[lbo-talk] Left wing loathing for the working class

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Mar 26 06:45:22 PDT 2007


John Thornton says I do not understand Marx's argument about wants being generated socially. I beg to differ. What Marx is saying in the Grundrisse about wants is most definitely not, what John says 'objecting to the capitalist imperative to consume'. On the contrary, Marx thinks this is one of the positive sides of Capital, 'the great civilizing influence of capital' its tendency to develop the individual as a cultured being. John writes that under capitalism the 'desires' of the masses are 'manipulated by advertising imploring them to consume'.

Marx writes:

"likewise the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures [genussfähig], hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a condition of production founded on capital."

At the risk of annoying John by putting words in his mouth, it seems to me that you misread Marx as saying that the desires that people have under capitalism are in some sense, false (or inauthentic, or not real, or artificial), and will fall away in favour of true (or authentic, or real, or natural) needs. But that is most definitely not what he is saying. He does not criticise capitalism from an ideal standpoint outside of the system, from which one might be in a position to say that these desires are unreal, still less that they are excessive. The wants that people have under capitalism, he thinks are real, and more than that, that they arise out of the progressive side of capitalism.

His criticism falls principally on the *limits* that capital puts upon working class consumption, the reduction of the wage to the bare minimum necessary for the reproduction of the worker as a worker. And as Doug has argued here, those limitations upon working class consumption are still firmly in place.

In the elaboration of the argument in the third volume of capital, Marx criticises Capitalism for the *limits* it imposes upon growth, its tendency only to develop the productive forces as far as can be reconciled with a falling rate of profit.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list