeah. I mean, this is the sort of messy dialectic of grief. It is at once incredibly personal and even physical, bodily. I was talking to somebody who came to my book talk last night who is a bodyworker and she talked about the way that capitalism constrains the body and grief acts on the body. And so, you can’t literally experience the physicality of grief when you have to discipline your body to go back to work.

The challenge is that grief is specific, personal, and idiosyncratic. It doesn’t operate according to neat stages. It will come to kick your ass when you least expect it. That is just inherent in the experience of grief. And also it is a common thing that we will all experience and therefore can be something that, if we figure out how to make the space for it, can bring us together and tie us together.

The book starts out with the George Floyd uprising in 2020. It starts out with a police car on fire. In thinking about that moment, I was in Philadelphia at the time, and these massive, massive protests were occurring. In the middle of the afternoon, people were busting bank windows and lighting police cars on fire, at like two in the afternoon in a mostly empty downtown Philadelphia, because of course it was still locked down.

And I remember thinking, oh, this is what happens when we actually just get out and grieve in public, and this is what happens when people are expressing all of the grief that they’re feeling. They’re grieving for this specific person [George Floyd], they’re grieving for the set of people [who experience police violence], they’re grieving for themselves, they’re also grieving for this fucking pandemic that is scaring the shit out of us, grieving all of the experiences that we haven’t had in the last few months because we’ve been in lockdown, and they’re grieving for the way that capitalism constrains our lives. At that moment, it briefly felt like it was big enough to express some of that collective grief, and then, you know, of course, it fades and people have to go back to work and there’s a really intense and aggressive repression that happens, but that experience . . .

I went to Minnesota for this book because that is where that movement kicked off. Most people don’t know this, but the block where George Floyd was killed, the convenience store that he was killed in front of, is a block away from the offices of CTUL and IX, which are a couple of just incredible, incredible organizations in Minneapolis. The names are Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha and Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia, which is Tenants United. And so they mostly started out organizing in Latinx communities, but they also organized in Black communities in Minneapolis. They also organize anybody who works in certain industries or lives in housing provided by a certain tenant or for certain landlords.

And people who had experienced all this grief, people who had been through rounds of protests after the shooting of Jamar Clark, after the death of Philando Castile in the Twin Cities, they were ready for this. These organizers, they didn’t start the protests, they didn’t control the protests, they didn’t direct the protests, but they were there to support them.

People who got tear-gassed could go into the CTUL and IX offices and be cared for. When the streets finally sort of quiet down, those [organizers] are the people who are holding the lessons of this uprising and who are thinking really seriously about how grief plays a role in their organizing and what it means to make space for that, to give people space to sort of experience and recover from grief but also to integrate it.

So many people who I spoke to for this book have been asking how we build rest into our organizing. How do we build care into our organizing? How do we take better care of each other? I think Kelly Hayes brought this up at our panel at the Socialism Conference, that we need the spaces where we take care of each other so that the meetings where we’re talking about strategy don’t become this space where trauma responses are ping-ponging around the room and suddenly we can’t get anything done because everybody’s triggered, everybody’s activated because we’re all carrying so much.

I don’t know that any of us have the answer because I don’t think there is going to be the one answer, but rather that, this is something that so many people are, are trying to integrate into their organizing in different ways, to make spaces for care and to think about what it means to build a movement that cares for the whole person?

You know, I think about Jane McAlevey, speaking of people I’m grieving now. Jane wrote about whole-worker organizing. What would it look like for the labor movement to really care about the whole person? What would it look like for movements to network together to effectively care for the whole person?

And I don’t think it’s an accident that, in Minneapolis, I’m seeing some of the most exciting work along these lines. Both this amazing alignment of labor unions and worker centers and tenant unions and community groups, climate justice organizing that are all connected with one another, and thinking about how to take care of a specific issue and how to integrate all of the issues, so that we have a livable community?

