Charles Brown wrote:
> When people find their basic "needs" fulfilled
> - and these themselves are very plastic - do they want less or more?
>
> &&&&&&&
>
> CB: First on the plasticity of needs: the idea of "need" is to refer to something that is relatively unplastic. It is a necessity, it is a limit within which we must live such as enough food not to starve. "Want" or "desire" is intended to refer to those things which are 'plastic". "Need" is intended to refer to more rigid requirements.
Charles, you're being sucked in and led where you do not need, and ought not desire, to go. "Needs," "necessities," whatever form part of the definition of the value of labor power, and the term is thus implicitly at the very heart of Marx's entire critique of political economy -- and Marx quite sensibly does not let himself be drawn into any endless haggling over definition. There is, he says at one point in *Capital* (Vol. 1) a "moral or historical" element in the value of labor power, and it is defined by the stuggle between capital and labor -- we are back again, then, to what are perhaps the single two most important propositions in Marx: His quotation from Faust (Im Anfang war die That) and his answer to the reporter's question, What Is?: Struggle. (Marx does note that it is in fact impossible to say what the minimum biological necessities for survival are. Attempting to define that would be a mug's game, and serious people should not concern themselves with it.)
There is a fine point here of some importance: Do we want to talk about "desire" or "desires"? The latter would be an empirical and historical investigation of some interest though not great theoretical importance. The former should be left to the theologians. The only respectable intellectual I know of who had any truck with it was William Blake, and it produced some good poetry. But then anti-semitism produced some good poetry.
Carrol