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FROM MOURNING TO RAGE TO TRANSFORMATION  
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Sarah Jaffe
August 8, 2025
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
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_ Grief at its start is a kind of anti-desire; it also clears space
for new kinds of wants, understandings of what we wanted before. It
made space for Tortuguita’s parents to understand their decision to
climb a tree to prevent it from being cut down. _

, Illustration: Johannes Hoffboll

 

Donald Trump is president again. He spitballs ideas out loud or on
Twitter, relishing the fear and dislocation he creates, and then
backtracks or denies even having said it in the first place. The chaos
is the point.

Despair is common these days in the US, far more so than it was in the
first Trump era. People in 2016 were outraged; somehow, in 2025, they
seem shocked — shocked in the sense that Naomi Klein wrote in _The
Shock Doctrine,_ intentionally stunned in order to further destroy any
remaining bits of the state that serve the public good rather than
private profit. Somehow, even after Trump had been president once, his
return itself feels catastrophic, like the storms and wildfires
rushing across the country in the months that preceded his
re-election.

And yet I can’t help feeling angry at the shock, at least from the
people who ought to have known better. The Democratic Party, for a
start. The professional political class which had access to the
Right’s Project 2025, its plan for remaking the state for months.
They had time to grieve the idea of an America that was too good for
Trump eight years ago. They have no excuse for not acting now.

Instead, the resistance such as it is is being led by workers: federal
employees who have been fed into the metaphorical woodchipper that
Elon Musk bragged about, who are staging a day-by-day class in what
the government actually does, parks workers and engineers who build
floodwalls and nurses at the Veterans Health Administration and so
many more. They are marching alongside teachers and professors and
scientists whose work has been slashed by budget cuts. Other people
are giving Know your Rights trainings to undocumented immigrants in
Trump’s crosshairs, or stockpiling hormones for trans friends who
may lose access to healthcare.

I wrote a book about grief that came out just before the election that
sent Donald Trump back to office, and by then I was already fairly
sure that this would be the result. I watched the previous
administration squander so much of its goodwill particularly with the
young, spend its political capital, unbelievably, propping up the
ongoing horrors that Israel has been inflicting on Gaza for a
year-and-a-half. Crushing protest with the aid of university
administrators who are now capitulating to Trump’s demands and
helping him deport their students. I wrote of the necessity of
mourning while I collected videos of protests (and attended quite a
few) demanding a halt to violence being done in our names, refusing
the weaponization of Jewish grief for more violence.

I wrote the book because it seemed that grief was everywhere in the
early 2020s: Covid, of course, but the lockdown had also brought us
the US’s largest protests ever after the police killing of George
Floyd. What is “Black Lives Matter” if not a call for mourning and
organizing together? The climate catastrophe that was only worsening,
the constant scapegoating of migrants who are themselves usually
fleeing disasters (whether “natural” or otherwise) inflicted by
the very countries where they arrive. The changing economy that left
so many people mourning a way of life that had been destroyed. This
piece is a collection of some of those thoughts that didn’t make it
into the book, mostly because there was so much grief to go around in
those years, about the ways that grief is produced and ignored,
utilized by the Right to whip up support for fascist parties and
street violence, and the ways that, I think, the Left can learn to
better understand grief so that we can live up to Mother Jones’s
sage advice: mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

The Murder of Jordan Neely

On the same day in early December 2024 that Luigi Mangione was
arrested, charged with the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian
Thompson, Daniel Penny was acquitted of murder for the killing of
Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train. Mangione became a folk
hero across the world as he was perp-walked by the Mayor of New York
himself; Penny had been made one by the Right already and was whisked
off to watch the Army-Navy football game by Donald Trump’s side as
soon as he was freed. The symbolism was clear: killing an unhoused
Black man for allegedly being disruptive on a train was something
Trump wanted to publicly endorse. Mangione, on the other hand, would
face the full force of the state
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I hate everything about New York these days but the subway performers.
When I go back, briefly, I want to get out as quickly as possible,
unless I am on a train and I hear the familiar call of “Showtime!”
or music starting up. I hand whatever is in my wallet to subway
mariachi bands, move out of the way so the showtime dancers can flip
and spin and walk on the ceiling, and since Jordan Neely was killed I
have been scouring my memory for Michael Jackson impersonators on the
train or the platform. I have seen them, I am sure. Was it him?