Yeah, I don’t think it’s an accident that this care-centered organizing comes out of the places where these uprisings have happened. In those uprisings, you build a kind of trust and you build a kind of care that is just different from anything you experience in a normal moment that isn’t a rupture.

EM: Wow. I love that. What I’m hearing from you is that there is a relationship between rage and grief, but also the necessity of not just care, but when you talk about these organizations, it’s like infrastructures of care. You are asking how movement care is sustained over the long term.

With that, I want to jump ahead and look at the book’s conclusion. ​​The conclusion of the book asks the question, “Can social movements build spaces that hold those cycles of rest and celebrations of life, the commemoration of loss, spaces that are connected to the struggle but not the place where it happens?” You go on to write that “moments of grief are messy and not often a good place to begin strategizing . . .” Can you talk more about what you mean by this? Are you confident that the present movements or organizations for justice can achieve this balance? What are the obstacles? Can you point to places where we are on our way?

SJ: The thing is that it’s not a balance. I think it is sort of a dialectic and it’s like you integrate things into your struggle and then what comes out of that is different than what was there before. There will be pushback and there will be new antagonisms and there will be a goddamn genocide that goes on for a year.

And as a result, we integrate new things, right? Like we are experiencing grief in a whole new and terrifying way, looking at what is going on in Palestine right now, and now what is going on in Lebanon. The fact that the world has just allowed this to go on, the fact that our tax dollars are still being spent on weapons and that we have not been able to stop it—this is a new kind of grief. And it is unlike anything we have ever lived with.

I’ve been covering politics and social movements for going on twenty years now, but this is just like, What the fuck is happening? I remember the first couple of months last year, October and November, everything was just like go, go, go, go, go. I remember trying to organize a teach-in on Christian Zionism at one point, and people were not answering my emails fast enough. There was an extreme urgency. It felt like we had to do everything we could do, throw everything at the wall to try to make this fucking thing stop. And somewhere, we had to go, oh my God, this [genocide] is going to keep going for a while.

How then do we transition into fighting genocide sustainably, which is just a bonkers sentence to say. How is that even a thing that we are thinking about right now? But it is because we have to. We have to be alive to keep fighting, and we have to be functional to keep fighting.

I think it’s Gargi Bhattacharya who says that capitalism everywhere is always fascism somewhere. And the difference now is less that fascism is somewhere, and more that it is streaming on our fucking smartphones, which are devices that also only exist because of horrific death-making conditions in many places around the world.

My point is, that we are learning and integrating and changing because of what’s happening right now and because of what we’re learning from people in Palestine, people in Lebanon, and people around the world who are fighting this. We are learning from the Houthis that it actually doesn’t take much to screw up global shipping. We are being forced to reckon with what it will take to meaningfully try to stop the machine of death that is capital.

One of the books that I’ve read, again, and that I wish I had read before I finished mine, is Hannah Proctor’s wonderful book, Burnout and the Experience of Political Defeat. She comes back beautifully to this question of urgency and patience and the tension between the two. And finally, towards the end of the book, she sort of says that urgency is patience.

I just found that so important to think about, because we also have to be okay, because in that room where the trauma response is ping-ponging around everywhere, nothing is getting done. We cannot organize effectively if we are not okay. We can organize actions and marches that don’t actually do anything but make us feel like we have done something, and I am no longer soothed by, Well, at least we did something. I need evidence that what we are doing is, in some way, effective.

And yet, I also feel like there is value in the action that makes people feel like they have done something because these actions can bring new people into the struggle. I was in England for the summer and there were a bunch of racist pogroms where angry people decided to try to assault women in hijabs in the street and set fire to hotels where migrants might be staying.

