It’s Labor Day weekend, and I’m in Erie, PA. I spent a cold and stressful week here last winter, in the lead-up to the nine-day strike by UE Locals 506 and 618, and thought that Erie in the summer, without a strike looming, would make a nice weekend getaway after the UE convention that just concluded on Thursday. And Labor Day weekend seems like a good time for reflection for someone whose life has been largely defined by the labor movement and the academic school year, so I’m writing an essay about certain aspects of the past year.
It’s been a somewhat difficult one. I’ve struggled with depression on and off since adolescence (at least), but this past year has been qualitatively different. For a variety of personal and professional reasons that I don’t really want to go into publicly, I’ve stopped, well, hoping for better. I have a pretty good life, a meaningful job that I (mostly) enjoy, I’m in good physical health, my kids are doing great. For the most part, the last year has been free of the kind of crushing lows that I used to be subject to, and I haven’t experienced intense suicidal ideation since, well, Labor Day weekend of last year. (Note/disclaimer: I’m okay, I’m not going to kill myself, I know how to deal with suicidal ideation and have been for years, etc.)
Given all that, it didn’t seem to me like I would need, well, hope, per se. And yet, it has been a strange and difficult year. The weirdest thing about giving up hope is that it creates (at least for me) a sort of dissociative disconnect between my intellect and my emotions, especially the part of the emotional brain responsible for motivation. Because of course I haven’t really given up “hope” in the broader sense — I can look around me and see that while some things about our current moment are objectively terrible (the looming threat of climate change, rising white-supremacist violence), others are objectively better than they have been at any other point in my lifetime (increased working-class militance, the growing Left pole in U.S. politics). I “know” that there’s hope (and that even if there isn’t, I and everyone else would be better off acting as if there is) — I just don’t feel it.
In practice this means that oftentimes over the past year, as I lie in bed struggling to find the motivation to get up and start the day, or as I sit at my desk at work staring at the computer screen, the command center at the top of my brain is running through all of the arguments, all the things I know, but its directives to my body to get out of bed or to my fingers to start typing that email are being intercepted and countermanded by some deep lizardy core before they can produce any effect in the physical world.
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In his address to the UE convention last week, UE’s Secretary-Treasurer remarked that one of the most insidious things the bosses and ruling class do to us is to convince us that our hopes and dreams are impossible, to make us prune our own imaginations. That’s not my issue.
I still have a pretty grand imagination; I’m good at bold thinking. On Wednesday night I had dinner with the executive director of the Sunrise Movement (who spoke at our convention) and our General President and several members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union who were attending the UE convention as guests. The ILWU comrades were talking about how their hiring hall works and it immediately struck me that part of the labor plank of the Green New Deal should be a hiring hall, to manage, in a worker-friendly way, the inevitable churn in the labor market as we transition to new technologies and new industries. Even if this particular idea turns out to be nuts (I’ve only run it by a few people since), I do think that that is the kind of bold and imaginative thinking our movements need right now.
My issue is this: in my deepest self, I feel like I’ve regressed to being the shy, occasionally-bullied kid who stayed up all night reading Isaac Asimov novels and inhaling and internalizing the idea of psychohistory because it seemed to offer a vision of how social life could be understood and even bent to more humane outcomes, at least on the broadest scale. Even if it offered no realistic hope of ameliorating the brutality of my own, small-scale social life.
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Some of the narratives that have resonated most with me recently are coming-out stories, and stories of leaving abusive relationships in middle age (even though I should be clear I am not in an abusive relationship — or, for that matter, closeted). I find myself connecting with these stories, or rather with their stage-setting and background, on the level of “there is something wrong with me” and “I don’t really deserve happiness” — even if, for me, the stakes are so much lower.
Indeed, when I worry about “what is wrong with me,” my worry is about my inability to be happy and content with all the blessings I do have.
It’s not even really happiness that I’m missing, so much. I’m fairly “happy,” most of the time. I’ve been journaling recently, rating every day on a 1-10 scale, and even though I have recorded several 3s and 4s, my weekly average has never dropped below 5. What I’m missing is joy. I haven’t really worked it out yet, but there has got to be some deep connection between joy (especially in the sense of taking joy in the small miracles of everyday life — something I’ve also had difficulty doing over the past year) and hope.
