Rethinking Pleasure in Economic Value

Capitalism’s addiction to growth doesn’t just show up in the external world. It can also be found inside us—in our manufactured desire for more and better. Not only do we have to keep wanting to keep the machine going, we have to keep wanting what is “scarce” and easily privatizable or commodifiable so that the capitalist class can continue to profit.

Critical hedonism(s) is an approach to pleasure and care that is critical of capitalism. It is a politics of pleasure that invites us to remake our desires to be less antisocial, competitive, and harmful, and to instead be more prosocial, collaborative and mutually beneficial. 

The idea of critical hedonism(s) has been deeply studied and explored by our guests in today’s episode. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wycoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently based in London. Eric runs a thirdspace project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the Critical Hedonist Manifesto.

This is Eric and Zarinah’s second time on the podcast, they joined us in 2022 to talk about Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is a great compliment to this episode. This is also a great episode following our most recent conversation with Jason Hickel, Better Lives for All. Where that conversation focused on human needs, this one takes up the topic of human wants. 

In this conversation, we explore what capitalism tells us to desire and why, we interrogate what is truly “cheap,” “expensive,” and “valuable,” and explore what it would be like to participate in a politics of pleasure based on critical hedonism(s)—creating conditions and opportunities for distributed pleasure that don’t cause harm to people or the planet. Finally, we are invited to learn about community gatherings and how to do the work of reclaiming and remaking pleasure.

Further Resources:

• Critical Hedonist Manifesto
• Critical Hedonism(s)
• Beyond Return
• Decoding Labs
• The Joyless Economy, by Tibor Scitovsky
• The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan
• The Zero Marginal Cost Society
• I Dream of Canteens
• The Listening Society: Possible and Necessary
• Post-Growth Living: For An Alternative Hedonism, by Kate Soper
• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by Adrienne Maree Brown
• Becoming Feminist: Consciousness Raising and Social Ecology, Eric Woycoff Rogers (blog)

Related Episodes:

• Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers
• Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel
• Grassroots Urban Placemaking with Mark Lakeman
• Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject
• Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities

Intermission music: Night Cafe Radio

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