They threw bricks through businesses owned by Muslims, and basically just went on an Islamophobic rampage. And then a few days later when there were reports that there were going to be more of these pogroms, thousands and thousands and thousands of people across Britain came out to fight them. People came out to protest in places like Walthamstow in the north of London, which are basically these gentrified corners of London occupied by a lot of people who’ve moved to the slightly outer ring to raise children

These are not people who are going out and trying to fight fascists in the streets with incredible regularity. These are people who maybe this was their first time confronting the Right. But now they have done that. And despite the fact that no fascists showed up in Walthamstow that day       —or if they did, they took one look at the crowd and went back home and, you know, kept their fashy flags hidden, in their back pockets— that was still a valuable action because those people had that experience, and so they are more likely to show up again.

The action was not where it was most needed,  probably because most of the fascist rampaging was happening in smaller towns where it is more disproportionately white, but that experience still has welcomed some people into an anti-fascist struggle that they would not have been part of before.

And so, yes, you need the thing that welcomes the new people into activity and gives them the sort of onramps and escalators that will get them to the point where they’re ready to throw down when the alert goes out on the WhatsApp group that there’s a raid happening. I’m thinking of something else that’s in the book where I accidentally stumbled on a police riot while I was walking home in Hackney one night. The police had been trying to arrest and harass or deport some young delivery drivers, and the community had been aware that this was happening through a sort of alert system. And so people came out to stop it. It was a smaller group, but it was really important in that moment, when somebody was actually about to be harmed, that the community came out and said no. The labor organizations and the no-raids networks that had been organizing were able to pull in people who might not normally do things like that.

Even though the low-hanging fruit thing doesn’t satisfy me because I’m like, Oh my God, we have so much further to go before we can overturn this death-making system, it’s still important. These actions can bring new people in and introduce them to struggle and the feeling of, on some level, putting their bodies on the line.

EM: I think that’s very useful. I want to linger on the question of obstacles a little bit because I think it’s useful to name them so that we can begin to think about overcoming them. No one has all the solutions, as you say in the Conclusion, but sometimes just the act of naming the obstacles can help us, at least, be more cognizant in our organizing.

SJ: Yeah, there are a lot of obstacles. I had people, in the course of writing this book, say to me, Oh, I’m, I’m too materialist to think about feelings. And I’m like, Well, I don’t know how to tell you that Marx and Engels also looked around at the world and thought it was horrific.

They were not operating from a place of pure theory. You know, Uncle Freddy looked at his daddy’s factories and went, holy shit, this is what I’m living off the profits of? He continued living off of those profits to be Marx’s sugar daddy, but he was horrified nonetheless. Having a materialist analysis of the world doesn’t mean that we turn off being human. In fact, the whole point of what variously gets called species-being and talking about alienation is that we want a world where we are not alienated. We want a world where we are not ground down and experiencing “social murder,” as Engels put it in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

This stuff grinds us up emotionally as well as physically. We don’t get involved in organizing against capitalism and imperialism purely for material reasons. I was just in Chattanooga last weekend for the Southern Labor Studies Association, and I was chairing a panel on the UAW and their win at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga and talking to some of those workers. One thing they kept coming back to was the question of dignity. It’s always dignity that is the thing that makes people organize. There are often specific insults to it that are not wages. You know, I mean, look, sometimes it’s about money, but often it’s about how the boss talks to me.

This one woman who I spoke to had been working at the plant for fourteen years. She’s told me, They [management] talk to you like you’re a dog, and I’m not going to take that anymore. And the union means to her that the boss is not going to disrespect her anymore. I mean, it probably means a little bit more money in her pocket, but the Volkswagen workers make good money compared to many people in the South of the U.S. but it comes down to dignity.

The example I use so often is the Amazon workers in Shakopee, Minnesota, who were mostly Somali and East African. They fought over prayer time. Many of them are practicing Muslims and they wanted their time to pray and they wanted space to do it in and space to do it properly. That was the thing that brought Amazon to the bargaining table.

It wasn’t money, and it wasn’t even the work process. It was like, We want to be able to feel like humans and not like robots. So, the fact that I still have to sort of argue with some socialists who see themselves as pure materialists is absurd. We should care about things beyond bread and butter.