The people of the sacrifice zones, the abandoned places, whether they
be whole countries or specks on a city map, have had to find their own
politics for a planetary crisis, a politics that does not wait for
anyone to ask their forgiveness.

I was in New York again in May of 2023 and it was full of ghosts of my
past, places that were closed, the restaurants where I was welcomed to
the city are gone, I was walking through Union Square not far from my
one Manhattan apartment and remembering the end the end the end of any
New York I could love anymore. I was on the subway and I was thinking
about how Jordan Neely called out for help. 

The thing that makes New York unpredictable and joyous is of course
also a form of precarious labour, a way to make some extra coin in a
time when living in the city is nearly impossible. The moments when
the subway car comes alive with music and dance and you make eye
contact with strangers are the moments I loved best in the city and I
think of how many people justified the murder of a man, a dancer, a
performer, because he called out for help, because he dared make
public the reality of living in New York today, that it’s fucking
impossible to do.

Ciara Taylor, one of the founding members of the Dream Defenders after
the death of Trayvon Martin, was haunted by Jordan Neely. She
recounted the budget cuts and the fare increases on the subway and the
homeless encampments cleared out and the lack of shelters and homes
that anyone can afford and the endless, always endless money for
policing. It wasn’t police who killed Jordan Neely, not exactly
though it was a young man, Daniel Penny, who had been a Marine and had
been trained to kill then by another arm of the state. But it was a
train car full of people who watched him do it and the police let him
walk away after a few questions and politicians ginned up outrage and
people donated millions for his defence and it is here, I think, that
the production of ungrievability — such an unwieldy term — winds
up. This is what happens when you say that so many people do not
deserve the stuff of life if they do not do the kind of work that
capital needs done. Dancing doesn’t count. The armed forces do
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The victim blaming felt familiar to organizer Mariame Kaba too, the
way the story of Jordan Neely’s death turned into a story of what
Neely had done wrong. “You don’t want to be that, you don’t want
to be the victim, so you put on this cloak of invulnerability. Nothing
can happen to me. I’m safe. I do the right things. Bad things
aren’t going to hit me”, she said. “The people in that subway
car, that cloak of invulnerability was really working for those
people. ‘I cannot be this guy. More than that, I’m going to
participate in this guy’s literal dehumanization because I so
don’t want to be this guy. He’s so anathema to what I want to be
seen as, that I am going to dehumanize him to the point where his
killing is not even a thing to me.’”

We do not have to grieve him, if he did something to bring about his
own death.

“There is not a living, breathing soul in Manhattan that has not
experienced a variation of what not only Mr. Penny but other
individuals experienced on that subway car”, Penny’s defence
lawyer told reporters, failing to note that most of those people
don’t kill. It is a version of the argument of “broken windows”
policing, which says that small bits of disorder — a broken window,
a shouting person — lead to bigger crimes. Failing to note that the
obvious solution to a broken window is to fix the damn window. The
crime that came after Jordan Neely shouting was that someone strangled
him to death.

This is what fascism looks like when it comes, I think. It’s not
just the person who did the killing with his own bare hands, it’s
the people who justify it after the fact, must’ve done something to
deserve it after all, this is fine, ungrievable. There must be
something wrong with _you _if you note that Jordan Neely was a human
who was suffering and who did not deserve to be killed, did not
deserve to be hungry and homeless and so alone that no one would pull
the arms from around his neck. This is what it looks like, when they
march down the street and tell you that the disappearances and the
deaths must continue in the name of order. This is what you have done:
you have said it is fine.

Nationalism of any sort demands sacrifice. Fascism only took this idea
to its extreme yet inevitable conclusion.

It is the bald truth behind the obsessive need to counter “Black
Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” as if the real answer
isn’t “almost no lives matter”.

