I he phrase 'development of human needs” echoes a position we have already noted: "Bv thus acting on the external world and changing it, [man] at the same time changes his own nature.” Human beings are self-mediating and historical; because we have no determinate nature at birth we are required to produce ourselves concretely over time.
Men have a history because they must produce their life. . . . Once a need is satisfied, which requires the action of satisfying and the acquisition of the instrument for this purpose, new needs arise. The production of new needs is the first historical act. .. .
The diverse shaping of material life is always dependent on needs already developed, and the production as well as satisfaction of these needs is itself a historical process not found with a sheep or a dog [emphasis added]. 52
Marx is not asserting that needs change only as the direct result of economic satisfaction, nor that the “instrument” of change is a material tool. He is speaking of our human self-production, an activity which is much larger in scope and more variegated than material production narrowly defined.
Most often, needs arise directly from production or from a state of affairs based on production. World trade turns almost entirely round the needs, not of individual consumption, but of production. Thus . . . does not the need for lawyers suppose a given civil law which is but the expression of a certain development of property, that is to say, of production [emphasis added]? 53
Law is also an instrument of our self-production, a way in which we mediate ourselves. Civil law is not merely an external institution. The conceps of rightful ownership, duty, contract, liability, etc., are aspects of our sense of ourselves as human beings. When Mill writes “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” 54 he is expressing the sense of bourgeois proprietorship that permeates our selfconsciousness. The idea that we possess our own mind, that we have sovereign property rights to its use, as we do to a material entity that belongs to us, is a historically peculiar notion. We create the institutions of law and we are, in turn, created through such institutions. We make ourselves into particular, determinate beings through the distinct form of our activity in the world.
For Marx, the basic human characteristic is our ability to transform our original nature by creating the objective world in which we acquire our specific nature. This position seems to me to be important and correct though it is obviously much too general as it stands. What is contained in this notion of “species-being” that makes intelligible the fact
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of human self-transformation? This problem requires a Marxist “psychology,” in order: (1) to enunciate the system of universal needs-— biological, social, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral—which we share in the process of our common labor in the world; and (2) to investigate the capacities in thought, language, self-reflection, and creativity through which we create and realize these needs. This whole enterprise must be kept historically specific and responsive to changing forms of the division of labor, and ideology. The insistence on the dialectic between abstract tendencies and their concrete manifestations is one of the primary contributions of a Marxist view of human nature to an adequate psychology and a viable political methodology.
The hope that must inform political activity rests on the conviction of the possible historical transformation of human need. The view that our society expresses the deepest stratum of human nature ends all movement toward a new life. On the first page of One-Dimensional Man the following assertion appears: “To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content” [emphasis added]. 55 If we conjoin with this view the additional proposition that modern technology is constantly better able to satisfy our wants—a position Marcuse accepts—we will have established the main lines of an argument that proves no socialist agency remains in contemporary capitalist society.
But everything depends on what view of human nature and its needs is postulated. If there is some fixed biological core of “want” whose satisfaction is the “concrete substance of freedom,” then increasing productivity will eventually satisfy our desire for freedom. But if “wants,” “freedom,” and “productivity” are aspects of a historical dialectic, their nature and meaning will change with history. Marcuse’s analysis obliterates Marx’s contention that “once a need is satisfied . .. new needs arise.” Marx insisted that since “our wants and pleasures have their origin in society ... we therefore measure them in relation to society.” 56
There is movement in history precisely because societies produce needs they cannot satisfy. Even the idea of physical subsistence has no fixed meaning. Some peoples have lived for centuries in the constant presence of toil and misery, while others have found in affluence and luxury the grounds of discontent and rebellion. Marcuse’s analysis reifies our despair. Marx points in a different direction:
Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants: but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in tfiis field can only consist in socialized man, the associated
producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces ot Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nevertheless remains a realm ot necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. 57
On the basis of a new mode of production a new form of freedom becomes possible. The material means exist for human beings to devote themselves to the realization of their nature. Our common human capacity to transform ourselves now becomes available as a power that can be cultivated for its own sake. Whether this possibility can be realized depends on whether we can elicit from each other “a need for selfrealization as an inner necessity.” If we persist in reified views of ourselves we shall never be in a position to test this possibility. The explanation of the facts of alienation and powerlessness that dominates works like One-Dimensional Man only reinforces the hegemony of the facts. Ironically, it produces an easy rest. Nothing can be done, nothing need be attempted. We can rest “content.”
The heart of Marx’s position is captured in the term “apropriation,” a notion both objective and subjective in its reference. While the Freudian bourgeois manipulates the external world to overcome tension and reinstate an earlier equilibrium, the species-being of whom Marx writes proceeds differently:
Man appropriates his manifold being in an all-inclusive way and thus as a whole man. All his human relations to the world—-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of his individuality . . . are in their objective action (their action in relation to the object) the appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality. 58
“The appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality”; die terms are reciprocal. As the object is given its meaning through social action, so is human nature. There are, of course, structures and parameters that define the limits of human transformation. Just as the external world is both obdurate and malleable, so is human nature. But the very idea of “limit” is a human construction. Its meaning varies from one period to another. The most obvious limit is “death,” but people die differently in different societies, just as they are born differently. The meaning of these universal biological acts is not a constant meaning. Marx wrote to Annenkov: “Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox which draws the plow.” 59 Neither is biology a human category. For just as “the way in which machinery is utilized is distinct from
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tiie machinery itself,” so the manner in which we utilize our “given” dispositions is totally different from the physical facts themselves.