Relax

Relax: alternative hedonism and a new politics of pleasure

Kate Soper on re-imagining fulfllment

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.

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