From Mourning to Solidarity: The Transformative Power of Grief in Organizing

This piece is part of a series following the 2024 United States Election. Be sure to read the other pieces in the series authored by Joerg Rieger, Gabby Lisi, and Aaron Stauffer.

George Schmidt

In a telegram to the American labor organizer and founding member of the IWW “Big Bill” Haywood, the Swedish-American labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill said his final good-byes before his execution. Famously he stated: “Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” On November 19, 1915, at the age of 36, Joe was executed in Utah’s Sugar House Prison. He died by firing squad after shouting “Fire—go on and fire!”

Since Hill’s execution, his telegram to Haywood has been shortened into a rather bullying leftist injunction: “Don’t mourn, organize!” The sentiment has never sat well with me. How else can we organize if not through mourning?! Hill himself, a songwriter, turned private sufferings into public witness. For my purposes in this essay, the theology of Dorothee Soelle expressed in her work Suffering, is elucidating here—particularly her conception of three phases of suffering and the movement through them.  

Soelle proposes a distinction between the pain that elicits a cry and the suffering that renders us mute. The suffering that renders us mute is brought on by “extreme external conditions” that are ultimately senseless because they erode agency and the possibility for change.  The initial impact of this suffering is horror, a disaster that strikes us both “blind and deaf”: “Feeling for others dies; suffering isolates the person and he no longer cares about anyone but himself.” (68) Soelle’s ableist language aside, the one who cannot see or hear is left with only raw interiority, the life of the pure Self. The external world, where the suffering is not taking place, holds no attention for the one in unbearable pain. In fact, Soelle suggests that just as the toothache tends to separate one from the rest of their body leaving the person “all tooth,” so too are we left as nothing but the sufferer. Such inward turnings take not only our eyes and ears but also our mouths. “I have no mouth,” pens Harlan Ellison, “and I must scream.” The first phase of suffering, as described by Soelle, leaves us helpless and alone, stripped of our agency, unable to give language to our suffering. Despair might be the best word to describe the first phase of pain, a state that leaves us “stripped from our autonomy to think, speak, and act.” (69)

So, then, what moves us to the second phase of suffering, away from total helplessness? Rational cognition is of little use to those in the first phase. To be sure, whatever work is to be done it must begin within the sufferers themselves. However, Soelle writes, “A prerequisite for such work is the conviction that we live in a world that can be changed.” (70) That is to say, life, change, and process must speak, if ever so briefly, offering something beyond the pain and suffering. Once this is grasped, sufferers must learn to “formulate things for themselves.” (71) Here is where a movement to the “phase of expression” begins to press upon the boundaries of phase one. Phase two is defined by language and communication. It is the communication of the suffering by the sufferer, the “lament, petition, expression of hope. Also characteristic is the emphasis on one’s own righteousness, one’s own innocence.” (72) It is expression that brings the sufferer out of phase one and through phase two. That is, “Phase Two presses beyond itself, toward change. Therefore it does not merely depict things as they are, but produces new conflicts.” (72)

It is from conflict that phase three is articulated. Soelle writes, “The suffering is now looked at carefully, it is taken seriously, and only under these conditions can the new question arise, How do I organize to conquer suffering?” (72) The stage of lament, of communication is the way onto stage three. But why is communication so important? Why lamentation? Because the movement out of isolation is through the lament, which then moves into solidarity with others. That is, communication leads to solidarity. In fact, solidarity leads back to communication. In this sense, as Soelle puts it, the border between phases two and three are open. It is within lamentations that one can “work on his suffering within the framework of communication.” (74) More importantly, such work can only be done “in the context of a group of people who share their life – including their suffering—with one another. One of them can then become the mouth for the others, he can open his mouth ‘for the mute.’” (74)

Soelle writes, “To watch Jesus, not to fall asleep during the time of his fear of death…is an ancient Christian demand that is contrary to every natural response to affliction.” (79) Such accompanying is not the inward turn of phase one, but the outward turn of phase three that solidifies people into bundles of deep solidarity. The leftist who chides us for mourning loses sight of the need for phase two, the need to move through the psalmic language. The animal-like moans of those suffering cannot press beyond themselves without mourning. Mourning is the Holy Saturday that must be moved through before the Resurrection is made clear. Mourning, when not done in isolation, is itself organizing. We, the mourners of our own hour, must turn our private grief into public witness. For to be sure, how else can one organize if not through the lamentations of mourning?