That’s a major obstacle, but the biggest obstacle of all is time. Everybody is so exhausted. I always end up recommending a ton of books whenever I talk about my own book. Another one is  Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s The Exhausted of the Earth in which he argues that the exhausted is perhaps the political subject of our time.

And I hear that in a lot of the interviews I do. I heard it from the Volkswagen workers, who told me that, after the lockdowns lessened, they just had to work all these extra hours to make up for lost volume. I also heard it from gig workers, who often tell themselves they must just keep the productivity app on just a little bit longer, and I hear it from people who are working from home now because working from home means your boss expects you to answer emails at 9 PM.

We’re so exhausted that we don’t even have time to experience what we’re actually feeling. The thing that I’ve heard from a lot of people who have been organizing around Palestine is that there is not even time to grieve because the genocide is still happening.

You can’t be in post-traumatic stress disorder when the stress hasn’t stopped, when you are never post the traumatic stress because it just keeps going. And again, I’m sort of returning to the same point over and over again, but I think that it is on purpose, right? We are not only sped up but also stretched out. More and more and more of our time is taken up and it’s being taken from us so that we can’t raise hell.

And, you know, one of the important things about the strike is that it’s not just a way to fuck up production, but it is also a way to reclaim your time.

In a strike, we are pulling our time back from capital and saying, actually, this is ours to do with what we want. And, you only get it from us if we agree to give it to you, and we will only do that if you agree to some of our demands. That kind of claiming of space and time is so, so important because we are so exhausted.

Another thing that Miriam Kaba actually brought up at an event in Chicago is how we have different grammars of grief, and that different people have different languages, experiences, processes, and rituals around it. And we often talk past each other. We don’t all need the same thing, other than time and that time to be flexible. Because you might be okay for a week and then suddenly grief kicks your ass. You might have it kick your ass five years on and need to take the time then. But no boss is going to be like, Oh, you can have your bereavement leave from the death of your mom five years ago. You’re supposed to be over that by now. And if you’re not, there’s social ostracization too. And we can do that to each other in the movement too, right?

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs was talking about this on our panel at Socialism again. She was in New Orleans, organizing after Katrina. She talked about this sign she had seen that read something like less tears, more action. But people have just lost everything, you know, and setting aside time for grief is important. We can sort of internalize these capitalist values even about how the revolution is going to be done. There is an internalized myth that it’s going to be done by us just working more. And I think, this is why I returned to Walter Benjamin in the beginning, the end, and all through this book to suggest the revolution is pulling the emergency brake.

It’s often doing less, deliberately doing less and refusing. It’s finding that way to stop the gears that are grinding us all to shreds.

EM: This next question is related to what you were just speaking about. At several points in the book, you note that capitalism doesn’t allow space for us to grieve, both denying us the time to grieve and also the ritual of grief altogether. I am thinking about Chapter 4—the story of Christina Longhini posting the video of her father’s belongings handed to her in a garbage bag, “his pajamas covered in blood” after he died of COVID-19 during the Italian lockdowns in Bergamo. Her story reminds readers that during the COVID lockdowns, people did not have access to their traditional rituals of grief. Many readers will make the connection to Palestinians, who collect bags of body parts from the Israeli government as it continues its genocidal slaughter of Gaza. What does it mean to be denied the time and ritual of grief? What might these two instances (Gaza and Bergamos) offer about one another?

SJ: Yeah. I finished a draft of this book on September 15th of last year. And so I had written some about Palestine, but then I had to sort of tear a chunk out of the book and write 5,000 words of what was going on—what is still going on. One of the things I had written about was the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian journalist, and how the Israelis then disrupted her funeral, and it, again, sort of brings me back to the Walter Benjamin line about, even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

And then recently with the pager attacks in Lebanon, supposedly on Hezbollah, but, Israel just blew up a bunch of pagers that had been imported into the country five months ago. They blew up a whole lot of people who weren’t in Hezbollah.