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As a complete tangent, one of the things I’ve been turning over in my mind a lot recently is the relationship between the shift to a service economy (in the U.S.) and the increased diagnosis of mental illness. Sunny Taylor’s “The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability,” which describes how “disability” is really produced by capitalism’s need for interchangeable “able-bodied” workers, has informed a lot of my understanding of disability issues.
When the main need of capitalism (again, in the U.S.) was bodies who could physically do things — weld metal, wind wire coils, stitch fabric — the biggest impediment to smooth capitalist production (and thus the biggest cause of people being condemned to a marginal existence in the capitalist economy) was physical disability. Mental health issues were less of a barrier to employment, as long as you showed up to work. Jeff Tweedy’s description of his father in his recent autobiography makes it clear that his father was able to work a full blue-collar career on the railroad with undiagnosed mental health issues, which he self-medicated with copious amounts of beer.
Now that so much physical production — especially low-skilled production — has been moved offshore, jobs in the U.S. increasingly require a whole set of social and emotional skills that have redefined what is required to be an “able-bodied” worker, a proper unit of abstract exchange of labor power in a capitalist market. Every social interaction required of a home-care worker or barista or customer service representative sorts an ever-greater number of us into the category of “mentally ill.”
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If this essay has a big political point (as, I must admit, I strive for most of my writing to do), it is that we need to think more deeply about the connections between mental health, healing, motivation, hope, joy, and political mobilization. Michael Yates, in “The Hidden Injuries of Class,” (another piece of writing that has been deeply influential on my thinking) points out that “traditional” working-class organization alone doesn’t heal the wounds we carry:
The injuries of class are deep and long lasting. The poor education that is the lot of most working-class children leaves lasting scars that will not be healed by a picket line. The love lost when the factory-working father spent too much time in bars does not come back after a demonstration.
There are, of course, many organizing and political projects (most of them, not surprisingly, led by women of color) that put healing at their center. These projects deserve more attention and support — but to be honest they don’t really address what I am trying to get at either.
Almost all of the movement organizations we have right now — whether they are mobilizing people to picket lines and demonstrations or doing the deep work of healing trauma — rely on a small layer of activists. If we’re going to build the kind of political movements we need in order to make transformative change, we need a massive expansion of that layer of activists, beyond what even the most skilled organizer can accomplish.
I think there are times when we have seen this happen — the Arab Spring, the occupation of the state capitol in Wisconsin in 2011, Black Lives Matter, to some degree the Occupy movement — where the immediate urgency of a political moment breaks down the usual defenses and compartmentalization that keep most people’s “politics” or “activism” contained. In those moments activism and political commitment grows through mitosis, rhizomatically.
I want to suggest that the barriers to this kind of growth lie not only in lack of organization, or in the deep hopelessness that trauma often produces (though obviously both organization and deep healing are essential), but in a broader, low-intensity malaise and weariness. Yates suggests that the aim of “all efforts to transform societies” should be “developing the capacities of working men and women, their ability to take control of their lives and the larger society,” but we also need to develop their — our — capacity to find joy and wonder and possibility in all of the small, necessary tasks that transforming society entails, the ways parents (if we’re lucky) learn to find joy and wonder and possibility in the thankless tasks that raising our children requires of us.
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Ultimately, though, this essay isn’t political, it’s personal. It’s an attempt to explore what this feeling of being without hope (though not hopeless) is like, to understand it better myself through communicating it with others (or at least with the internet).
At some point around the time when I got hired as UE Communications Director (my “dream job”), I made a commitment to myself not to shy away from being honest online about my own mental-health challenges. The labor movement, especially, has an aversion to projecting any kind of weakness or vulnerability — which makes it hard for those of us who are constantly and painfully aware of our own weaknesses, faults and vulnerabilities to see ourselves in leadership roles.
I don’t know what the outcome of my own personal journey will be, whether or how I will find hope and joy in the future. But this is one of the reasons we commit ourselves to institutions: unions, community organizations, political parties, religious communities, and on a more personal level friendships and relationships and marriages and families. They get us through these times when we lose hope as an individual.
Jonathan Kissam 