p Our examination of the evolution of the sense of contentedness will be incomplete if we say nothing about sublime cult of consumption, which is one of its varieties. The ideal inspiring and orienting this cult may be called anarcho-hedonism, which draws its proponents mainly from the easily “Bohemianised” segment of students and declassed intellectuals, people finding themselves knocked out.

p Unlike vulgar, prosaic consumer psychology, anarchohedonism does not abide by the guidelines of official bourgeois ideology and morals with their illusions, norms, symbols and career standards. It does not subscribe to the battered moral “respectability”, does not eulogise the doubtful advantages of the “golden mean" and is not preoccupied with quests to justify time-serving. But God forbid that an anti-consumer psychology is attributed to it on these grounds. Everything is quite the reverse: this ideal embodies consumer psychology with the maximum consistency, bringing it to nee plus ultra. It is not merely a substitution for the commonplace consumer psychology, but its logical consummation and one ol its potential forms. The 87 usual consumer morality proves to be only unfolded anarcho-hedonistic morality. We are here confronted, to quote the apt remark by the Soviet sociologist Y. N. Davydov, with a refined variant of the cult of consumption that has managed to convert the most trivial striving for entertainment and sensual pleasure into a quivering and frenzied belief in the divinity of any delight, appearing before the amazed world with its mystical core and esoteric cult.  [87•* 

p What is the life-blood of this neohedonistic mysticism? In what spheres does it wander and on what does it rest? The philosophy of super-consumption does not descend to such “trifles” as the distinctions between the two opposing worlds—capitalism and socialism, with the result that these terms are themselves artificially converted into hollow abstractions. This speculative operation helps to persuade people that paradise is round the corner, and that if most of the disciples of neohedonistic mysticism were forthwith to give rein to their natural inclination for unlimited enjoyment there could be a paradise immediately. The anarcho-hedonist draws backing for his arguments from the subjective conviction that a situation suitable for a neohedonistic revolution has matured in industrialised countries.

p However, the long-established system of moral taboos obstructs the realisation of this Utopia’s imperatives. This hinders also the adequacy of experiencing enjoyment, limits free access to new spheres of enjoyment and prevents any unregulated pleasure-seeking.

p Anarcho-hedonism acknowledges that culture and morals were vital in the remote epoch of low labour productivity and limited intensity of association. But in modern society, which is founded on a formerly inconceivable level of labour productivity and high intensity of association, culture and morals have become fossilised dogmas, conservative survivals. It is these dogmas and survivals and not anybody’s economic domination or the machinery of power and suppression that comprise the main force of “ repressive society”. The sons and daughters of industrial 88 civilisation have been accustomed to tame rationalisation and compelled to subordinate their sensuality “voluntarily” to moral prescriptions and dead traditions in exchange for hopes, for guarantees of satiety and security. They have been forced to place duty above happiness, and labour above enjoyment and pleasure. As a result, socialised man is solidly adapted to alienated relations sanctified by productivity, rationalism and discipline. The mythology of anarcho-hedonism is full of normophobia, of anti-cultural zeal. It demands the release of natural instincts and the imagination from the oppression of culture and moral tutelage. It is alleged that social progress should necessarily be directed towards the long-past “golden age”, the moral vacuum and permissive society.

p However, any negation of norms inevitably leads to negation becoming a norm. This is what is happening to the mythology of anarcho-hedonism. The means of saving mankind suggested by it come forward as a variety of new norms of compulsion, of a new fear of “indecency”. The system of means of carrying out the programme tasks of this mythology is a loose group of directives, which cannot be qualified as other than anarcho-hedonism as far as the inter-related areas of behaviour and the organising elements of the ideal itself are concerned. To round off the picture let us at least cursorily consider the directives recruited by the ideal.

p Most frequently a group of directives is distinguished in the area of sex behaviour. Undeniably, appreciable changes have taken place in this area in our age. They are most fully expressed in the changes of the social status of women, although in bourgeois society there still are various forms of inequality of women and the need, to quote an American sociologist, for a “female rebellion against traditional sex roles and male sexism”.  [88•*  The European ( Christian) sex moral code, which is based on the patriarchal tradition, is undergoing considerable modifications. We are witnessing the crystallisation of Lenin’s forecast: “A 89 revolution in sex and marriage is approaching, corresponding to the proletarian revolution.”  [89•* 

p In view of capitalism’s general crisis the process of innovation in this area is burdened by innumerable deformations (family disorganisation, excessive eroticisation, liberalisation of sex relations, abundance of erotic literature, and so forth). In this contradictory historical situation anarcho-hedonism demands the fulfilment of an ideological super-task, namely, a moratorium on norms in sex relations, the legalisation of free love, of sex freedom. It tries to persuade people that these steps will not only spell out a full-blooded life but enable people to acquire an awareness of their own importance derived from involvement in society’s advance to the strategic expanses of new social changes of an allegedly breath-taking scale. In other words, what is taking place is a deliberate and totally immoral exploitation of the above-mentioned deformations, exploitation screened by ultra-Left verbiage that is as shameless as it is irresponsible.

