of people aware of their impotence to take on the corporate giants and lacking a coherent idea of what to put in place of the existing order. But the regrets and disquiet are real enough, and feed into a widely felt sense of the opportunities we have squandered in recent decades for enjoying more relaxed and less narrowly reduced ways of living.
This is reflected, too, in the concerns of medical professionals, welfare workers and academic researchers about the economic and social effects of the high-stress, fast-food lifestyle. Recent studies have indicated that buying more does not bring greater happiness and that economic growth has no direct correlation with improved levels of well-being.30 As the UK’s independent watchdog on sustainable development (set up by the Labour Party in 2000 and abolished by the Coalition government in 2011) noted some while ago in its report on ‘Redefining Prosperity’,
ever since the ground-breaking work of Abraham Maslow and Manfred Max Neef, psychologists and alternative economists have set out to demonstrate that, far from there being any automatic increase in wellbeing for every increase in levels of consumption, much of our current consumption is turning out to be a very inadequate surrogate for meeting human needs in a more satisfying, durable way.31
More recently, recognition that a time-scarce, work-dominated society is bad for the physical and the mental health of workers has led to many calls for GDP (sometimes dubbed the ‘Grossly Distorting Picture’) to be displaced in favour of other indices of social wealth.32 While the huge contribution of unpaid activity such as household and voluntary work is discounted, GDP includes profits made from dealing with the consequences of mishaps and disasters such as air pollution, plane crashes and car accidents. A number of alternatives have been proposed, including the Human Development Index, which now recognises, alongside living standards measured by income, the role of life expectancy and knowledge in advancing well-being. The Genuine Progress Indicator (developed by Herman Daly and John Cobb in the late 1980s) also adds in the value created by domestic and voluntary work while subtracting the costs of crime and pollution. More recently, the Ecological Footprint, measures how much land and water a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its waste under prevailing technologies. The Happy Planet Index uses the Ecological Footprint along with life expectancy and reported experience of happiness to calculate national levels of happiness. It thus includes ecological efficiency in providing for well-being as a key criterion of its achievement. Nations score well on the index if they achieve high levels of satisfaction and health with low levels of damage to the environment. To date many of the most industrialised nations, including the UK and USA, have scored pretty poorly on the index.33
There is, then, a climate of concern about the impact of unchecked consumption on ourselves and on the environment, which is reflected in an extensive body of research. But not much of this new thinking has entered into mainstream political argument, which still entertains only the most orthodox (and outdated) economic models and conceptions of prosperity. Even as it is progressively undermining the basic conditions of existence for millions alive today and for all future generations, the Western affluent lifestyle continues to be upheld as the model to which all societies should aspire. Mainstream political parties and corporate elites certainly profess concern about global warming, and have supported (often under some duress) measures to reduce emissions. Governments have also implemented schemes to reduce the collateral environmental damage of domestic consumption: encouraging and enforcing recycling, taxing plastic carrier bags and so on. But those in power have certainly not invited the electorate to think more radically and expansively about ideas of progress and prosperity. Little or nothing is heard about the purpose of all our wealth production, and whether it really enhances well-being; little or nothing is said about what might be gained by pursuing a less work-driven and acquisitive way of life. On the contrary, governments and mainstream opposition parties have been happy to allow consumer culture to retain its hegemony over the imagery and representation of our well-being, and they continue to encourage us to spend more on it. We heard this in the post 9/11 calls to commit to ‘patriotic shopping’ as a way of showing our support for the Western way of life (which said much about the dependency of corporate power on our continued loyalty to consumerism). The message is repeated in a never-ending barrage of advertisements and in the many incentive schemes to keep us spending. So culturally entrenched is the idea that our health and happiness as a nation is conditional on how much shopping we do that it seems eccentric to even question it.
To encourage ever-expanding consumption while professing concern about its inevitable environmental consequences is contradictory. There is, of course, a very obvious reason why acknowledgement of eco-crisis is not matched by action, a reason summed up in Paul Mason’s terse remark: ‘If climate change is real, capitalism is finished.’34 Since the global market thrives not on human or environmental well-being but on the multiplication and diversification of ‘satisfiers’ that can realise profit, counter-consumerism would prove disastrous for business. Ever fearful of what they term ‘need saturation’, corporations devote a great deal of ingenuity and money to encouraging new consumer whims. Since a constant flow of future buyers is required, massive budgets are expended on grooming children for a life of consumption. The average child in the US, UK and Australia sees between 20,000 and 40,000 TV ads a year, and marketers are also adept at camouflaging their messages by means of product placement that goes beneath the radar of most children and often deceives even their parents. The Internet also provides continuous exposure to on-screen and pop-up ads, with many brands offering games quizzes, and other entertainment on their own commercial sites. According to research by the National Consumer Council in the UK, the average ten-year-old has internalised 300 to 400 brands – perhaps twenty times the number of birds in the wild that they could name. Seventy per cent of three-year-olds recognise the McDonald’s symbol but only half of them know their own surname.35 Dependent as it is on the revenue from commercials, the media can hardly stem the flow of advertising. In consequence, representations of need, desire and pleasure not focused on consumption are marginalised. As Justin Lewis puts it in his study of the highly political role played by advertising in promoting consumerism (a role, as he notes, almost wholly outside the jurisdiction of the regulatory authorities):
Since advertising carries no right of reply, its voluminous presence has created a lop-sided political landscape. Imagine, instead, what the world might be like if all that creative energy were spent encouraging us to think beyond consumer capitalism. It would represent nothing less than a seismic shift in our cultural environment.36
Left-wing critics of capitalism have been more bothered hitherto about the inequalities of access and distribution that a consumer society creates than about how it confines us to market-driven ways of thinking and acting. Employment is almost always prioritised over other goals. Labour militancy and trade union activity in the West have been largely confined to protection of income and employees’ rights within the existing structures of globalised capital and have done little to challenge, let alone transform, the ‘work and spend’ dynamic of affluent cultures. In the past, socialists such as William Morris and Edward Carpenter offered imaginative and radical thinking on alternative consumption and ways of living, and dated though their argument now is in certain respects, it remains an important resource.37 But there has also been a tendency on the left to opt for patronising and simple-life accounts of fulfilment, rather than a more expansive way of thinking about the complexities and potentialities of human pleasure, and how it might be made richer and stranger in a post-capitalist society. Nowadays, the more influential left-wing commentaries on future consumption put their faith in technology to deliver material abundance,38 and in some cases adopt a rather conventional hi-tech toys-for-the-boys approach to it. ‘Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power’, write Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, ‘the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction …’.39
Alternative hedonism
Despite the paucity (and repression) of alternative visions among politicians and business communities, the contradictions between capitalist priorities and ecological imperatives and between what the economy demands and what is humanly valued are becoming widely noted and discussed. The sense that we must find another way is also expressed in a wide, if