From the ashes

It feels strange to be promoting a book right now, so I'm writing to you about many things

I promised you a book cover, my lovelies, and it is time for me to deliver. Here it is!

The official description:

From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change, in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated.
This is capitalism's death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others, for the marginalized and the vulnerable but increasingly for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning those futures that are being so brutally curtailed.

At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a political act. Sarah Jaffe shows how the act of public memorialization has become a radical statement, a vibrant response to loss, and a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to grieve well the ones we have lost, the causes they fought for, or the examples they bequeathed us, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

Those of you who’ve been here a while know that this is the promised “grief book,” and you’ll recognize the style and my willingness to get a bit more personal from reading these very very occasional letters.

I was torn about doing this today—it feels wrong to celebrate my book with a title like From The Ashes when a young man has self-immolated in protest over the continued bombardment, the ongoing starvation and killing in Gaza. And then of course I thought that if I stopped my work when someone has died horribly, when something precious was aflame, all I would do is mourn and that is precisely, actually, what I have been writing about, in this book and elsewhere, for the past couple of years.

Aaron Bushnell did what he did to protest the rendering of so many people disposable. He did it to get our attention, to demand we not look away, to reach for the emergency brake that Walter Benjamin wrote about. The use of flames was not an incidental choice. His action recalls Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the rebellions known as the Arab Spring, a wave of uprisings that still shape the world around Gaza. It recalls Buddhist monks opposing American involvement in Vietnam, and American protesters following them to the flames. Aaron Bushnell was an active duty member of the American military; “I will no longer be complicit in genocide," he said. His last words were “Free Palestine.”

"I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."

It is that last sentence that haunts me (along with a persistent voice in my head that says so young so young we send people off to kill and be killed so goddamn young). It is not the statement of someone who was unhinged but rather someone who has looked rationally at the world as it exists right now. This is normal. That is why I am still here writing to you and telling you I wrote a book, because this is what the book is also about, this is all I can think of these days.

I do not mean to be catastrophist or indeed even too bleak. Yesterday before I heard of what Aaron Bushnell had done I posted on Instagram that I was choosing optimism of the will that day. I had the amazing good fortune to spend last week first with two people I love most in the world and then on the invitation of another to spend four days in deep conversation, debate, and planning with people who are organizing to build a new world from the ashes of the old. What was even better was that I had only met two of them before I arrived on Wednesday; it gives me hope always to realize that there are whole worlds I do not know about, where people have built safety and care for one another into their landscapes, where they are organizing to stop the destruction, to refuse the cruel normal we are expected to exist within. I met people from Hawaii and Mexico and Canada and all around the US, from India and South Africa, and their generosity and steadfastness, their understanding of what must be dismantled and what must be built making me think of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words, which I took as the epigraph for this book, “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

Because a young person working in the literal heart of the machine could not be bent toward destruction, refused any longer to participate or to pretend that things were OK, I am in fact heartbroken but I am still choosing optimism of the will today too. Choosing to remember, as Mariame Kaba says, that hope is a discipline. Choosing to grieve for Aaron Bushnell and for all the people in Palestine whom he was mourning in turn, and to turn once again to my work today, to go to my JVP meeting this evening and recommit myself to doing what I can to stop the death and destruction.

As I wrote in the conclusion to the new book:

“I have argued here that grief is a necessary part of life, a painful yet transformative experience that deserves its space and time and respect and care.

“But the amount of misery, the violence and cruelty of this world, the premature death all around us -- this is not necessary. This, I think, we can change. The radical project is to accept that death and grief are inevitable but not let that be an excuse to ignore all the preventable horrors, or rather to be motivated to tell the difference between the inevitability of mortality and the brutality of capitalism.”

