Excerpted from a long essay by Kate Soper in Red Pepper magazine:

“A predictable consequence of the current recession has been a renewal of interest in the politics of welfare and community values. As they seek to patch up a fresh consensus amidst the fallout from the latest crisis of capitalism, both sides of the party political divide have come up with new narratives about wellbeing, communal belonging and social cohesion. On the right, in a warmed-over, chummier version of the Thatcherite politics of empowerment, David Cameron is pushing the idea of the ‘big society’, with its cost-cutting culture of voluntarism, philanthropy and social action. To the left, Blue Labour has rediscovered Aristotle on the ‘good life’ as a traditional (albeit long-neglected) component of Labour thinking, and is campaigning for the party to adopt the idea of a ‘good society’ based on reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. Across the board, then, there is rather more acknowledgement than before the crash that neoliberalism is not quite the panacea it was held out to be, and that relentless commodification is bad for the soul both of the individual and of the community.

These moves suggest that there is now some awareness among mainstream politicians of the underlying contradictions between growth economics and social – and individual – wellbeing. But to date there has been no attempt seriously to challenge the definition of the ‘good life’ associated with affluent consumer culture. When launching his new ‘happiness index’, Cameron told us that economic growth isn’t everything and that there are aspects of life that ‘can’t be measured on a balance sheet’. But since then we have heard a great deal from him about the need to return to growth and very little about the good life conceived in any other terms.

Maurice Glasman, a key influence on Blue Labour, is critical of the unfettered market. Invoking an ‘organic community’ as the agent of opposition to commodification, he wants a return to skilled labour, co-operatives, mutual societies, local banks and the like. There is much to welcome in this. But he, too, appears still to see the nation state as locked in competition with others for economic advancement through ongoing production, and says rather little about the wider social and environmental consequences of national success conceived in those terms.

This global dimension needs to be more widely acknowledged by those seriously committed to an alternative politics of community and the ‘good life’. For in the end there can be no successful promotion of happiness at home without attending to the misery caused elsewhere by our current consumerist lifestyle. This includes the millions injured or made homeless in recent decades through disasters triggered by global warming for which they are largely not responsible; the many more condemned to what Mike Davis has called ‘informal survivalism’ in the ever-expanding slums of the new mega-cities; the near slave conditions of workers locked overnight in Bangladeshi factories to meet the timelines of the fashion industry; the quasi-apartheid between those who enjoy and those who service the global playgrounds of the wealth-makers – and this is to name but a few examples.

It is, then, only by means of an altogether more equitable distribution of both resources and the burden of pollution that we can accommodate future ecological constraints and thus lay the foundations for an alternative ‘politics of prosperity’. This in turn means accepting the need to move beyond the ‘work and spend’ dynamic of a profit-oriented global economy and the time scarcity it generates for so many people. Just when we need it least from the point of view of human or environmental wellbeing, we are committed to an economic system that can only flourish if people keep spending – which means they must keep working, which means they have less time to do things for themselves, which means they have to buy more goods and services to make up for the time deficit.

Instead of making use of enhanced productive efficiency to shorten the working week, so that we could enjoy growing and preparing more food for ourselves, companies profit from selling us ‘fast food’, ready-cooked meals, pre-washed salads and the like. Instead of giving us the leisure and facilities to walk or go by bike, we are co-opted into buying short, sharp exercise sessions in the gym. Instead of longer holidays in which we could travel more slowly and experience more genuine relaxation, the tourist and therapy industries profit hugely from their provision for mini?breaks and stress-relieving services.

Now more than ever, the consumer society is dependent on a collective preparedness to spend the money we earn by working too hard and too long on provision to compensate for the more diverse, enriching and lasting satisfactions we have sacrificed through overwork and overproduction. Yet it is far from clear that this reflects some innate desire of people constantly to work and consume more. If it did, the billions spent on advertising, and on grooming children for a life of consumption, would hardly be necessary. Nor would the government pressure us to keep spending: the injunctions to ‘patriotic shopping’ in the aftermath of 9/11; the car scrappage schemes to keep the motor industry on track; the anxieties lest increased VAT reduces sales in the malls.

Everyone knows, in some sense, that the system is ultimately unsustainable. (Does anyone really believe the growth economy can continue for another hundred, let alone thousand, years?) It is in this context that I have argued that the present crisis, for all the pain it is causing, also provides an opportunity to question a way of living that is not just environmentally disastrous but in many respects unpleasurable and self-denying.