p Of course, sex behaviour can be considered in isolation from the other vital activities of people and the essence of morality reduced to chastity solely from the positions of inveterate moral conservatism. As has been justifiably noted by British sociologists who have studied sex morals, the sex preoccupation of a segment of young people is due to the fact that they do not lead a constructive life. Their conflict is with consumer society, which in its denunciations of sex freedom is guided not so much by a concern for the purity of morals as by its desire to save moral conservatism with its demagoguery and “high tariff walls against alien notions”, with its joy that follows “the orgy of denunciation”.  [89•** 

p However, most of the disaffected young people are not opposed to marriage, to the duties of parenthood and to family life. They strive for the purity and equality of the sexes, seeking to surmount dual morals. They do not want “group sex”, “communal marriages”, “hippie-nudism”, “streaker-nudism”, sado-masochist and unisexual love, the 90 disappearance of the values of parenthood, justification of the newly-acquired promiscuity. They do not seek the break-up of obligations. They do not look for a frivolous attitude to intimate relations. They do not wish to give way to any impulse (albeit they sometimes blunder, use means that are inconsistent with their desired goal) under the guise of waging a revolutionary fight against hypocritical bourgeois decorum, Victorian culture and stratified society into which thev are provoked by the imperatives of anarcho-hedonism. Youth protests partially mirror the need for the burgeoning of individual love, which is only possible when there are indeed free sex relations, when personal relations are individualised, when these relations are unobscured by attendant and fettering considerations, when hate is surmounted. However, anarcho-hedonism demands the reduction of love to the fancies of eroticism, the depersonalisation and instability of sexual relations, the renunciation of love as a universally recognised value, a return to brute sexual behaviour.

p This situation requires additional study in the context of anarcho-hedonistic association. In the ideal we are examining there are demands that at first glance are antiindividualistically orientated, lor example, the demand for so-called collectivism. A positive collective is interpreted as an unofficial, unformalised and unstable association. What is meant actually is the herd. Its prototype is the idealised anti-community, the community of nomads. Its goals are sexual freedom and the realisation of an altruistic instinct. If we look through the self-advertising enveloping this sort of collectivism we shall see the demand for the legalisation of obscenity and sexual perversions of all kinds. At the back of this is the striving to assert a new attitude to perversions and experimentation, the argument being that in collective life the problem of sex acquires paramount significance and recognition is accorded only to enjoyment derived without selectivity or spiritual closeness, and the highest points are given to group satiation of worked-up desire.

p Collaterally, this sort of collective is designed to kill labour incentives and social activity. On the pretext that modern commercial civilisation exaggerates the outworn 91 values of labour, it calls for the desocialisation of the individual and opens the way to psychopathological behaviour and the cult of violence, creating unsolvable and tragic contradictions and training reinforcements for criminal elements, Right extremists and anarchoterrorists.

p In this pseudo-collective existence, in this “ladled-out consciousness" it requires very little effort to discard the fetters of responsibility and is subjectively simple to betray cultural and moral values. This “collectivism” involves rituals of “holy” libertinism that facilitates the destruction of the “antiquated” taboos. These rituals spring from certain elements of youth nihilistic sub-culture. We shall distinguish three groups of these elements.

p The first are elements of the given sub-culture, which fuse various irrational-mystical principles, ritualistic interpretations of culture and everything that is primitive. This gives rise to an attraction for archaic cultures such as ZenBuddhism and ancient orgiastic and phallic cults. Out of an assortment of such elements efforts are being made to create a new erotic culture, for the sake of which the collectivist of the anarcho-hedonistic school is already today renouncing traditional European culture. Simultaneously this signifies a renunciation of fundamental moral values contemptuously called “conventional morals”. The anarchocollectivist, with his claims to becoming a new “natural”, asocial man, attacks culture for its teaching of restraint in the satisfaction of instincts, of readiness to rest content with delayed and, therefore, allegedly diluted enjoyment. From his position of “civilised barbarity" this collectivist seeks to discredit all the social institutions of culture and its norms as synonyms of alienation and non-freedom. By his unfounded substitution of the cause and effect dependence between the social structure and culture, and also morals, he separates the changes in human activity from the changes in the circumstances of this activity, divorces the revolution in the make-up of the individual from revolution as the socio-economic and political reorganisation of society.

