Printed Summer 2014

GIVE UP LIFESTYLISM!
LAUREN WROE AND JOSIE HOOKER
Ethical lifestylism, or the practice of adapting ones individual lifestyle habits (where you
shop/eat/work) as a means of promoting or facilitating social change, has always been
something of a bug bear for SHIFT. However as the political climate transforms, with uprisings
in the UK, Europe and the Arab world, we want to return to this critique as we consider how to
relate to and act with the struggle against wide-scale economic and political crisis. Do our old
methods and tactics still stand up to the challenge? Arguably they never did. This article will lay
the way for a series exploring the relevance of lifestyle politics in the current political climate.
Back in 2007 we attended the climate camp at Heathrow airport. The camp set out to tackle the
root causes of climate change, and as difficult as it is to determine where these factors manifest
and how best to tackle them (especially when you are tied by the camp/direct action model)
camping outside large infrastructure targets seemed as good a choice as any. The political focus
at this camp was often directed toward corporate expansion and profiteering and the
subsequent and unnecessary short-haul business flights, rather than holiday makers on their two
week package holiday from work. However we felt the choice of airport as target was in some
ways a symptom of, and could all too easily slip into, an attack on flying as a holiday/lifestyle
choice and quite often it did (see Shift Editorial Issue 1 and Jessica Charsleys article in the same
issue Climate Camp- Hijacked by Liberals). We felt that this failed to acknowledge the
dimensions of class and privilege that make it harder for some people to take a 4 week holiday
in a bus to southern Spain rather than booking a budget flight to accommodate for their kids and
their 7 days off work. This isnt to glorify the limitations of work and money, but rather to
acknowledge class and privilege as barriers that must be overcome, rather than reinforced, by
radical political movements (see Climate Camp and Us, Shift, Issue 7).
We used the term lifestyle, then, as the focus of these actions were usually highly
individualised, isolated acts in which a person made decisions on how they live their lives, within
capitalism, in a more ethical or moral fashion. It is the individuality of these actions, their
ignorance of the social dimensions of capitalism, that we found problematic, rather than the
everyday level at which the actions are taken. It can be argued that these actions are
empowering, allowing the individual to re-gain control of their lives, but often it seems to result
in division and finger-pointing; pinning the blame for social problems onto each other whilst
letting the structural factors off the hook.
There is also an assumption here that social change will come about as more people realise the
error of their ways. But the demands made by those advocating more ethical lifestyles are often
impossible escapes, further trapping us into the work, consume, logic of capital. They are often
easily co-optable/tolerable forms of resistance. This is not to say that skipping, shop lifting,
skiving (to name a few) are not meaningful actions; it depends on the context and the manner in
which they are carried out. For example thousands of people shoplifting in a non-identitarian,
collectively politicised way, could potentially be very powerful (think of the radical and popular
auto-reduzione movement in Italy)!
However there is often a strong element of turning ones back on society characteristic of
collective lifestyle projects, housing co-operatives being an example. Whilst these mutual aid
networks can be a vehicle for exploring new ways of housing and organising ourselves, if we
retreat into these communities as viable alternatives to capitalist reality, we run the risk of
isolating ourselves from the reality of capitalism and the everyday struggles of work, housing
Lifestyle is Individualised Action.
which is why lifestyle is definitely not about individualising the fight against capitalism. Living
differently necessitates and promotes supporting others who are doing likewise (supporting
workers co-ops for example). As such, lifestylers develop the sorts of communities that many
others simply bemoan the lack of. Getting to know local shop-keepers by shopping in small
shops, not soul-less supermarkets, and so on.
Conclusions: if not now, when?
fuck the systemWhen well understood, lifestyle is very much a response to the realities of
state-capitalism, and very much about creating networks of resistance and new ways of doing
and being that help us escape the cultural, ethical and structural parameters that dominate our
world. Of course, it presents certain challenges but what form of activism is easy? And some
who engage in it may feel and act morally superior, condemning others who fail to meet their
ethical standards, but many non-lifestyle activists do so too. We shouldnt conflate the actions
of certain people with the tactics they use.
It seems to me that lifestyle is absolutely necessary, not only as a way of breaking state-
capitalism, but also as a way of ensuring that, if we succeed in doing so, we will be prepared to
create not simply another world, but also a better one. Lifestyle allows us to experiment with
new ways of organising, to critically explore our own values and priorities. State-capitalism has
robbed us of responsibility, and has replaced it with promises of material wealth which we have
come to see as our right; if we dont start to live and think differently, then, if we ever did crush
the state, through some epic battle, say, then wed simply recreate the old hierarchies and ways
of doing.