But one of the things that some people noted was they did a first round of explosions of these things. And then the next day, when people would have been trying to bury their dead, they set off another round. It’s a literal attempt to harm people as they gather to grieve. Just think about how horribly cruel that is—that it’s an attempt to literally weaponize people trying to gather to mourn. When we think about what’s happening in Gaza, it’s not only that people are having to try to identify body parts from a pile in a bag, but also that they have to broadcast this to the world to try to get someone to give a shit. It has a whole other kind of publicness to it. None of us should be seeing this stuff, but at the same time, Palestinians understand there is a political necessity to this publicness.

I think about Beth Hoffberg, who is an organizer in Memphis who I spoke to for the first chapter of the book, and she talks about watching the video of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by Memphis police. She was just like, I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is so wrong that this police killing is a thing that we are watching. And I understand politically why it is. It’s necessary for the video to be out, and to be public, and for people to be able to watch it. But also, oh my God, I shouldn’t be seeing this.

This is just this horrible, horrible moment. That shouldn’t be the way the world knows this man. And because of that, Beth really focused on finding his photography and trying to get it out to the world. It was important to her that we know this person beyond the horrible way that he died. And not out of this sort of respectability politics of like, Oh, we have to prove that he was a good person and this shouldn’t have happened to him.

You know the family, friends, and loved ones of those murdered by police shouldn’t have to grieve in front of everybody and be judged on how well you do it. But there’s this set of judgments that get leveled on the family members of people who have been killed by police. Some of them sort of perform the role well, in such a way that is acceptable to the movement,and others don’t. I wouldn’t perform that role very well. I am not good at controlling my emotions. There is an expectation that not only do you have to grieve in this horrible way for this horrible thing that has happened, but also you have to sort of do it knowing that the world is watching. It becomes collective in a way that maybe we don’t want it to be.

How many videos have we watched now of somebody holding their dead child up to the camera. People have commented over and over again that so many of the videos coming out of Gaza are in English. People know who the audience is because they know who is funding the bombs. And imagine having to speak about this horror in a language that is not the most comfortable to you because you are desperately trying to get someone to turn off the flow of death. It’s just horrific in a way that I don’t know how to hold physically.

And that question of a loss of the ritual, we see it in Gaza and then, on the other end, you know, with COVID. People died alone and their loved ones didn’t see what happened.  You asked about Christina. She makes this video of the bag, the garbage bag that the hospital workers gave her back holding her father’s things. But she couldn’t be with him in the hospital. And the nurses and the doctors were so busy that she barely got to talk to him while he was in the hospital because they were just dealing with all of it.

And, you know, the medical workers are, in turn, the ones who experienced all of it, they’re the only ones who experienced this death firsthand. So on the one hand, there is a horrific, horrific publicness to pandemic grief. On the other hand, there is a sort of outsourcing of all of the grieving to a set of workers who are also physically exhausted and overworked.

They are often sick themselves and are terrified of bringing the virus home to their own families. Particularly in the early days, when we didn’t really know what would work against it and what wouldn’t.

And this is still true now, when the broader message from the rest of the world is to go back to normal. Everything is fine. And people who work in hospitals are seeing a surge. People are still dying of this thing, and these workers are still being forced to hold all of that. They’re not getting the support they need. They’re not getting the care that they need. They’re not getting anything that they need, and they just have to go on holding it or quit their jobs. But they also have to figure out some way to process it, handle it, and mourn it, alone.

