ACFM Trip 61: Resilience

**Keir Milburn** (0:20)
Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my very dear friend, Nadia Idle. Hello.
And my other very dear friend, Jeremy Gilbert.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:34)
Hello.

**Keir Milburn** (0:35)
And today, we're talking about resilience. So, Jeremy, why are we talking about resilience?

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:42)
Because we're launching an NGO, and we're trying to get funding from the Human Approved Bodies and the Soros Foundation.

**Keir Milburn** (0:50)
We're not really.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:51)
But resilience has become a kind of buzzword, which circulates within the corporate sector, it's part of management discourse, but also large sections of the voluntary and public sector. Resilience is understood to be a thing that schools are now supposed to teach to school children, for example, or a quality that it's supposed to cultivate. And this question of, well, what does that mean?
And is it all bad? Because it's coming from sources that we usually mistrust. And what do we think about it? Is it an interesting thing for us to think about, I think?

**Nadia Idle** (1:25)
Yeah, definitely. So I think for all of those reasons, and I really like this kind of encapsulation of it as a quality. So I'm interested in resilience as a quality, and then as a discourse, and where it sits in late capitalism, as always. This is an area of interest for ACFM. But again, how it interfaces between the individual level and thinking about our psychology, and how people talk about personal resilience, both in the workplace and in groups and in progressive spaces as well, and how that functions, but also how that interacts or relates to big structural issues, like the economy and the environment. I think more and more we're hearing this term resilience. It's a really good ACFM topic to kind of unpack. What does this actually mean? And importantly, how does it function?

**Keir Milburn** (2:18)
Yeah, in my head, this is almost a sort of continuation of conversation from the last episode we did, which is about shock. And we still got into this idea that we wanted to talk about shock because we thought there was some like economic shocks, oil shocks, food shocks coming down the line because of the war on Iran. And then, you know, the increasing extreme weather shocks which will impact all sorts of economic and ecological systems we depend on are coming down the line. And a lot of the ways we would normally manage those risks such as the insurance industry, et cetera, may not be reliable for that. When the shocks that are coming down the line get large enough basically. And so like resilience is one of the terms we could use to continue that conversation. I think there was lots more to explore. And it is a good one because it does go from like the personal to like the economic, to ecological and to the political. And when Jem introduced it for extremely funny way about what a buzzword it is in like the NGO sector, you know, we have to think about the role that it plays there resilience in NGO world. But like, you know, what role could it play in other forms of left politics, the forms of left politics we might be a little bit more interested in, like mass democratic left politics, perhaps. So all of that basically just means it's an absolute classic ACFM topic. And we'll get into that in a moment. Let's just do the parish notices. We always do this. So there's the newsletter, of course, we'd be writing very interesting things about shock and resilience in the newsletter.
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**Nadia Idle** (4:34)
Do you guys think there is a difference, you know, between talking about resilience and endurance and tolerance? Because I was thinking about those three kind of terms and it seems like resilience, it is the buzzword of the time. So I wonder whether you thought there was a qualitative difference between what we're talking about.

**Keir Milburn** (4:53)
Well, yeah, endurance seems like something which sits alongside resilience, like the ability to endure stuff, basically. Keep going while enduring hardship or something like that, or even just keep going for a long, long period, endurance, running, these sorts of things. Explain the tolerance thing, Nadia. I'm not quite sure how that relates to resilience.