But the fascist state, the postcolonial black intellectual Achille
Mbembe wrote, is only the state that had most completely consolidated
power over death. He points to the broader “perception of the
existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or
absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my
potential to life and security”. This, he wrote, “is one of the
many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late
modernity itself”. Jordan Neely could be eliminated simply for
existing as Black, poor, homeless, in public, refusing to go quietly.
This has been more or less true of America and the world it helped
create since the colonizers landed, lost, on its shores. The fear of
Jordan Neely is in a way an admission that the country, the city did
indeed owe him something. That, in Leila Taylor’s words
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murder for 400 years and it’s been sleeping with one eye open ever
since”.

As Walter Benjamin wrote
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as the Nazis marched and shattered and burned their way across Europe,
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of
emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” To
be in solidarity — as a Jew, a human, a once and probably not future
New Yorker — is to realize this and to see myself in Jordan Neely as
much as I do in Benjamin, and to take seriously his admonition “that
it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will
improve our position in the struggle against Fascism”. In other
words it is my job to fight, it is my job to stop the arm around
Jordan Neely’s neck and the shattering of lives that is daily
existence in the city I can no longer afford and the one I can, for
now.

Learning from Defeats

How do we fix a society when that society has been built on death,
when all around us it seems that the people in power are intent on
continuing the killing, from the cold denial of health insurance
claims to justifying murder on a train, from state executions to once
again embracing “Drill, baby, drill” as a goal despite the climate
catastrophe? Prison abolitionists speak of transformative justice as
an alternative to punishment, as a process of repair that in the
repairing creates new relations. But the old relations of structural
violence and extraction of resources have not ended. 

The people of the sacrifice zones, the abandoned places, whether they
be whole countries or specks on a city map, have had to find their own
politics for a planetary crisis, a politics that does not wait for
anyone to ask their forgiveness. A politics for those who want to stay
as well as those who move. Across geographic divides and racial
difference, language barriers, and flood waters they build a justice
movement that makes its own resilience. Ruth Wilson Gilmore
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used the Malay word _desakota_, a word used by geographers to
designate places that are neither urban nor rural, to describe a
certain kind of “betweenness”. Having been forgotten, she wrote,
is part of such betweenness, a culture and a politics built in the
gaps among crises. The awareness that one has already been abandoned
to the disasters that will come brings with it a particular kind of
grief: when facing the end of your world, what kinds of new struggles
become possible?

Politicizing Emotions

The police shot Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known to most people as
Tortuguita, in January 202 for attempting to protect Atlanta’s
Weelaunee Forest from those who would destroy it to build a
90-million-dollar police training facility, known as “Cop
City”. The shooting seemed to prove everything that they, and the
others protesting alongside them, were saying about Cop City: in Amna
Akbar’s words
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that “police violence itself constitutes an environmental hazard,
and that toxic chemicals associated with explosives that could be used
on the site will destroy the air, water, and land on which myriad
forms of life depend”. Tortuguita was blamed for their death,
accused of shooting first, but later autopsies found that their hands
were raised when they were shot. Fifty-seven times.

In the Weelaunee Forest, many struggles came together to mourn the
dead and fight for the living: to preserve one of the “four lungs”
of Atlanta, the trees and the ecosystem as well as the lives that may
yet be taken by police trained there. Tortuguita, of Indigenous
Venezuelan descent, had spent time rebuilding hurricane-damaged homes
in Florida before they went to Weelaunee. Their parents arrived after
they were killed, to mourn and to recognize the movement now as theirs
too.

Grief at its start is a kind of anti-desire, but it also clears space
for new kinds of wants and new understandings of what we wanted
before. It made space for Tortuguita’s parents to understand their
decision to camp in a forest, to climb a tree to prevent it from being
cut down. It made the fight their own. I hesitate when I write things
like this — I wonder _is it true_, or rather can it be true for
everyone, would I will it true? There is a learning that comes with
loss, but it is not the same each time or for everyone and it is a
learning we can refuse, that we can close off. I have attended a
funeral for a friend and wondered if the parents who put it on even
knew the person they mourned at all; I have at a Zoom memorial watched
someone’s family learn things they’d never known about their
mother/sister/wife from the people she organized with. Each person
lost is a whole world, and it is after all impossible for us to know
all of the contents of it no matter how hard we love. But perhaps I
think the learning at the heart of mourning is, as Hélène Cixous
suggested
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that “We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover
that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we
think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and
immortality we carry.”

