The Politics of Pleasure

By Kate Soper, et al

Efforts to green the economy and distribute wealth more equitably often sound like a program for joyless lives: make do with less and give up your pleasures. To philosopher Kate Soper, this gets it all wrong. Leading this issue’s forum, she urges that we see “post-growth living” as an opportunity for greater pleasure, not less. A simpler life of “alternative hedonism”—built around local community and abun­dant free time—could make us happier and healthier while giving our overextended planet a new lease on life. Forum respondents, including Green New Deal economist Robert Pollin and Kenyan activist Nanjala Nyabola, embrace Soper’s call to remake society but question her prescription. The result is a wide-ranging debate about the limitations of lifestyle critique, the value of economic growth, and the kinds of alternatives that are possible.

Other contributions focus on the connections between pleasure and gender, including the joys of collective action and care work, the ordinary pleasures of Black motherhood, the misogyny of Pos­itive Psychology, and the links between good sex and democracy. Together they imagine what it will take to make a pleasurable life possible for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781946511836

Book preview

UNTIL RECENTLY, scientific warnings that human activity is causing global warming went largely unheeded. Even less attention was paid to arguments that affluent societies will need to adopt dramatic changes—in consumption, in lifestyle—if they are to bequeath any kind of habitable planet to future generations. On the contrary, environmentalists, green politicians, and their followers were widely ridiculed for being nostalgic, even retrograde. Over the last decade, however, climate science has provided so much evidence of humanly caused global warming—and the resulting floods, fires, and heat waves have become so much more deadly—that the ridicule is now instead aimed at those who had presumed that business would carry on as usual. As for the remaining diehard climate denialists, it is they who are now deemed outside the pale of reason.

Nonetheless, it remains a minority who will readily admit to the role of capitalism and its consumer culture in creating environmental breakdown. It is an even smaller number who dare to suggest that the lifestyle generated through the growth economy is not necessarily the most enjoyable. Climate scientists and many economists now accept the importance of moving away from fossil fuel dependence over time. Some even agree that affluent societies cannot continue in their current ways. But they do so with regret—with a sense that more austere consumption, though necessary, will be to our disadvantage. Even those who are skeptical about the whole project of green growth, and who quarrel with the cost–benefit calculations used in support of it, too often go along with the consumerist definition of the benefits in question. They don’t question whether consumption actually benefits us, nor whether, if we consumed differently, the beneficiaries might not only be future generations but we ourselves. Most politicians and business leaders seem likewise incapable of thinking of the good life other than in terms of consumerist gratification. Obsessed as they are with economic growth and GDP, they do not invite electorates to entertain other ideas of progress and prosperity, and are more than happy for advertisers to retain their monopoly over how pleasure is imagined. Mainstream politics thus remains dominated by narrow disputes over the means to a commonly agreed set of ends (economic growth, technological development, increased standards of living as defined by current consumer culture).

Nor is this much challenged even by those further to the left, where the tendency to disconnect from issues of material culture has discouraged most from trying to imagine a radically different vision of ethical consumption. Thinkers on the left will agree that capitalist production is a historically specific mode of production, and condemn its human and environmental exploitation. Yet the consumer culture it has bequeathed is often accepted as if it were a natural legacy to be preserved as far as possible—with socialist economics directed at providing its affluence for everyone in abundance. Critics of the current economic order have usually been more bothered about the inequalities of access and distribution it creates than about the ways it confines us to market-driven ways of living. Labor militancy and trade union activity in the West has likewise been largely confined to protection of income and employees’ rights within the existing structures of globalized capital, and done little to challenge, let alone transform, the work and spend dynamic of affluent cultures. Even among the less pragmatic thinkers on the left—the so-called tech utopians and luxury communists—something of the consumerist mindset persists. The future that is promised will be more idle (thanks to robots and drones doing most things for us), but it remains conventional in tying much of its pleasure to the continuation of automobile culture and the expanded availability and use of machines and hi-tech gadgetry.

The presumption, however, that more sustainable consumption will always involve sacrifice rather than improve well-being needs challenging. Our so-called good life is, after all, a major cause of stress and ill health. It is noisy, polluting, and wasteful. Its work routines and commercial priorities have forced people to plan their whole lives around job-seeking and career. Many are condemned to unfulfilling and precarious work lives in the gig economy. Even those with more secure employment will frequently begin their days in traffic jams or suffering other forms of commuter discomfort, and then spend much of the rest of them glued to a screen engaged in mind-numbing tasks. A good part of their productive activity is designed to lock time into the creation of a material culture of fast fashion, continuous home improvement, urban sprawl, speedier production, and built-in obsolescence.

Our consumption economy’s markets profit hugely from selling back to us the goods and services we have too little time or space to provide for ourselves. Consider the role of the fast food, leisure, and therapy industries, or the gyms where people pay to walk on a treadmill because walking anywhere else is impossible or unpleasant. These markets’ merchandising strategies promote competitive forms of consumption, especially among the young, often relying on devious means such as body-shaming, thus worsening anxiety and depression. These markets also now subject all online shoppers to the insidious advertising strategies of what has been called surveillance capitalism, while at the same time off-loading onto the consumer much of the servicing and bureaucracy that businesses used to perform themselves.