It still feels odd, after all this, to turn to practical business, to tell you that you can pre-order my book and that pre-orders are so helpful in signaling to the industry that this book matters. That you can pre-order through your community bookstore and help keep these institutions that I love and you love and we all need alive, or you can order through the links here to Bookshop.org which helps support local bookstores as well. I hate like poison the part of the process that is packaging and commodifying this thing that I have written, packaging and commodifying myself as well. But I am trying to think of the books that I have loved and that have gotten me through the last five months/five years, books that captured something of how I felt, books that taught me to see strategically through left melancholia(s) and to imagine otherwise possibilities through loving even when it hurts and to think with clarity about the climate catastrophe and to see possible abolitionist geographies and so so much more, and to hope that my book isn’t an act of self-gratification but an offering like these are to all of you. And to say I am so grateful to all of you who keep reading and keep telling me your stories and keep letting me write them down and share them with the world.

I will not say that this book is easy to sit with but I will say that the people I spoke to for it, some of whom I have known for years, others who I just met once and briefly, have inspired me to keep going and also given me permission to stop for a while with my grief, to contemplate the enormity of the overlapping crises, to be human in the face of a brutal capitalist system that treats us like unfeeling machines at best and so much meat at worst. That I went to Memphis and Loiza and Bergamo and Barnsley, and Cancer Alley right near my home, that I spoke with people who had pulled refugees from the Mediterranean and rebuilt hurricane-shattered homes along the Gulf of Mexico and put out fires on the streets of Minneapolis when the white supremacists came to after the uprising. That doctors and nurses who had tended Covid patients and a former coal miner who went into care work reminded me of what we can do with our own hands to ease the pain of strangers. That hundreds and thousands and millions of us have stood together and said those words that became Aaron Bushnell’s last: Free, free Palestine.

Aaron Bushnell, presente.

Writing

A book!

Also, as usual for me these days, it seems, most of what I’ve written in the past couple of months is for print and therefore I wrote it a while ago and you haven’t seen it yet. My latest column at The Progressive, on care work, strikes, and the composition of today’s working class (I can hear you mumbling isn’t that everything you write, and yes, you are correct, friend) and a piece on Jewish antifascism and the fight for a ceasefire in Gaza for In These Times.

Podcasting

Watch this space for more on Belabored, I swear we’re not dead yet.

But in the meantime! My dear friend James Meadway let me take his podcast Macrodose for a spin while he was enjoying a much deserved break. James does a weekly roundup of economic news in practical, no-nonsense language and just fifteen minutes. Highly recommended even before he recruited me to guest host.

I hosted two roundtables, which are both available as video as well as audio. The four guests are people whose work and whose humanity and friendship have sustained me for the past few/several years, doing this was an absolute joy.

First, with Laleh Khalili and Kareem Rabie on the political economy of Palestine and the economic levers being pulled to try to stop the bombardment. Listen or Watch!

And then, I brought Brett Scott and Quinn Slobodian together for a wide-ranging discussion about Javier Milei, libertarianism, money, conspiracy theories, and fantasies of exit. Listen or Watch!

Thanks again to the Macrodose team for having me, and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

Troublemaking

There will be book tour, pandemics permitting, and so as usual, watch this space. But for now, I’m joining a couple of other people’s book tours:

Joanne McNeil, whose work you may know if you know, well, me, has written a novel called Wrong Way that is dystopian and harsh and beautiful and it’s about tech companies and the gig economy and also the particular part of Massachusetts where both she and I grew up. I’m joining her virtually to talk about the book this Thursday, 1pm Eastern, hosted by the Internet Archive.

I’m also joining Hamilton Nolan to talk about his book The Hammer, about the labor movement we have and the labor movement we need, here in New Orleans at Baldwin & Co books on March 21.

Also if you happen to be in Maine, I will be there Monday, March 4 for an event hosted by the University of Southern Maine, talking about the historical and present-day issues of women’s work.

And someone else’s dog

(For new readers, this used to be a picture of my dog, but he died in 2020 and since then I have been using other people’s creatures. This particular pup is Ida, she belongs to my friend Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, who has not one but two books out in the world right now that you should get, one is about prisons and capitalism in Louisiana and the other is an edited volume on the expansion of the jail.)