Movements are beginning to understand that the movement itself can be
a site of trauma even as it is a space of possibility and care.

The statement has been repeated so often that it has become apocrypha;
credited to this or that thinker, that it is easier to imagine the end
of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But what
grief taught me was to imagine the end of my own world and then to
have to go on, and either learn to imagine the new or to live in that
despair. Capitalism is cracking everywhere and the only people
clinging to capitalist realism
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Mark Fisher’s gloss on that phrase — are, it seems, a handful of
leaders of the old parties and the late hegemonic powers.

Nationalism of any sort demands sacrifice. Fascism only took this idea
to its extreme yet inevitable conclusion. Historian Adam Tooze
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explained it as in part a response to the experience of World War I,
its horrific violence spread across the world. A romanticized view of
brutality and death, of martyrdom for the nation, was central to
fascism and particularly to Nazism. The slogan of the Hitler Youth was
“I was born to die for Germany”, Tooze noted. “That kind of
consciousness is a key element of fascism, it’s an incredibly high
stakes kind of politics that is demanding that everything is put on
the line.” It was a process of socializing young people to valourize
both killing and their own deaths en masse.

Fascism shook the faith of so many who had believed in progress
because it turned the supposed advances of industrial modernity to the
production of death at scale. The assembly-line killing of so many
Jews and Roma and Black and queer people and Communists, the full
breadth of the horror only visible after the fact, after the
liberation of the death camps and the division of the world along
different lines. Many socialists and Communists too had believed in
the forward march of history; Walter Benjamin had been one of those
who warned that it was possible for progress to bring ruin too, before
the spread of Nazism brought about his own death. A belief in
inevitable progress, he noted, did not square with a necessary
understanding of power, of the truth bordering on cliché nowadays
that history is written by the victorious. “There is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Death as the last and best sovereign power, the one that remains when
any belief that good things can be achieved is wiped away. When all
that victory offers is that the right people will be punished, and
anyone or in any rate any group can be offered up as the ones who
deserve suffering. _Racism is premature death. _The process not just
of producing that death but of manufacturing our consent to it. Of
creating martyrs, and using them to demand more killing. Of leaving
the ultimate structures of power and property untouched and offering
the masses, as Benjamin wrote, only expression — expression of rage,
of anger, of the loudest parts of grief. Only fantasies of power and
deathlessness. Vengeance, misdirected, instead of mourning. The end
of the world as perversely seductive, because it justifies all kinds
of supposedly redemptive violence.

Not all fascisms are the same, of course. Climate catastrophe offers
us two versions: the petro-masculinity
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of “drill, baby, drill!” and its longing for the actual end of the
world, and a kind of ecofascism
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that takes “blood and soil” at its word, that imagines purity of
race and purity of planet as connected or even just wants to kick all
the unworthy off the metaphorical lifeboat. Borders as climate policy
are the polite liberal version of this structure of feeling.

I think of the destruction of the Weelaunee Forest to build a training
facility for violence workers as an example of this impulse. Climate
change breeds chaos, destabilization, and the answer is police, It is
to crush protest, not only to kill Tortuguita but to charge 61 of the
forest defenders with being a criminal enterprise for things like
“mutual aid” and to repeatedly stymie the process of putting Cop
City to a democratic vote. The Black radical tradition has long
understood fascism as a tentacle of colonialism and its racist
justifications; Angela Davis explained fascism as “the use of the
law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and
latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people,
tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even
moderate democrats.” This is more than an echo, it is an exact
description
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Organizing, Rod Adams from the New Justice Project in Minneapolis
told me, is about “politicizing emotions”. He spoke of moving pain
to passion, and passion to politicization; of sharing one’s own pain
and passion in community. “It’s about not only convincing people
to be in the struggle, but to struggle with them. Our role as
organizers is to be in the struggle. Hand in hand with people.”
Liberation, he said, is for all people, and so organizers have to care
for all people. They have to do that despite all the pressures, public
and private, that they face. In Minneapolis, after years of uprising
and struggle, many organizers, he said, burned out, were
disillusioned, left the movement. Felt shame at needing to take time
for themselves. “We need more movements for joy”, he said, but
also that requires real resources, real support. It’s not just a
nice word. Many organizations function on a shoestring budget and the
labour of people who haven’t had a day off in months. He told people
to rest, tried to get them to release that shame.