Our so-called good life is a major cause of stress and obesity. It subjects us to high levels of noise and stench, and generates vast amounts of junk. Its work routines and modes of commerce mean that many people, for most of their lives, begin their days in traffic jams or overcrowded trains and buses, and then spend much of the rest of them glued to the computer screen, often engaged in mind?numbing tasks. A good part of its productive activity locks time into the creation of a material culture of ever-faster production turnovers and built-in obsolescence, which pre-empts more worthy, enduring or entrancing forms of human fulfilment.

Anyone who has spent hours trapped in motorway traffic, or who regularly commutes, or who lives in noisy and polluted and heavily industrialised environments will be well aware already of the dystopian aspects of modern life. As I have argued in various writings around the concept of ‘alternative hedonism’, many people, even in the more affluent areas, are now beginning to regret what has been sacrificed in the pursuit of the dominant model of the good life. Implicit in contemporary laments over lost spaces and communities, the commercial battening on children, the vocational dumbing-down of education, the ravages of ‘development’, the cloning of our cities, and so forth, is a hankering for a society no longer subordinate to the imperatives of growth and consumerist expansion. Diffuse and politically unfocused though this may be, it speaks to a widely felt sense of the opportunities squandered in recent decades to create a fairer, less harassed, less environmentally destructive and more enjoyable way of life.

To defend the progressive dimension of this kind of yearning (I have elsewhere termed it ‘avant-garde nostalgia’ ) against the exigencies of ‘progress’ is not to recommend a more ascetic existence. On the contrary, it is to highlight the puritanical, disquieting, and irrational aspects of contemporary consumer culture. It is to speak for the forms of pleasure and happiness that people might be able to enjoy were they to opt for an alternative economic order. It is to open up a new ‘political imaginary’: a seductive vision of alternatives to resource-intensive consumption, centred on a reduction of the working week and a slower pace of living.

By working and producing less we could improve health and wellbeing, and provide for forms of conviviality that our harried and insulated travel and work routines make impossible. A cultural revolution along these lines would challenge the advertisers’ monopoly on the depiction of prosperity and the good life. It would make the stuff that is now seriously messing up the planet – more cars, more planes, more roads, more throwaway commodities – look ugly because of the energy it squanders and the environmental damage it causes.

Such reconfiguring of the good life could alter conceptions of self-interest in affluent societies, highlighting the downsides of over-development and inviting reappraisal. If we have a cosmopolitan care for the wellbeing of the deprived people of the world and a concern about the quality of life of future generations, then we need to campaign for new attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure and self-realisation in the more affluent nations. Such a campaign would envisage forms of social transformation and personal epiphany analogous to those brought about through the feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements of recent history.”

After reviewing the historic positions of the left on the issue of happiness, Kate describes ‘alternative hedonism‘:

“‘Alternative hedonism’ is not a theory about what ought to be needed, or desired, or actually consumed. It is a theory about what some consumers, in their experience of the stress, overwork, ill-health, congestion, noise and pollution that accompany affluence, are themselves beginning to discover about the ‘anti’ or ‘counter’ consumerist aspects of their own needs and preferences. Its main interest is thus in an emerging ‘structure of feeling’, to invoke Raymond Williams’ concept, that is at once troubled by forms of consumption (such as car use or air flight) that were previously taken much more for granted, aware of former pleasures gone missing and sensing for the first time the summons of another way of living.

The alternative hedonist argument thus moves from an experienced ambivalence regarding existing patterns of consumption towards the alternative structure of satisfactions that are arguably latent within it, rather than presupposing the existence of needs for which there is no evidence in the conscious responses of people.

Nor does it presume that the ‘excesses’ of modern consumption can be corrected through a return to a simpler, objectively knowable, and supposedly more ‘natural’ or traditional way of being. It does not deny the sophistication of human desires, nor the need to accommodate the distinctively human quests for novelty, excitement, distraction, self-expression and the gratifications of what Rousseau termed amour propre – the need to be esteemed by others. It can even allow that the ‘fureur de se distinguer’ – the zeal for self-distinction which Rousseau associated with amour propre – is most easily supplied through material acquisition (at least if you have the money for it).

But what comes easiest, of course, is not necessarily the most rewarding or fulfilling, and the alternative hedonist case is that in deflecting more ‘spiritual’ demands on to materialist forms of display and competition, consumerism offers a reductive, limited and partial rein to desire. It offers too little rather than too much, reconciliation rather than transcendence. To invoke Adorno’s metaphor, it offers a society in which ‘everyone lives in aeroplanes’ but remains obedient to the edict ‘Thou shalt not fly.’