Scarcity

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Wed Apr 11 08:52:31 PDT 2001


In message <20010411095020.A8805 at panix.com>, Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> writes, quoting Marx, and interpreting him as follows:


>In effect, then, technology, in presenting us with new
>things, satisfies no deep longing or important desire,
>generally speaking. We do not miss what we never had.
>Before we can experience the deep desire, we must first
>become addicted to the substance which occasions it. Or
>as Uncle Karl was just quoted in this mailing list,

But as I read it Marx thought that the tendency for capitalism to engender new wants, substituting social needs for natural ones, was a good thing, something he called, without irony, the civilising aspect of capitalist society, the creation of the many sided-individual.

That is quite different from the moral critique of consumerism, as one finds in Veblen or Packard, to the effect that these wants are artificial *and therefore false*. For Marx, by contrast, the creation of new needs is artificial and also positive. -- James Heartfield



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list