Grief makes a mockery of our ideas of success. It is itself an ongoing
process of destruction and creation and of tending, of bringing
together and tearing apart.

Movements are beginning to understand that the movement itself can be
a site of trauma even as it is a space of possibility and care;
because disappointment is and is not grief; because people will face
violence and loss for being in political struggle, as the police
killing of Tortuguita reminded us. We cannot expect people to bring
every piece of themselves to the struggle, Mariame Kaba said: some
things require rest, and the care that only the people who know us
intimately can provide.

When I searched for a word for the politics of these times, I landed
on “Salvage”. I think of salvage as a way of both practicing and
resisting repair. Resisting the idea that our anger and grief and rage
are the problem and that we need fixing; resisting the narrative that
some of us are or ever could be surplus. We are, as Beatrice
Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
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wrote, “each of us ripped and maimed, strangled and buried by
capital, in one way or another”, and our very brokenness is what has
taught us that capital will never serve us. Frantz Fanon, in the
Algerian clinic, decided that what his patients needed was not simply
therapy but the end of the colonial system which brutalized them. He
spoke, Nica Siegel explained
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not of “repair” but “its etymological forbearer, preparation,
_praeparatio_”. His word choice, Siegel wrote, implied something
like “_let us restore the conditions of our ability to be future
oriented, like we were before_”. Like coming out of the fog of grief
and learning to imagine another future. Possibility-making.

There is the blasting and then the lingering; the twin temporalities
of grief and of social transformation. The moment of rupture and the
patient tending that comes before and after, the daily care work of
organizing, which Mike Davis likened to gardening, clearing away
weeds, encouraging sprouts to grow. There is something luxurious in
processes that take a while, in learning to let our pace be dictated
by forces we can’t control. To envision abundance as something
relational, like the friends who bring food to the wake or the shiva;
we trust in those moments, if we have the networks we need, that we
will be looked after when we are too shocked to remember to eat. I
like to imagine expanding this ethic outward: our needs no longer
dependent on our ability to work, not just in moments of crisis but
all the time. That instead we do what needs doing out of a form of
care that does not feel like, is not labour. The way that holding a
friend while they cry has never felt like work.

Because grief is never finished, not really. It makes a mockery of our
ideas of success. It is itself an ongoing process of destruction and
creation and of tending, of bringing together and tearing apart. In
this too it teaches us something about the rhythms of transformation
that we can turn to political use. Grief, as Judith Butler
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wrote, “displays the way in which we are in the thrall of our
relations with others that we cannot always recount or explain, that
often interrupts the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try
to provide in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as
autonomous and in control.” Can we imagine our autonomy as always
and only ever possible with others, as something that we make in the
spaces between people? This is, of course, a risk, but it is the only
way we will survive the ruins.

_This article first appeared in _LuXemburg
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(_https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/von-der-trauer-ueber-wut-zur-v…
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_SARAH JAFFE is a writer and journalist based in New Orleans. Her most
recent book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on
Fire._

_The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is one of the six major political
foundations in the Federal Republic of Germany, tasked primarily with
conducting political education both at home and abroad. The foundation
is closely linked to Die Linke, a democratic socialist party in the
German parliament._

_Since its founding in 1990, the foundation’s work has adhered to
the legacy of its namesake, German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg,
and stands for democratic socialism with an unwavering
internationalist focus. The foundation is committed to a radical
perspective emphasizing public awareness, education, and social
critique. It stands in the tradition of the workers’ and women’s
movements, as well as anti-fascism and anti-racism._

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