If were happy to live lives fed by unsustainable practices and slave labour now, why wouldnt
we be at any other time? Capitalism offers us these things, but why do we not refuse? At what
stage should we take responsibility for the way we live?
Lifestyle both prepares us for and helps us move towards a world where we, not state-
capitalism, control our lives. From insurrectionary acts to on-line petitions, many other tactics
will be needed to change the world, but for the world to really change, we surely need to
change ourselves as well.
Lifestyle is Moral Puritanism.
But what if people want to update their iPhone? Isnt lifestyle a form of ethical vanguardism,
dictating how people should live their lives? Well, no. And, yes. It isnt, in the sense that while
many lifestylers follow certain ethical norms (such as veganism) this is due to particular cultural
trends, but it in no ways exhausts the possibilities of the tactic of lifestyle activism. Simon
Fairlie, editor of The Land, offers what Id say is a fine example of lifestyle politics, but, as a
result of his critical enquiry into the way he wants to live, he supports small-scale animal
farming. Lifestyle forces us to consider the ethics of what we do, and I see that as a good thing.
The reason many people see this differently is, Id suggest, a result of following a liberal logic
which divides the public and the private. Following this line of reasoning, veganism is a private,
ethical issue, which we shouldnt insist people follow, but anti-capitalism, say, is a public,
political issue which were free to shout about. But that makes no sense. We all want to see a
world that supports certain values and not others; if we think we dont, thats because we see
our values as somehow obvious, natural, or undeniably right (as liberals do). Ultimately, theres
no difference in arguing for a vegan world than arguing for an anti-capitalist world theyre both
just expressions of our values, but we often fail to recognise this. For example, an anti-
capitalists may feel comfortable in denying the legitimacy of sexist behaviour, because they see
this as universally wrong; but they see vegan values explicitly as personal values and argue that
therefore they should be kept private. Again, this is what the liberal state does.
Ultimately, then, we do need to address the question of what sort of world we want to live in,
and recognise that there are limits to diversity and limits to what we can do if we take our
values into account. Lots of people want to fly to Spain every year for their holiday. OK, but
that means many more people will suffer somewhere else on the planet. Lots of people want
cheap electronics. OK, but this means that economic slaves have to make them. Ironically, the
failure to recognise this is a result of what lifestylers are so often accused of namely, failing
to recognise the social [and, we might add, environmental] dimensions of capitalism (Give up
lifestylism! Issue 13, SHIFT). Vegan cyclists are accused of pushing their ethics onto others,
yet this is only true in a discursive sense (at most), but we must all live with the consequences
of people eating meat, driving cars, etc.. Again, the invisibility of this is precisely what liberal
capitalism is all about, and why those who oppose lifestyle are in fact the ones who appear to
fail to see the inter-related dimensions of global state-capitalism.
Arent lifestyle choices just about better capitalism?
how greenOf course, we live in a capitalist world, and its hard to escape that, but many
lifestyle choices are about working outside this logic. So, for example, we might set up a tool
club where a community has access to a library of things they need from time to time but dont
want or need to own. This is a small but powerful step towards communalising the things we
need to live and thus side-stepping the capitalist model of private ownership. And we can take it
further, as workers co-ops do, and begin to communalise the ownership of the means of
production. Some argue that workers co-ops are capitalist enterprises, but this is untrue and
conflates markets with capitalism. Workers co-ops are run by their members, but no one owns
the machinery, buildings etc they are effectively collectivised. And they explicitly reject profit
and growth, using surplus income to either improve their products or make them cheaper. Some
argue co-ops have to grow like any other capitalist business; again, this is untrue. Many survive
sticking firmly to their principles. Of course, many struggle because they are up against capitalist
companies that produce stuff with economic slaves and with no consideration of the
environment; but a lot more co-ops would survive if more people who care about the values
they defend supported them in other words, if more people followed a lifestyle politics
and community. They are powerful tools if they remain engaged and antagonistic and dont
become mere havens for radicals and hippies. Along with many other lifestyle choices,
veganism, squatting, etc, we have to acknowledge that these are havens for us, not everyones
idea of autonomy from capitalism would look the same.
