I know this thread is keenest over at Pen-L, but I can't get there from here, so you lot can wear my indignation at all this toing and froing about the importance of producing new 'needs'.
Need and desire are a long way from each other. No desire matters a jot until needs are met. We need food, water, clothes, and shelter. If we're sick, we need medicine. If we're little, we need looking after. All else we desire. And, our physical animal needs taken care of, the next thing we need is for our human potential to be realised. And for that, we need: a socialisation that affords a necessarily socially embedded personal autonomy (more easily said than done, but you take my point); the education to divulge enough for us to identify our interests, proclivities and aptitudes; and the free time to explore and develop them, and thus ourselves.
Romantic love does not equal bulimia (it takes a very particular complex of relations and meanings to get from a to b), and the search for satisfaction is just the way we are. We will always want something more than or other than what we have. I don't care if the Althussarians and Foucauldians amongst you wanna call that crass theoretical humanism or if the anthropologically inclined Marxists amongst you wanna claim we only want stuff coz capitalism has trained us to want it (I hold we want to own it individually under capitalism, whereas we might merely desire access to it under another system - a big difference).
Humans invariably want it different than it is. That's what makes history. Mebbe that's what Marx meant when he responded to the journo's question 'What is?' with the single word 'struggle'. We're always gonna be struggling for something, because we are strugglers by definition - always able to imagine, and hence pursue, an alternative state of affairs.
Whatever. First things first, I reckon. When you got kiddies dying for want of a few oats or a pint of clean water, you got the most basic obscenity happening - worthy of as radical a response as it takes. The single irrevocable precondition for humanity is to allocate its resources such that adequate health is ensured for humans' bodies. Any system which doesn't look to that as a matter of absolute priority, is fundamentally inhuman (precisely because it neglects a human community's most basic object: the human subject). Then we can work on Yoshie's bulimia and my smoking (conditions of unhealth actually produced by using up resources we shouldn't be allowed to squander whilst others are unhealthy through deprivation - a hypocritical stance for me, perhaps, as I suck at my ciggie, but then it's hard not to play one's part in this hopeless system - we're all of us yoked under capital's whip one way or another).
And then we can talk about producing new wants - as if they need deliberately to be produced for us ...
Cheers, Rob.