Abigail Susik’s recent essay devoted to Silvia Federici’s work delved into her evocative response to an inquiry about threats to social reproduction. She approached the subject in a wholistic manner:

I call it a war—a war on people’s reproduction. Wherever you turn your eyes you can see that. […] I think the most visible evidence of this war is the massive migration movements that we see all over the world and the [ever-present] reality of refugee camps. Today […] the image of the worker is not the image of the person at the assembly line; it’s the immigrant. […] This […] has to do, I think, with [this broad] corporate move to basically take control, possession, of every important resource for the reproduction of people across the world. I think there is a plan, for example, to separate people from land, from access to independent means of reproduction, […] so that you’d have companies that will control all the soil, the subsoil, that will control the trees, the seas […]

Later in the essay, Susik, who authored Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, related Federici’s acquaintance with US surrealism in the 1970s. Though the topic of Surrealism’s contempt for miserabilism didn’t surface in this context, it has obvious correspondences to feminist assaults on sacrifice and subservience. Miserabilism could be termed the operating system of the State as it extracts obedience most clearly through the work ethic. David Roediger offers a good introduction to the concept in History Against Misery.

Several authors, notably all European women, recently have written in defiance of miserabilism, very likely unaware of its surrealist origins. These authors easily use “joy” in their political texts, yet pleasure is not to be seen in a positive light on their pages. Joy suggests radical promise (and I used it as my working title for my book length essay Jobs, Junk, and Joy), while “Happiness” as in Lynne Segal’s title, Radical Happiness, leaves me flat. Though her subtitle tries to retrieve her radical intentions – “Moments of Collective Joy.” Unfortunately, her radical intentions are left at the bus stop when, in not more than a dozen pages, she dismisses pleasure as a false goal. It’s associated, she maintains, with consumerism. It should go without saying, that nowhere in her index is there an entry for hedonism.

Kate Soper, Segal’s sister British feminist, ventures to the edge of the quicksand and titles her book Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. Soper rejects, following Segal, the faux pleasures of traditional, pro-growth consumerism that she defines as simply massive, addictive, accumulation. She endorses a version of sustainable consumerism as the alternative: bikes not autos.

Similar to Soper, a book by Orsolya Lelkes titled Sustainable Hedonism seems to cover the same ground –

In positive psychology as in happiness economics, the epicentre is the individual and their quest for happiness. [The positive psychologists] provide useful guidance for this, but it is, in my view, a limited approach. A key component is often missing: the consequences of our actions on others.

That’s a good point, which Leikes emphasizes by delving into the negative side of the formulation – “We cannot live a truly flourishing and happy life at the expense of others . . . .”

There is nothing in her book beyond friendship as the lodestar of happiness or, in her terms, sustainable hedonism, which brushes up against an oxymoronic formulation. For her, radical hedonism, like pleasure in the previous authors, is equivalent to addiction.

Above all, I like Enrenreich’s Dancing In the Street, though pleasure and hedonism doesn’t appear in her index, she does refer in the text to a “hedonic vision of community, based on egalitarianism and the joyous immediacy of human experience . . . .”

But what is this “joyous immediacy of human experience?”  Can it be anything other than democratic collaboration in its many forms. In my book length essay, I try to systematically define the context – our bodily needs for affection and play from babyhood – and then the substance – the historic collaborations often designated as utopian experiments, even when they have thrived for decades and with the participation of millions, as was the case with cooperatives in post WWI Poland.

The experience of democratic management, or workers control, that members of worker cooperatives strive to maintain on a daily basis remains unknown to academics. Frederici appears to understands intimate collaboration when she says to Susik –  

Revolution is learning to work with other people, trying to find a range of possibilities. It begins when you say, ‘This is a change I want to make in my life,’ and you go with it.

The concluding quote from Federici, however, indicates she has in mind only protest movements –

 “I don’t know if these struggles will turn the tide of destruction,” she said, “but it is all we have.”

Movement activists can experience the intense camaraderie than exists in the daily lives of worker cooperatives members, yet miserabilism can creep into the lives of both, without a cultural revolution. What’s needed is a total transformation on the social and personal level – from sacrifice in “service of the struggle” to, alternatively, what I call radical hedonism, that is, the desire to solidify collaboration. Without a cultural revolution the commitment of activists and cooperators too easily collapses into burn-out, disillusionment, or worse.

Members of a worker cooperative make a commitment based on values that are already one step removed from serving others, which is the dominant motivation of movement activists. One joins a cooperative for personal reasons, for instance, to ensure economic stability in their lives. They may in the course of their work, as is often the case, provide a service to others and they may even be motivated to do what is now termed “essential work” which unfortunately often entails sacrifices. But these are secondary concerns compared to the central decision a worker makes, which is manifestly one of self-interest: the baker loves baking, the farmer, farming. All these roles magnify their pleasure when done with others.

Further, in the course of maintaining economic stability, workers often must make significant decisions that will affect their daily lives within the cooperative. These decisions will affect how they work with others in a systematic way. New skills may need to be developed and one’s everyday activities adjusted to accommodate the collective decision. Activist’s decisions are more speculative and can be more easily changed, even reversed, without threatening their employment. A project succeeds or doesn’t, a new one begins, life in the office or on the street goes on. In both cases a cultural revolution that buttresses hedonism ensures sustainable and enduring collaboration.

Without a conscious refusal of the cultural baggage of miserabilism, cooperative camaraderie is threatened. The current popularity of the term “worker-owned” that pervades the cooperative community, in imitation of the ESOP slogan “employee owned,” implies subservience to the work ethic as ESOP promotion documents spell out.

Douglas Kruse and Joseph Blasi of Rutgers have found that ESOPs appear to increase sales, employment, and sales per employee by about 2.3% to 2.4% per year over what would have been expected absent an ESOP.

Concentrating on ownership as opposed to stewardship of a commons, stifles the joy of actually doing work together and promotes the indoctrination that striving like a boss of a small enterprise is praiseworthy. On the contrary, one member of Rainbow Grocery, a 200 member worker cooperative in San Francisco, recently expressed what workers’ control meant to him –

I always know that my opinion matters and that I can impact my own well-being and work life very directly.

Neither the cooperative movement as a whole, nor its most radical sector, the worker cooperatives, are hardly populated by conscious hedonists. Most likely, if characterized as such the members would be repulsed. And yet, when you probe the daily activities of worker cooperatives, the level of joviality and playful banter far exceeds that found in hierarchical organizations. (I know this from personal experience in both situations.)

A cultural revolution of the sort I imagine would be premised on fully embracing pleasurable interactions with one’s comrades, not stealing these moments when rare opportunities present themselves. Radical hedonism is radical when conviviality no longer is anticipated, but normalized by the daily practice of collectively decompressing the stress of performance for authority. This is what it means, quoting that old slogan, to create the new society in the shell of the old.