When we fail to acknowledge this we are guilty of a kind of ethical vanguardism, peddling the
idea that we could live better lives within capitalism, if only we could be bothered or were
educated enough. There is also pseudo-religious, sacrificial element here, that we are the
martyrs for social change, but considering the often subcultural irrelevancy of our actions our
sacrifices and preaching often fall on deaf ears anyway. When we make these sacrifices we are,
in fact, not martyrs; we are further reinforcing our identities as activist and anarchists, this is
our haven, this is where we fit (un-problematically) into society.
As we see it then lifestylism as we describe it here is a tendency that emerged in a very specific
context. In recent years it has represented, at best, an accentuation (in de-politicised form) of
the New Left tendency towards identity politics; or perhaps a certain inertia vis--vis the
absence of an exciting politics to replace that of the anti-globalisation movement or, with the
mainstreaming of environmentalism, that of the radical green movement. At worst, however, it
embodies the gravest shortcomings of identity or new social movement politics stripped of all
radical (or even properly political) content.
The heady unraveling of crisis after crisis following the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008
has of course transformed this landscape beyond all recognition, bringing structural factors to
the fore in a way that the anti-capitalist wing of the climate movement could do only on limited
terrain. Gone is the consensus that There Is No Alternative (to capitalism) and even the
seemingly unshakeable paradigm of liberal democracy has taken unprecedented blows to its
legitimacy in recent months. In short, politics that is, possibility is back! And it hardly takes a
Marxist or a class war veteran to point out that this return of the political has been closely
associated with the return of class as a serious political issue.
With the very fundamentals of our social organisation in question and the re-emergence of
class-based politics, then, the inadequacy and irrelevance of the lifestylism into which our [the
authors] political generation was born is laid bare. Indeed, we imagine that our readers need
little reminding of the fact that the recent ruptures (which, as we write in the wake of the
August riots and the victory of the Libyan rebel forces over the Gadaffi regime, only seem to
increase in pace and intensity) have had very little to do with the practices that we identify here
as lifestylist: with living in a housing cooperative, consuming ethically or belonging to a minority
subculture. Indeed, in this climate where the alternative is on the lips of hundreds of
thousands of people, the alternative that an ethical lifestyle supposedly embodies (that old,
self-satisfied call to be the change!), not surprisingly, has very little traction.
So why, then, the continuing attention to what we can all agree is an obsolete practice?
The answer, for us, is two-fold. Firstly, the allure of ethical choices and lifestylist solutions is
still strong. With increasing pressure to find answers to our present predicament, its not
surprising we look to our existing repertoires and their cut-out templates: when asked at a
protest so what is there if not capitalism?, we might offer the example of workers coops.
However, while important on their own terms (and the strengths and limitations of autonomous
institutions and infrastructure is something wed like to address in this series), these alone will
not topple capitalism: indeed, taking (always limited) control of our own exploitation is very
different from abolishing capital/value as the root of the labour relation. Similarly, if we
recognise lifestyle choices for what they are that is, expressions of personal preference for a
particular brand of freedom (the freedom we call autonomy) that can make our lives under
capitalism more palatable there is also a danger that in these harsh times we retreat inwards
to these comfortable islands that shelter us materially (or however else) from the raging storm
beyond. Yet this alluring comfort zone isnt only material. If we recognise activism as a
lifestyle/identity in itself, there is surely also the danger that, faced with the disorienting new
political climate (and the associated identity crisis of identity politics), we cling to that identity in
a bid for status and security.
The second motivation for insisting so heavily on the exorcism of lifestylism speaks to the
question posed by various contributors to this issue of SHIFT: where are we? Because the
ruptures of the past months and years have not only revealed, as weve argued above, just how
heavy a price has been paid for our departure from the traditional left in the post-1968 period
(in terms of a dislocation from class politics). They have also been a clear reminder of the
weakness of the traditional left (testament, then, to the necessity of the departure in the first
place): indeed, from the cowardice of the NUS leadership last November to the glaring failure of
the unions to generalise the J30 strikes, more and more people are experiencing this inadequacy
first hand (betrayal has indeed been a defining experience for the new Millbank generation).
