The left and the pleasure

The political confrontation is played today basically in the field of affections.

The dominant narratives are not so much theories as emotional aspirations.

In this space, the story seems to be triumphing according to which the left is moralistic, prohibitionist, wants us unhappy, while the right would let us enjoy doing what we want.

Obviously, this story is fallacious, but the stories are not scientific theories but states of mind that end up prevailing and are more decisive in shaping public opinion than any evidence.

The left counterattacks by accusing those who seem to forget the seriousness of the crises we have to face as deniers.

Here we would have a possible answer to the question about the reasons why a part of the workers vote to the right or why government action focused on protecting the most vulnerable is not rewarded in the polls or at the polls.

Cycle changes are not produced by precise calculations or sophisticated reasoning, but by reasons that have to do with mood, such as fatigue, fear or pessimism.

The left will only be able to assert itself in a scenario that is not very favorable to it if it manages to modify its emotional terms.

The high esteem that a good part of the left shows towards sacrifice as the engine of historical transformation has its peak in that famous statement by Marx that shame is a revolutionary feeling.

Shame has indeed been a positive and transformative feeling when it has become testimony, as we have recently seen in the breaking of silence by victims of sexual abuse.

The problem is that the repetition of this type of discourse colors everything with negativity: there is only talk of bad experiences, complaints, the political narrative is one of abnegation and the government's action translates into a catalog of prohibitions.

Faced with this, a positive discourse on the part of a certain right can be irresponsible,

This sacrificial view of history also has its limitations.

From the outset, not every humiliation sets in motion a process of emancipation;

there is a humiliation that paralyzes and individualizes, that turns into unproductive anger or simple sadness from which nothing operative against the iniquity of the world follows.

There is also a very elementary dialectic in this conception of social change;

history shows that, very often, repression is not the preamble to liberation but to further repression.

Turning "the contradictions of capitalism" into the harbinger of its demise is sheer fraud.

In his book

José Andrés Torres Mora has devoted some glorious pages to refuting the expectation that suffering is the means through which political ideals are realized: delving into suffering does not necessarily lead to a regime in which suffering changes sides, but the truism that those who suffered before suffer even more.

The "teaching the people to be afraid of themselves in order to instill courage" is mere pamphlet rhetoric of that young Marx who intended to criticize Hegel.

Against his intentions, the negative language of criticism can serve to entrench despondency.

With this sacrificial conception of social transformation, a conception of the body is communicated as a receptacle of social injustices, abuse, domination, control,

The Rousseauian left seems to have imposed itself on the Voltairian left, thus contributing to creating a field of antagonism that can be very unfavourable.

The left commands, regulates and prohibits, while the right claims a more carefree and spontaneous life.

One is concerned with the good life, while the other is dedicated to the good life.

In the political brawl they are the limits to air conditioning, the consumption of meat or the correction of language, in front of the terraces, the illuminated city and deregulation.

In the midst of this framework, it is inevitable that the left seems corny and moralizing, that for large sectors of the population it is not managing to appear as better, but simply as more bossy.

Are we to conclude that suffering is the only method known to the left and that the right has a monopoly on pleasure?

Would this explain the different assessment that public opinion makes of the fun of one and the other, of the parties of Boris Johnson and Sanna Marin?

Apart from other relevant differences, this different rating may be due to the fact that we associate the right with enjoyment and the left with sacrifice, so that in one case we do not see any inconsistency and in the other we do.

The left will not overcome this antagonism that is so disadvantageous until it formulates a different idea of ​​pleasure, which it has been considering as something individualistic and bourgeois.

In a framework dominated by consumption, pleasure only appears as a confirming principle of the social order.

But the left could think of pleasure as a pleasure that is aware of its limits and that finds its authenticity and intensity in sharing.

Not any pleasure would be equivalent to imposition or conformism, but that short-sighted, rude pleasure that ignores the joy of respect and shared enjoyment;

the pleasure that the left does well to distrust is the pleasure linked to abuse, to the absence of limits,

In the old idea of ​​suppressing private property, the most valuable thing was not the empty claim of a collective property that is completely unreal, but the appeal to a different way of possessing.

The pleasure of the bodies can be understood as a reciprocal appropriation that is not without limits, fundamentally the one indicated by the idea of ​​consent.

It is not that things lack an owner, but that there are no forms of property that imply direct domination over others or that indirect domination that would mean disregarding the effects that the abuse of one's own property can have on others.

Sexual consent and ecology have in common being ways of understanding pleasure as shared realities, between people and between generations.

It is possible to think of pleasure and property in another way, as shared enjoyment.

The common is a mode of appropriation that limits abuse.

Pleasures can increase when shared equally.

Enjoying equality, the satisfaction of being part of a just society are forms of pleasure that could be a positive alternative to their individualistic reduction.

Daniel Innerarity

is Professor of Political Philosophy, Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country and holder of the Artificial Intelligence and Democracy chair at the European Institute in Florence.

@daniInnerarity

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