p Second, a ritualistic significance is imparted to some orientations of neo-avant-gardism. Every art is capable of 92 performing a hedonistic function. But by its nature aesthetic enjoyment is spiritual, although it may extend from katharsis to so-called relaxation that absorbs the earlier aroused excitement by negligible mental effort and moral experience. Ritualised by anarcho-hedonism, art descends from katharsis and relaxation to ecstasy. It endeavours to reduce aesthetic perception from the spiritual level to the level of psycho-physiological enjoyment, to the level of affectation, to a first signal system. Long exposure to this spiritually self-destroying “involving art" must help to erase traces of “dead culture" from the consciousness.  [92•*  It is only by stretching a point that in this dehumanising art one can discern a sort of negative reaction to the drabness, inexpressiveness and featurelessness of mass culture, which turns the individual into an anonymous and standard consumer, for it deepens the lack of individualism, assessing it not as a vice but as valour meriting elevation to the rank of an ideal.

p This art is expected to modify the obsolete balance of sensations, to bring to light new, unknown and extravagant spheres of enjoyment. It is expected to bring total emancipation to the consciousness of the individual, to bring inner release from the “sticky” embrace of culture and morals.

p The third group of “collectivism’s" rituals is linked with individual and group drug-addiction. It is not simply a matter of drug dependence, abuse of anti-fatigue drugs, of soporifics and tranquillisers (barbiturates, etc.), but of drug-addiction pure and simple. This concerns not its victims but its adepts. The use of traditional narcotics or 93 those that have been produced by the latest psycho- pharmacology pursues the aim of opening the sluice-gates to freedom of enjoyment and thus itself becoming intense enjoyment, an activator of eroticism. Naturally, in view of anarcho-hedonism’s evangelistic claims, both these unseemly aims are heavily screened by ultra-moral justifications. In group drug-addiction it finds a “new holiness”, an instrument for “collectivist” unity and universal love, a means of deposing bourgeois individualism: in the individual caught on these somnambulistic waves, not only the willingness but also the ability to identify himself with other human beings and generally regard himself as an individual are atrophied. The ability of the drug-addict to step easily across the moral bans relativised in advance is regarded as evidence of the revolutionary significance of mass drug-addiction, which thus gets the mission of bringing freedom into the whole of human culture.

p Such, in brief, is the content of anarcho-hedonism’s basic guidelines. By and large, the material premises of this ideal may be characterised as the fetishisation of the changes wrought in the correlation between labour and enjoyment under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution. The conflict between antagonistic classes is leading to dualism in the moral of asceticism and the moral of hedonism. Whereas the former proclaimed as morally worthy only what the individual must do regardless of the vacillations of his desire, the latter regards as valuable only what the individual desires, regardless of what he is obliged to do. This dualism is inevitable when labour is alienated, when labour is separated from and counterposed to enjoyment, when enjoyment mostly follows labour in time and in space. (For that reason, let us note in parenthesis, the elements, the “splashes” of anarcho-hedonism, of its specific attitude and cult, took shape by degrees and have a fairly long tradition in the history of anarchism and extreme individualism from antiquity to Marquis de Sade.) “The pleasures of all hitherto existing estates and classes had to be either childish, exhausting or crude, because they were always completely divorced from the vital activity, the real content of the life of the individuals, and more or less reduced to imparting an illusory content to a meaningless 94 activity.”  [94•*  This situation, in general outline, remains under modern capitalism as well, despite the rapid growth of social wealth, requirements and enjoyments.

p But mesmerised by the alienation of labour, the anarchohedonistic immoral consciousness continuously curses labour generally in any of its forms and manifestations. It imagines that the species essence of man is constantly negated in labour, that man was created and continues to be created by enjoyment outside labour, by trifling and aimless activity, and that the attainment of a state of irresponsible, morally uncontrolled enjoyment brings man into kinship with everything living. The “revolution”, with which the hopes pinned on this consciousness are linked, may without exaggeration be called an anti-labour revolution of social parasitism. This consciousness, which declares “let highly productive society do the paying”, cannot understand that as a mandatory condition of finding enjoyment and as a vital material basis of enjoyment, the individual’s capacity for pleasure takes shape precisely in labour—productive and non-productive. Creative labour is itself the highest enjoyment, free play of physical and intellectual forces, remaining purposeful, utilitarian activity. It is precisely here that an impetus is given to speeding up that evolution in the style of life which the Polish sociologist Bogdan Suchodolski formulated as a “quest by man of new attractions in life”.  [94•** 

p Further, it must be noted that anarcho-hedonism’s bent for integrating elements of diverse archaic cultures likewise rests on the reality of the increased cultural interaction fostered, in particular, by upheavals in the sphere of mass information. On the whole, the assimilation of the moral ideals and values that matured in preceding or coexistent but separated cultures is a progressive development provided, of course, this integration is selective and proceeds on the basis of progressive criteria.  [94•***  But anarcho- 95 hedonism adopts the stance of an apologist of all archaic cultures, frenziedly picking up what had been cast off by various reactionary ideas. The choice in favour of mysticism is, for its part, not only an understandable reaction to the general complication of the volume and structure of the fund of culture but also the result of distrust for the variety of rationalism flourishing in the modern bourgeois world, a distrust that has assumed the form of total cultural nihilism.