In the present climate of social unrest and political possibility the stakes have therefore never
been higher. Yet if we have the ambition in us to believe in an autonomous, radical left worthy of
its name, we must be sure that the question where are we? is interpreted as we intend it: as a
criticism not of our absence, but of our tendency to assume the importance of our presence,
regardless whether the latter takes a politically adequate form. Because for us where are we?
is patently NOT an invitation to head into the fray armed with vegan curry for the masses, to
bicycle our way to global communism or to advise the rioters on how to source their loot
ethically. Neither, though, is this call to a we meant as a re-assertion of the identity into which
we users of the activist toolkit tend to fall. Indeed, the final lesson that recent events have
given us is that we perhaps didnt go far enough with our critique of lifestylism and ethical choice
first time around: it was all too easy to make jibes at those environmentalists whose radical
credentials amounted to nothing more than the appropriation of direct action to ends of state
and consumer lobbying in favour of individualist, lifestylist solutions. Targeting this unapologetic
liberalism was perhaps a straw man that allowed us to cut short the critique of a practice that
was perhaps too close to home: that is, activism as a lifestyle itself.
It is in this spirit that we wanted to publish this series. We wanted to remind ourselves of the
dangers of the activist identity, and the lifestyle that goes with it; because it is these that
present such an obstacle to our entering into the process of creation of a new politics. We [the
authors] believe that there is a role here for the radical, undogmatic left, but only if the latter
stands for more than an identity or a set of lifestyle choices; only if it is willing and able to
formulate and promote positions that are adequate to the politically complex and increasingly
dynamic world we inhabit. Give up lifestylism! Give up activism!
IN DEFENCE OF LIFESTYLE POLITICS
MATT WILSON
Ignoring Structure.
Contrary to the claims of many opposed to it, lifestyle politics are developed alongside a radical
and engaged analysis of the world and its many problems; it by no means lets the structural
factors off the hook, as Wroe and Hookers article suggests, but directly responds to them and
is an attempt to ultimately destroy them. The fact that it does so by side-stepping them is due
to the anarchistic vision of creating another world in the shell of the old, rather than taking state
power directly. So yes, it ignores state and capitalism, but only in the sense of refusing to allow
them to tell us how to live; it does not ignore their impact and the barriers they place in our way
when we try to live differently. In fact, in attempting to live in accordance with our values, these
barriers are made even more obvious. Furthermore, as I explain in greater detail below, lifestyle
is an explicit response to the inter-related nature of our lives under capitalism, and a recognition
that what we do has an impact on other people.
Privilege.
organic foodIt is commonly claimed that lifestyle is the preserve of the privileged. But this is
only true if we see lifestyle as a consumerist greening of capitalism. In fact, lifestyle is about
radically changing the way we live, and that includes not simply ethical consumerism, but ethical
consumption, which must mostly be understood as consuming less, and consuming (or using)
without buying; by re-using, recycling, borrowing, creating and, again, simply using less. Often,
then, lifestyle activism is cheaper than other lives. Its also an attempt to escape the allure of
endless capitalist products that we are all so easily sucked into. Paying that little bit more to
support a local shop may mean not updating our phone, spending fewer nights in the pub, or
whatever; but those are choices we need to make. And this encourages us to think critically
about what it means to be able to afford something, and what the real costs of things are. When
we say organic food is too expensive, what were really saying is it seems expensive compared
to products made in ways which we entirely disapprove of; when we say we cant afford it, we
(often) mean weve chosen to spend our money on other things: we need to reconfigure our
relationships here, and to think of what we want to support, rather than simply what we can
afford in economic terms.
And is it wrong that people who can do something do it, even if others cant? Is there any form
of activism that doesnt exclude some people? Of course, its absolutely wrong if people
condemn people for not doing things that they genuinely cant do, due to their personal
circumstances, but this is a critique of the way some people behave, not of the tactic of lifestyle
per se. Yes, lifestyle forces us to consider our own responsibility, and that might lead to
disagreements and even condemnation, but if we want to live in a world where we create our
own values, then isnt this always a possibility? Perhaps we should embrace the fact that were
engaging in ethics rather than leaving capitalism and the state to decide what we can and cant
do. Its also worth considering how this accusation of lifestyle as privilege ends up itself being a
defence of western consumer lifestyles (pretty much all of which are privileged from a global
perspective); working class people in the UK, so this argument goes, must be left to do
whatever they want with their money; but what about the impact their choices have on much
poorer people across the globe? This isnt about moral puritanism or vanguardism, but it is about
acknowledging that the way we live has an impact on everyone and everything around us, and
that we often do have some scope (even if its limited) to act differently.