>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