constitutes a ‘high’ standard of living.
Those who object to attributing all environmental wrong-doing to the capitalist West while ignoring the ecological devastation of the Soviet regime are surely on target. But things might have been different had the Soviet leaders been less enamoured of the Western model of consumption and energy provision, and more revolutionary in their thinking on human prosperity – had they been less ready, in other words, to ‘naturalise’ the consumption associated with capitalism. The point made some while ago by James O’Connor is still relevant here:
An uncritical acceptance of Western-style development led to its mechanical imitation in socialist countries. The progress of socialism too often has been measured by its ability to keep pace with or outdistance, as with Sputnik, the West’s most technologically advanced accomplishments. In the course of this race, the idea of a qualitatively different type of progress, one measured by the quality of life rather than the quantity of technology or consumer goods, has been systematically suppressed.46
So, too, in many ways, is the rallying call of Rudolf Bahro, another early red-green thinker,
Our customary idea of the transition to socialism is the abolition of the capitalist order within the basic conditions European civilisation has created in the field of techniques and technology – and not in Europe alone. Even in this century, a thinker as profound as Antonio Gramsci was still able to view technique, industrialism, Americanism, the Ford system in its existing form as by and large an inescapable necessity, and thus depict socialism as the genuine executor of human adaptation to modern machinery and technology. Marxists have so far rarely considered that humanity has not only to transform its relations of production, but must also fundamentally transform the entire character of its mode of production, i.e. the productive forces, the so-called techno-structure. It must not see its perspective as bound up with any historically transmitted form of the development of needs and their satisfaction, or of the world of products designed for this purpose. The commodity world that we find around us is not in its present form a necessary condition for human existence. It does not have to look the way it does in order for human beings to develop both intellectually and emotionally as far as we would like.47
It would be a pity if those responsible for the innovative arguments on ecology that have been developed of late within historical materialism were not to extend their insights onto capitalism as a perverse and dystopian biospheric organisation in order to provide an equally luminous de-naturalising assault on capitalism’s anachronistic conceptions of human prosperity and well-being. The definition of progress in terms of capitalist-driven technology and industrialisation can no longer be left unchallenged; nor can nations with the least sustainable environmental footprint any longer be allowed to figure as models of the good life for the developing nations.48 A less techno-driven and growth-oriented organisation of nature has now to be viewed as offering more advanced norms of welfare and modes of providing it.
Orthodox Marxists may object, but those working within a broadly historical materialist framework of thinking must now encompass the politicisation of consumption, rather than restricting their focus to production and worker exploitation. They need to be as critical of capitalism’s success in promoting the consumerist lifestyle as if this were the only one worth having as they have been of the naturalisation of its reliance on fossil fuel. They must allow criticism, too, of Marx’s more extravagant claims about what a post-capitalist future could deliver. ‘An abundance of needs’, ‘distribution according to needs’ – heady though such slogans may be, they can no longer figure as appropriate summations of what could be achieved under socialism. Hence my own quarrel with the detached radicalism of some academic Marxists who have been happy to repeat the gesture towards an ever-receding utopian horizon of universal plenitude in order to spare themselves engagement in the necessary, though troublesome, reconstruction of the Marxian message on post-capitalist society. A cultural politics that sniffs at the idea of moderating consumption is clinging to an outdated set of assumptions about what would constitute post-capitalist forms of industry, labour process and worker emancipation. Nor can the left continue to advocate equal, universal access to Western affluent standards of living, not even if their production were to be revolutionised in ways that freed it from the exploitations of heteronomous labour. Demands for full employment, the end of austerity and economic security for all have to be coupled with, even replaced by, demands for a post-growth economic order based on fairness in global distribution and an essentially reproductive order of material consumption. This in turn will require a revolution in our thinking about the very nature of progress and prosperity – a revolution that challenges the idea that consumer culture delivers the good life even to those with the means to buy its goods, that undermines attempts to maintain the hegemony of work over our lives and value system, and that highlights the pleasures for everyone of a less speed-driven, time-scarce, acquisitive way of living. Only if the left commits itself to an alternative politics of prosperity along these lines have we any real hope of setting off the relay of pressures that might issue in an effective mandate for change.
While I have a quarrel with those who would treat consumption as a nugatory factor in the ‘crime’ of the fossil fuel economy, I am equally reluctant to discount the possible role of revised ideas about prosperity, consumption and the ‘good life’ in leveraging some more radical economic transformation. The IPPC report of October 2018 charged states with a ‘moral responsibility’ to act with immediate and radical effect on global warming and presented them as the main agent of change. Since then there has been some state acknowledgement of our ‘climate emergency’. But based on their record, it is difficult to see states committing to the radical action that is needed without being pressured to do so. But who will exert that pressure? Malm suggests that it would be folly to trust to consumers to change their habits and demands.49 He is by no means alone in this, and he may well be right. But by his own argument, it would be even more absurd to put one’s faith in corporate elites to enforce state action in the creation of a just and sustainable future. Nor, surely, can we any longer expect meaningful opposition to the status quo to be initiated by a concerted proletarian movement. Paul Mason may be mistaken in claiming that everyone is now capable of becoming an agent of transformation thanks to global networking, but he is surely right in suggesting that those who cling to the idea that the proletariat is the only force that can push society beyond capitalism have failed to see how extensive and diverse the potential agency for change has now become.50 In any case, the proletariat in Marx’s now classic understanding of it as the class of immiserated factory-workers opposed to the bourgeois class and seeking its overthrow no longer corresponds to the realities of the contemporary capitalist formation and its possible sources and agents of transformation.
Foolhardy as it may be, I am therefore offering, in the ensuing chapters, a review and critique of affluent consumer culture that challenges a left–right consensus about its pleasures and its inevitability as a model of the ‘good life’, while highlighting the disruptive political potential of contests about consumption.
Why ‘Alternative Hedonism’? Why Now?
The model of prosperity associated with the capitalist growth economy and its consumerist way of living has always had its critics, but it has also come to exert a powerful influence over conceptions of progress and the ‘good life’. Many have defended it as the guarantor of freedom and democracy and the sole means of achieving a high standard of living. Capitalism has, indeed, brought many benefits, at least in the richer nations, and it has proved compatible with the advance of socially progressive agendas on ethnicity, gender and sexuality. But its benefits have been achieved at the cost of exploitation of both people and the environment; and it has done most for human well-being when it has been most subject to political regulation, as it was in European social democracies after World War II.
In recent decades, as post-war social democracy has fallen victim to neo-liberal ideology, the social costs of capitalist growth have soared with alarming consequences. The recent rise of populism in the UK, Europe and America, much of it though not all of it on the right,1 reflects