Barry:'Abolishing want' is actually inconsistent with Marx's own explanation of 'historically developed social needs,'* in which he explains the process whereby the luxuries of yesterday become the necessities of tomorrow.
" Need is culturally assigned---therefore it is the province of psychology, not more technology, and certainly not more political 'solutions' based on more technology (to come)."
bill
To continue in this vein, citing from a user-group post quoting Avineri's summary of Marx's position:
History is not only the story of the satisfaction of human needs but also the story of their emergence and development. Whereas animal needs are constant and determined by nature, man's needs are social and historical, i.e., determined in the last resort by man himself. Marx denies that each generation's consciousness of its own needs is a mechanistic, automatic response of the human consciousness to merely material stimuli. Man's consciousness of his own needs is a product of his historical development and attests to the cultural values achieved by preceding generations.
Avineri argues that "since historical development enriched human wants,
they cannot be measured without first being related to the modes of
production which create them. From such a point of view class war brutally demonstrates that the satisfaction of wants lags behind the expectations arising out of social organizations."
Still, it does seem as if two different needs are being described here - basic animal needs which are ahistorical and "determined by nature", and those which are a product of social, economic, and cultural overlay. The particular needs of those populations residing on garbage dumps outside metropolitan areas such as Cairo or Manilla are extraneous and irrelevant to the dominant culture. Indeed, there are over 1.4 billion on the planet living in abject poverty, disengaged from the larger culture and the economic gears of production. Their needs are not created by their environment which is in fact quite hostile to their being satisfied but biologically self generated.
Nevertheless, those needs that have evolved historically under capitalism's mode of production might be segregated into three forms.
1. Those which result in self-estrangement. (the working class)
2. Those which are manufactured by and systemic to the ruling class.
3. Those which are an existential expression and are self-affirming.
The first sort is well described by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in which he describes three forms of alienation experienced by the wage worker's relation to the productive engine of society. (The worker, paid a fraction of the product's worth, has no control over the end product or its distribution, he/she is forced into this position under threat of starvation, and finally, unlike other animals that are "at one with it's life activity", the human worker is socially estranged, being forced to live only as a means by which capital and its manifestation is created of which he has no share.
(Marx writes about labor: "Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague")*
The secondary set of wants (and needs) of the "rentier" class are different. Their labor is less alienated in that they have control of the production and distribution of their "labor".
To quote once again from a poster from the user-group:
"…by the 1930s the world economy reached a point where it needed to manufacture needs and desires and raise the level of consumption so that the ruling class could continue accumulating capital. The system had reached a point where its appetites exceeded the appetites of the people relevant to capital in the demand domain: the consumer. So
while the level of historical development had created the need for people to own a car, it had not created the need for people to buy a new car every year. In the 1930s, and this was firmly in place by the 1950s, a whole industry had developed that functioned to help the capitalist class *realize* the surplus value the high level of production forces made possible: public relations and the ideology consumerism. The wants and needs that are generated and engendered in this context are not organic but manufactured."
Well, this post is already too long, but I hope to get to the third expression of "need" and "want" as it may touch on some of the psychological manifestations of the behavioral approach (though I'm still not entirely happy with clinical sounding phrases such as "strength of behavior" and "schedules of reinforcement" which seem kind of...well bloodless. I do agree however that 'working toward' something may indeed become potentially as important as the goal'.
bill
*quotes from Radical Psychology edited by Phil Brown p.197