EM: Obviously not on the same scale, but sort of drawing a correlative between the genocide in Gaza and the COVID pandemic is that there’s also a degree of denial. You’re seeing the evidence in your face, and yet the official story continues to deny that it’s happening. I think that also complicates the grief. I think this actually kind of transitions to another question, which is the question of solidarity, right? I think that one of the brilliant things that the book does is to deploy grief as a kind of analytic. We know the culprit is capitalism. But using grief as the analytic tool to examine the alienation, exploitation, violence, and the imperialist drive of capitalism, both personalizes and also collectivizes our experiences of those things. And I think that it breaks open a pathway for solidarity.

This comes in Chapter Four; you write, “Solidarity is a feeling and a practice that is pulverized by the neoliberal era.” I love that. But then you go on to write, “In the early days, the pandemic broke from this logic because the pandemic had to be faced communally. However, neoliberalism quickly rose from the dead again.” I was wondering if you could just comment a little both on the solidarity across the struggles that you talk about in the book, but also the way in which capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular, insists on pulverizing this solidarity out of us.

SJ: One of the things with COVID is that, in the early days, when we didn’t know how it spread, we had this whole [idea] that we were in it together. We’re all at the same risk. And then it became very clear that we weren’t. It became very clear that the workforce split into three.

There were people who could work from home; people who just got fired, laid off, furloughed, but mostly fired; and people who were still doing the same job, but it just got a whole hell of a lot more dangerous. And guess which section died? It was the people who were still going to work in person. It was the healthcare workers, but also the line cooks, the meatpacking workers, and those who are incarcerated. These groups experienced some of the highest casualty rates. It was people who were forced to be in collective settings—whether they liked it or not, mostly they did not—who were dying. It was also disproportionately Black and Brown people. It was also people who lived in multi-generational homes, and therefore the whole family gets sick when one person goes to work.

As soon as we started to realize who was dying, the minute it became publicized that it was more likely to be Black and Brown people who would die from the virus, that’s when white people started to throw off their masks and protest because they wanted to be able to get a haircut.

That’s when it started to polarize, because it became a thing that was mostly happening to people who society considers disposable already. And of course, the trick is that capitalism considers us all disposable. But, it will make certain people more disposable than others. And so that acknowledgment of who is it that’s actually sick, who is it that’s actually dying is an important one. When you don’t know anybody who is taken by the virus, you may feel less affected.

I remember talking to an editor who was trying to commission me for a piece about the moment when nobody wanted to work anymore. This was one of the several post-COVID work trends that we’ve had—bosses sticking up these flyers on their fast food windows complaining that nobody wants to work anymore. And I had to tell this editor, like, look, people died. One of the reasons that there is a labor shortage in this industry is the people who used to work in it are dying. And this editor responded, Oh, but mostly old people died. And I answered, Yeah, and poor people, and people who work in low-wage jobs, people who work in fast food.

Just because you didn’t know anyone who died, my dude, does not mean that no one died. It means that your social circle is classed. My point is, if we do not learn to break out of seeing our social circle as the political world, we are fucked on so many levels. I used to work in restaurants for a good ten years of my life before I finally managed to claw my way out of the service industry, so this is not academic to me. These statements of we’re all in it together, they fall apart very quickly once it becomes clear that we’re not. We’re not in it the same way.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. And who is made vulnerable to premature death? In some ways, the whole thing is going to kill all of us, but it will be group differentiated and it will come for some people first. We can either see this and challenge it as a basis for building solidarity or we can close our eyes and ignore it.

I was talking to Eva Borgwardt from IfNotNow in relation to Palestine because there are sort of two Jewish responses to antisemitism. There is, Oh my God, we need a walled fortress and we need to do our own genocide in order to keep us safe. Or we go with the, you know, the Yiddish word is doikayt, which translates to hereness, and it is the principle of the Bund and of radical anti-Zionist Judaism, which is that we fight where we are, with who is around.

And that is about solidarity. It is about connection. It is about reaching across and being in relationship with the people and the place where you live. In a way that was meaningful to me before the fucking genocide started, but it’s certainly become only so much more so since. Because you can either reach out across differences and realize that at different moments in time, I have been part of the group that was made vulnerable to premature death. Right now I may not be, but I can certainly be again. And we can either say and recognize that those differences are the thing we need to fight, or we can double and triple down on them and, you know, we are seeing in real-time right now what happens when that happens. The response is genocidal, right?

