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Post-Growth Living For an Alternative Hedonism

Highlights

We need, in short, to challenge the presumption that the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today is advancing human well-being rather than being detrimental to it.

green thought and writing, hitherto overly centred on the depletion of the natural world, now needs to focus less on the destruction of nature and its impact on a–supposedly unreformable–consumerist way of living, and more on human political culture and its reconstruction.

The main aim must be to challenge the supposedly natural (in the sense of inevitable and non-political) evolution of both

the capitalist growth economy and the consumer culture it has created, to undermine the sense that this development has been essential to human well-being, and to argue that we will prosper better without it.

They caution us against a ‘grand narrative of the Anthropocene’ whose grandiose focus on interactions between the human species and the Earth system

We need to contest mainstream presumptions that technology is ‘natural’ and economics purely ‘social’, but to do so we must maintain an analytic divide between the natural and the social in the first place. This requires resistance to some of the more irrational and neo-animist tendencies of contemporary cultural theory.

Posthumanism in its ‘new materialist’ formulation has also invited us to think of inanimate objects as exercising agency no less extensively and effectively than human beings. 27

I am also quarrelling with those who insist on the importance of a redemptive awakening to human continuity with nature, rather than on the (often grim) exceptionality of human economic and social practice. Indeed, if human forms of consciousness and agency are on a par with those of the rest of nature, then no special responsibility for ecological collapse can be attributed to humans, and no eco-political strategies for redemption can be expected of them. Paradoxical as it may seem, the belief that humans occupy no special place in nature is likely to confound rather than advance the ecological cause.

The uniqueness of human responsibility–which simply cannot be extended to rivers, volcanoes, or even dogs–remains an insurmountable dilemma for posthumanism.

the fact that it is precisely because we have been told for so long that there is no post-capitalist alternative that it becomes important to envisage one. 41

It is another to ignore the extent to which workers as consumers are collusive in the reproduction of the capitalist economy–an issue on which much of the left has so far been extremely evasive.

socialists are still much too ready to subscribe to conventional views on the ‘good life’ and what constitutes a ‘high’ standard of living.

As work becomes more precarious, and the quest for work more desperate, the sense of purpose it provides diminishes.

Abraham Maslow and Manfred Max Neef,

At a time when some economic theorists predict a terminal decline in capitalism’s powers of accumulation, 40 and when the environmental obstacles to growth appear insuperable, it becomes urgent to renew an earlier tradition of positive thinking on the liberation from work, and to associate that with an alternative hedonist defence of the pleasures of a less harried and acquisitive way of living.

it may just figure as a vague and rather general malaise that descends in the shopping mall or supermarket: a sense of a world too cluttered and encumbered by material objects and sunk in waste, of priorities skewed through the focus on ever-more extensive provision and acquisition of stuff.

My main focus is neither on consumption as a bid for personal distinction and individualisation, nor on consumption as a relatively unconscious ‘form of life’, but on the ways in which a whole range of contemporary consumerist practices, both more or less everyday and more or less identity-oriented, are being brought into question by reason of their environmental consequences, their impact on health, and their distraints on sensual enjoyment and on more spiritual forms of well-being.