<HTML>Since Yoshie has developed this sudden fondness for citing actual texts, it seems an appropriate time to point out that the discussion of scarcity, needs and Marx has had very little reference to actual texts of Marx, and that it might be well served by such references. In what is probably Marx's first musings on the subject of political economy, his _Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy_, the notion of needs plays a central conceptual role. Employing a rough historical sketch as the basis for his economic categories, Marx postulates a "state of savage barbarism" analogous to a state of nature in which man "produces no more than his immediate needs." (Penguin Marx Library, Volume 1, p. 274.) In contrast to this state, the economy marked by the introduction of exchange produces "beyond the needs of immediate possessions"; this surplus production operates as "a form of mediation by means of which it becomes possible to satisfy a need which does not find its objectification directly in one's own production, but in the production of another." (p. 274.) This comparison is particularly striking in its resemblance to Rousseau's concepts of the state of nature and civil society: Marx's state of 'savage barbarism', or the natural economy, is a world of self-reliance defined as immediate and direct, while his system of exchange, or the market economy, is characterized by mediation and objectification in another. Both Rousseau's and Marx's schema rely on what Derrida has called 'the metaphysics of the presence' to establish a natural standard of right by which all social relations are to be judged; Marx's vision of communism -- like Rousseau's social contract -- is an attempt to recapture in a new social form this original state of immediacy and directness. It is not a return to a 'natural economy' as such, but a 'back to the future' in which the essential elements of it -- its transparency, its immediacy and directness, its lack of 'false needs' -- are recaptured in a new form. In the _Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts_, Marx elaborates on the Rousseauian theme of the multiplication of needs: "Each person speculates on creating a new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him to make a new sacrifice, placing him in a new dependence and seducing him into a new kind of enjoyment and hence into economic ruin. Each attempts to establish over the other an alien power in the hope of thereby satisfying his own selfish needs. With the mass of objects grows the realm of alien powers to which man is subjected..." (p. 358.) In this passage -- and completely contrary to what James Heartfield would have us believe about Marx on the subject -- one can find Marx's equivalent of Rousseau's 'false' needs of civil society, as well as the link between those 'false' needs and the phenomenon of alienation. Driven by the exchange economy to forego production for his own needs in favour of another's needs, and what is more, to produce for new non-essential, 'false' needs of this other, Marx's man had created an 'alien power' which controls him. (p. 276.) The paradigmatic form of this alien power of the exchange economy is money: "the need for money is... the real need created by the modern economic system..."(p. 358.) Thus, we arrive at the world of consumer culture which started this entire discussion. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>