There’s no ethno-state that does not commit racist violence. You just can’t do that. I know that Richard Spencer and all those assholes tried to sell it that way for a little while. Like, Oh, we just want, you know, like people to be with like people. But, there’s no way to do that without racist violence and mostly no way to do it without genocidal racist violence.

EM: I also think that one of the things the book offers in presenting grief as a kind of analytic tool is that it helps to frame solidarity a little bit differently. It helps to encourage us to think about one another in relation to one another. But I wanted to make sure that we get to this last question.

Is there a danger to overstating the commons of grief? In the book, you write about the work of Sisters Uncut who call a demonstration in support of a white woman who has been brutalized by the police. Another example is the lesbian and gay support for the striking miners described in Chapter Three. But it seems the most aggrieved are often required to express empathy and offer solidarity first. That solidarity is not always returned, so is there a danger to overstating a commons? If so, what do we do with that?

SJ: I think that is an important question. It is sort of a challenge that we do not all speak the same language of grief, actually. Look, I think that the fascist uprisings in England trying to smash things are also a grief response. It’s a horrific one, but there is a kind of grief in there.

Gabe Winant wrote this piece in the early days after October 7th, and he was arguing with Joshua Leifer. Gabe talks about Israel as a machine for metabolizing grief. It turns that grief into an excuse for genocidal racist violence. And so it’s like, you sort of can’t grieve. This is this, you know, challenge that I think a lot of Jewish people have been struggling with since October 7th : if we express grief at all, it just gets metabolized back into this fucking machine. And the machine is genocidal.

I remember listening to an interview with Adam Tooze, who, in addition to being everybody’s favorite sort of economics commentator, is actually a scholar of politics in Nazi Germany. And he was talking about one of the things that brought Nazism about was the mass death of World War One. And this experience of mass death that Nazism, in particular, does is it sort of venerates death and turns that into its object. And it basically becomes a death cult. What it offers people as consolation is taking pleasure in the deaths of others.

And this, to a lesser extent, but still to an extent, is the promise of Trumpism. It is that you get to take pleasure in the misfortune and misery of Brown people, right? This is on some level what America is all about. Greg Grandin’s book The End of the Myth, explains the way that freedom in the U.S. is always freedom to exploit, oppress, and kill Black and Brown people.

But these are also things that come out of grief and trauma. They are experiences also of material loss. I write a lot about deindustrialization, which is something that I’ve been obsessed with writing about since the Trump phenomenon began, actually before the Trump phenomenon began. Some people’s response to deindustrialization is “make America great again”, which is like, you know, bring back the days when men were men and went down a coal mine and that’s what life looked like. And, you know, that actually sucked when it was really happening, but we are nostalgically attached to it because at least you knew where your next paycheck was coming from.

And that is all wrapped up in ideas of race, ideas of whiteness, ideas of masculinity, and power and strength. But it does not offer anything real. Trumpism is not going to make America great again, spoiler alert, because, well, America was never great. The pleasure Trumpism offers instead, the thing that will allow his supporters to deal with the awful feelings that they are feeling, is revenge.

But it’s revenge on the wrong people. Because it’s not, not that I need to tell any of your readers this, but it wasn’t the migrants who closed the factory, you know? And so, it is really important to note that grief does not make us better people automatically, or even a little bit better. It often can make us worse, especially in a world that offers us no care and support for it.

EM: I think that connects back to the way you end the book, which emphasizes the importance of having those spaces for grief, care, and emotions inside the movement work and the organizational work that we do. Having them is not a fail-safe, but it is one effort that can prevent those feelings of grief from descending into feelings of grievance, which is another kind of pairing that you use in the conclusion.

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