p As for “collectivism”, it is a perverted reaction to the dominance of bourgeois pseudo-collectivism and bureaucracy, to the accentuated normative character of bourgeois organisation. Under capitalism alienation grows steeply in huge industrial, managerial, educational and consumer organisations. The object of depersonalised suppression, manipulation and levelling looks for compensation and frequently finds a safety-valve in the sex “industry” and in herd “collectivism” which fosters that industry. The weakening of the traditional means of socialising young people with the help of the family, the church community and “local associations”, with the enhancement of the role of the mass media in the socialisation process, is making itself felt in the bourgeois world today. This system of information brims with material that depicts modern life as endless enjoyment and pleasure, stimulating anarchohedonistic behaviour and the corresponding views (that life is a carnival, the counterposing of labour to enjoyment, the encouragement of a Bohemian jargon, the worship of pathological cruelty, and so on).

p To close our examination of the material sources of the anarcho-hedonistie sub-mass consciousness, it must be emphasised that to some extent the ruling class (which, of course, takes the corresponding ideological and organisational steps in that direction) is interested in its dissemination and inlluence. However, to ascertain the social significance of anarcho-hedonism, it is far from enough to point to the correlation between this particular form of consumption and the market requirements of state-monopoly capitalism. It is quite apparent that the alleged antibourgeois character of anarcho-hedonism is illusory. But this illusoriness is not entirely bereft of content. The fact is 96 that in a limited sense the proclaimed aim is pursued seriously and with considerable vigour. But the actual target of its critical attacks is not the bourgeois spirit as such but the “classical forms" of bourgeois decorum and morals.

p These morals embrace a definite system of stereotype values, value orientations, ritualised forms of behaviour, motivations and sanctions of the bourgeoisie at an earlier, at any rate the pre-imperialist, stage of capitalism’s development. They took root and settled in the ascetic ideals of acquisition and accumulation and acquired the inertia of prejudices. The bourgeois system of morals is today moving to a new phase. This has given prominence to the question of the ways and means of destroying the fortifications of traditional, official bourgeois morals. From the standpoint of historicism these changes enable us to understand and assess the functions of anarcho-hedonism. It is quite evident that the ruling class would not have wished anarchoJiedonistic behaviour to acquire a mass character because consumer-coloured extremism harbours the threat of serious social disorganisation and cultural chaos. Besides, the models of such behaviour generally cannot become universal for they are adjusted much too closely to the styles of the youth sub-culture (in which, needless to say, there is still space for the further expansion of this behaviour). The problem lies in settling the conflict between the requirements of the economy of consumer society and the psychological barriers in the consciousness of the mass buyer, barriers reinforced by the ideals of classical bourgeois morals and which it is difficult to break down with the conventional means of market offensives. Anarchohedonism is designed precisely as the practical instrument for settling this collision.

p Moreover, it has the no less important function of diverting critically-minded young people from the revolutionary movement. The English poet Roy Fuller writes that the bourgeoisie deliberately allows for all-permissiveness in the mass art and in the sphere of mass information because sexual satisfaction weakens political disaffection. This function is facilitated by romanticism, transgressions of official morals, the attractiveness of impermissible pleasures, the illusion of involvement in the epoch, and the 97 non-ideologised clarity and ideological vagueness of anarcho-hedonism. It constantly seeks to benefit by the striving of young people for immediate action, by their antibourgeois feeling, by a false understanding on the part of a section of young people of the correlation between morality and revolutionariness.

Anarcho-hedonism has no features of anti-consumption and it does not call upon its supporters to achieve martyrdom or win the questionable “right” to wretchedness. It has no lasting hostility for social vanity and the ethics of business. It protects social Vanity against destructive criticism, keeps it in reserve for the future, shows a convenient way of directing the criticism of young people into a channel that does not jeopardise state-monopoly capitalism and indicates how to adapt the individual to the conditions of life in bourgeois society even at the price of destroying him through the acquisition of criminal tendencies. “ Revolutionaries" orientated on bourgeois consumer morals become “rascally businessmen" (Dostoyevsky), while the patterns of anarcho-hedonistic behaviour are quite easily integrated with mass culture.