From the Ashes

August 15, 2024
Labor journalist Jaffe delivers a searching meditation on grief and its misapprehensions. The world is burning--literally, with climate change remaking the planet and pandemics and political violence upending the nations. Against this backdrop, Jaffe posits, her private griefs are not lessened, but they stand in a kind of communion with the grief experienced by so many others: grief born of the death of loved ones, of injustice, of the need to leave one's country and flee to another. Such griefs, Jaffe writes, constitute "a sudden, abrupt, even violent break from the status quo"--and if there's anything capitalism hates, it's a departure from the status quo and the demands that owners make on the worker bees' lives, without time allotted for grieving but "only to attend a funeral." Though her musings never quite cohere into a manifesto as such, Jaffe's book constitutes an informal set of philosophical propositions: Capitalism wants us to be monads, easily separable, in a society that "hasn't been set up to understand collective decisions"; because grief is universal, it is definitively collective; therefore, as one therapist tells her, "We're communal beings. We should be heartbroken for each other." Whether that sense of broadly distributed grief can do anything to lessen individual sufferings is a point of debate, but certainly it invites the reader to summon more empathy upon learning of the death of a friend's pet, the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage. All of this hinges on a perhaps unexpected outgrowth of grief, namely hope in the form of the realization that we have no control over the world--but, even so, "changing the world is a process that will require many of us imagining and struggling together." A fresh way to look at the psychic pains that we bear mostly alone--and unnecessarily so.

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October 7, 2024
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.