Greens, then, may get dismissed as regressive killjoys, and have played into this characterization by presenting reduced consumption as only necessary rather than personally rewarding, even pleasurable. But the reality is that today’s work-dominated, time-scarce, junk-ridden affluence is itself the killjoy, and often puritanical and sensually offensive. Moreover, it does not arise from any innate desire of people constantly to work and consume more. If it did, the billions spent on advertising, and especially on grooming children for a life of consumption, would hardly be necessary.

It may be objected, especially in these times of intense economic hardship for so many, that in advocating the pleasures of escaping the consumerist lifestyle, I overlook how partial the access to its forms of affluence has actually been. What sense, it will be asked, can my argument have for those increasing numbers who currently wonder how they will provide even such basics as food, clothing, and heat. Critics may rightly note that even in better times, few have ever really been in a position to enjoy much of the comfort or luxury associated with affluence. I am sensitive to these objections. But they overlook the extent to which the consumerist lifestyle functions in affluent societies as a regime in which we are all caught up, whatever our income. Viewed in this light, people who are on the breadline, or only just managing, have not escaped the constraints of its work ethic or on what they can do and how. All are subject to them. Even among the adequately employed, most have too little time and not enough income to consume more sustainably even if they want to. Hence their reliance on buying ready meals or processed food, quick air flights for compressed family vacations, cheap goods from Amazon, and so forth.

Consumer society is, in this sense, itself a vehicle of inequality and the provider of a distinctive form and aesthetic of material culture to which we must all, in one way or another, conform. Although often acclaimed as the guarantor of universal freedom and self-expression, it might be better viewed at this stage in its evolution as a means of extending the global reach and command of corporate power at the expense of the health and well-being of both the planet and the majority of Earth’s inhabitants. In exchange for this misery, it offers the compensation of goods and services which, though intensely profitable for corporations, fall far short of making up for what has been lost through overwork. Considered in this light, we should not think of the changes forced by the climate crisis as a disaster, but rather as an opportunity to embrace a fairer, more enticing way of living.

I would respond along similar lines to the equally relevant objection that my argument overlooks the importance of a continuing growth economy in meeting the needs of those in so-called underdeveloped or developing nations. I accept that economic growth will be needed in the short term to ensure the provision of basic needs in the poorest nations. I also agree with economist Kate Raworth that growth may temporarily result from measures undertaken to secure a regenerative and distributive economy—for example, to establish an infrastructure for renewable energy. But the overall aim must be to wrest control of global wealth and material resources from the grip—and accompanying ecological dereliction—of a relatively small corporate elite. Between 1990 and 2015, the world’s richest 10 percent produced over half of all carbon emissions while the poorest 50 percent produced less than a tenth. It is also the poorer nations who are doing the least to create climate breakdown yet who are suffering most severely from its social and environmental impacts.

It is therefore absurd that nations whose citizens’ consumption grossly exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity should continue to be held out as aspirational models for the rest of the world. Capitalist-driven consumer culture should no longer be allowed to exercise its monopoly over conceptions of well-being and how to secure it. Indeed, societies with traditions of less industrialized but more sustainable methods of production and modes of consuming must surely begin to count as more progressive. This has long been recognized by many indigenous activists and critics of the current neoliberal thinking on development. In the words, for example, of Nemonte Nenquimo, cofounder of the indigenous nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance, and first female president of the Waorani organization in the Ecuadorian Amazon:

You forced your civilisation upon us, and now look where we are: global pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread spiritual poverty. In all these years of taking, taking, taking from our lands, you have not had the courage, or the curiosity, or the respect to get to know us. To understand how we see, and think, and feel, and what we know about life on this Earth.

In line with this, in my book Post-Growth Living (2020) I emphasize the need to revise and revalue concepts of prosperity and development in order to bring them more in line with the more sustainable ways of living and working that have so often been swept aside by capitalist progress. This would not endorse a back to nature ethic through which modern excesses could be corrected by return to a simple way of life. But it would resist the presentism that refuses to look to the past for resources that could help us form a more viable, enjoyable future.

Concerned consumers in more affluent societies must lead the way in this rethinking and thus act as an essential initial leverage for a global green renaissance. The Debt for Climate campaign rightly proposes a global revolt against debt and austerity in which poor world governments refuse to honor their debts and activists in the rich world support them by calling for debt cancellation as well as reparations for the devastating loss and damage caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. As George Monbiot has put it in a recent article: By reviving the question of who owes what to whom, huge constituencies, labour and green, north and south, can develop a common platform. Climate campaigns are indivisible from global justice.

WE NEED to be more assertively utopian in promoting sustainable consumption in richer nations. I don’t mean only that our blueprints must be more openly utopian in the futures they plan for, but that we must also actively encourage desires and feelings to match. The new consumption is not a matter of simplifying needs and wants. Rather, we want a world that provides more of what we currently lack, and which opens the way to previously unconceived experiences. In what follows I explore this idea by charting (in a necessarily incomplete way) some of the losses and gains that might follow were we to embrace a new vision of consumption which I call alternative hedonism.

Work

WERE WE TO SPEND less time working—committing, say, to a three- or four-day workweek—the workaholics might lose some of the gratifications of a 24/7 job-centered lifestyle. But many people would be spared the hassle and expense of daily commuting and the long hours spent on it. They would avoid much of the stress and stress-related illnesses incurred through overwork. The large numbers now employed in financial and administrative services, described by anthropologist David