Alien Nation posted by Richard Seymour

"Happiness is a new idea in Europe" - Saint-Just.

A survey reported on BBC News this morning reported that 90% of Londoners are unhappy with their day to day lives. In 2001, the Observer reported:

Despite the highest British income levels ever and a buoyant economy, researchers - who interviewed 1,000 people - found most were profoundly unhappy: 55 per cent said they had felt depressed in the past year.

Now, there's a moralistic left response to this, which is to affirm that human happiness pertains to matters greater than shopping, and to identify the problem as one of consumerism, greed, avarice, a lack of solidarity and so on. See this Polly Toynbee wheedle for instance. Citing LSE lectures by sociologist Richard Layard, she claims that once people have risen above desperate poverty, it really makes little difference what one's income is: unhappiness becomes the rule, and much of the blame is placed on shopping. To be fair, Toynbee does also note that while GDP per head tends to make little difference to the national aggregate of happiness (yeah yeah), the unequal distribution of income contributes greatly to unhappiness within nations. To wit (from Layard): "In 1975 39% of the rich (in the top quarter) were very happy, compared with only 19% of the poor (in the bottom quarter). This would lead you to expect that when the people in the bottom quarter became richer, as they had by 1998, they would also have become happier. But they did not." (I can't quite get my head round Layard's charts, though - he reckons people from Northern Ireland are among the happiest people on earth. Has he ever visited that fucking place?)

Unhappiness is indeed related to inequality, and has curious effects:

Comparing two countries in which the poor have equal real incomes, the one in which the rich are wealthier is likely to have a higher infant mortality rate. This anomalous result does not appear to spring from measurement error in estimating the income of the poor, and the association between high infant mortality and income inequality is still present after controlling for other factors such as education, medical personnel, and fertility. The positive association of infant mortality and the income of the rich suggests that measured real incomes may be a poor measure of social welfare. (Robert J. Waldmann (1992), “Income Distribution and Infant Morality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107:4, pp. 1283-1302).

But of course what this moralistic analysis misses is the crucial dimension of class analysis, or to put it another way, exploitation. If we don't account for this, then we are left with a debate between liberal vicars arguing for a nicer, happier, more genteel society and vicious neoliberals arguing that such unhappiness is mere resentment, the 'politics of envy', and that the winners are not to blame for the failings of the losers. It is a sterile argument, and it invites us to revel in what Nietzsche calls 'slave morality', in which our plea for nicer, fairer treatment by the rich, our toothless misery, testifies to our moral superiority. It strikes me as partially the heritage of a teetotalling sentimentality in traditional Labourism. One might add that focusing on what might be described as a mere excess of the system, perhaps a mere result of revanchist rightism and the neoliberal assault on Keynesianism, this moralism does an excellent service to capital. From the citadels of secular liberalism, we are called upon to pursue a moral renewal rather than a class struggle. And there is absolutely no irony in that: Western liberals are Christians in drag.

Unhappiness and slavery flow from inequality, and the latter from property. Property is thus the greatest of society’s plagues. It is a veritable public offence.

Perhaps the misappropriation of the Marx's concept of alienation, and particularly of commodity fetishism, by liberals and some theologians is therefore understandable. The concept originates in Judeo-Christian discourse (alienation from the Kingdom of God etc), and shorn of its unpleasant materialist imbrications and the implication of class struggle, it can be restored to its spiritual domain. Sure, I've heard it said, meaning is taken from our day to day lives because the only universality in the secular-liberal universe that really matters is saleability. Certainly, in separating conception from action, in reproducing a series of actions under pain of losing our livelihood, we experience a spiritual loss. Hence, the answer is to suffuse social action with a moral and ethical structure, to reconnect with God, to reconstitute the mythical lost 'community', to have more respect for one another, to give to charity, to stop obsessing about how much stuff we have, to resist consumerism, to 'forgive' Third World debt (which is really to 'forgive' the expropriators of the Third World, Mother Theresa-style) to seek reform and encourage corporate social responsibility etc. It isn't too far down this road to Asbos (in which the government criminalises behaviour that is not criminal), cuts in disability benefit (in which the poor are told by Mr Blunkett that they will find more meaning in work than in watching television all day), tuition fees (in which the workshy students are to be given an incentive, a work ethic to structure their otherwise shiftless, drifting lives), and so on.

Alienation is the process by which capital treats a human being as a commodity, paying for that commodity a rate secured on a labour market. The commodity does not decide anything, unless capital says so. The commodity is a problem to the extent that she is human, and the management and smoothing out of these human tendencies is necessary to integrate her into the cycle of capitalist production. That integration, the acceptance that one is a commodity, purchased for increasingly longer hours in the day to perform specified tasks (and some unspecified ones too), is essential to the creation of surplus value. Without surplus value, there is no profit, and without profit there is no capital. Of course being reduced to a commodity for most of one's waking day makes you unhappy. Of course living for others, waking up for others, timing one's journeys for others, regulating one's leisure time for others, is a source of unhappiness. Of course, the inequality that derives from exploitation is a source of unhappiness. Capitalism is radically inhuman: it is the source of alienation and unhappiness. How could it be otherwise? Autonomy, equality and justice are human needs.