Herbert Marcuse’s differentiation of objective and subjective needs illustrates a major hole in the study of free markets and political economy, as well as the need for a new reactionary approach to economics that transcends the old socialist-capitalist dichotomy. One of the great arguments for the market and against central planning is that the market best fulfills the needs of individuals, as evidenced by the great wealth of Western nations in contrast to the old Communist East. This is not questionable; in terms of raw productivity and per capita GDP, the Western market system has surpassed any system in history at providing a high level of material wealth to its constituents. Marcuse points out, however, that there is a slight error in terminology with the prior fact. Markets do not react to the needs of individuals; markets react to the desires of individuals based on their acted-out purchasing preferences.
Marcuse’s philosophical anthropology is fundamentally flawed, which undermines the critique he is trying to make of the market system. He sees human nature as infinitely plastic, which entails that human needs are moldable by society, outside of physical needs of biological sustenance. In his essay, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” he attempts to sketch out a movement to realign subjectively felt need with an objective need for human liberation, wherein human psychology changes from materially-focused to politically-focused. Marcuse even embraces the word utopian to describe his project.
The critique in “Liberation from the Affluent Society” is not without merit, however. Instead, several basic points from the essay illustrate the way forward from the dead dichotomy of 20th century political economics and toward a new Economics of Need, wherein the economic structure fulfills the true needs of its citizens rather than their degenerate desires. The beginning of this path involves restoring a valid picture of man at the center of the economic system.
Human nature is fundamentally fixed. This should be taken as a generalistic statement, rather than a universal law of physics; change in human nature occurs on a scale which transcends the lives of political systems. Certainly, one could argue that the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution changed the human creature in some way relevant to political economy, but within the confines of a civilizational lifespan, human nature is unchanging. Political actors cannot expect to change the basic motivations and drives which impel humans toward their ends. They can only channel these motivations and drives toward eucivic outcomes. In other words, we dance with the one that brought us, the human beings that actually exist and not hypothetical “better” men.
Since we understand that human nature is fixed, the past serves as a valid dataset for understanding and interpreting these motivations and drives. The men of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were no different than modern men in their fundamental makeup, thus their examples and situations provide us valuable insight into alternative modes of social, political, and economic organization. From the past, we learn that the tragedy of human failure emerges out of the incongruity of needs and desires. Aristotle is fundamentally correct about the struggle between the rational mind which apprehends the actual needs of an individual and the sub-rational appetites which compel him toward alternative desires. The child desires ice cream when he needs meat. The man desires a promiscuous woman when he needs a chaste wife. The citizens desire ease when they need discipline. The ruler desires extravagance when he needs power.
Marcuse correctly illustrates the flaw in market ideologies, in that markets have no preference between providing false and true needs, responding only to the expressed desires of the market agents. Thus, given enough demand, the market will gladly provide its constituents with the suicide and slavery that they demand. It is for this reason that there is never any such economy as a “pure” market economy. The ruling class always intervenes in the market for its own interests, to ensure that its desires predominate over the desires of the vastly numerically superior masses. A wise ruling class will intervene in the market in such a way as to ensure the production of goods and services demanded by the masses will also serve the ultimate ends of the ruling class’s power.
Thus, in the modern Managerial system, the mass-production of identical, consumable goods serves the interests of the ruling class by impoverishing the middle class, yoking the masses in the bonds of usurious consumer debt, and drugging them from a consciousness of their own exploitation. The globalization of the economy serves to flush out regional styles, tastes, and cultures in favor of an international monoculture which is easier to manipulate through the usage of mass media propaganda, which also serves itself as a consumer good catering to the desires of the masses. Thus, the strength of the modern system is that it is able to coordinate the satiation of individual desires with the interests of the ruling class without major disruptions to the market.
This coordination occurs through the programming of desires in individuals which match the interests of the ruling class. Through command of the avenues of communications, the ruling class is able to manipulate and influence the perceived status of various objects of desire, thus tapping into the innate human tendency to collectively construct the bulk of their perceived needs. Recall Adam Smith’s famous story about leather shoes; leather shoes were not a need when it was common to wear wooden shoes, but when wooden shoes became associated with poverty and shamefulness, it became a perceived need for individuals to secure leather shoes. Aside from basic survival needs, the vast majority of human desires are socially constructed in this manner, from the context of the society in which they live. Therefore, Marcuse argues that to change the desires of a population, one must first change their values.
Given that he is an anarchist interested in destruction, he proposes a trans-valuation of all values, basically an inversion of the bourgeois virtue system, making right into wrong and wrong into right. This trans-valued moral world is the world of today, in which it is good to be deviant and bad to be normal. This trans-valuated system serves the interests of the ruling class by destroying traditional limits on consumerism, emphasizing an extremely high time preference over the low-time-preference moral systems of the past, and breaking down communities of values which served as repositories of social capital inaccessible to the elite. In other words, Marcuse won everything he desired, and yet only got more of the system he opposed.
What, then, is the positive prescription for an Economics of Need? First, there is the question of values. One response to the Marcusian system of today is to trans-value the trans-valuated values. Trans-valuation is an act of destruction, however, not an act of construction. The urge to trans-value the trans-valuated is a nihilistic spiral into the value-less world of the Last Man. The response to destruction is rebuilding. The response to trans-valuation is reevaluation. Certainly, it is impossible to simply restore the old bourgeois moral system as it was. Their system rested on the fact that bourgeois values promoted bourgeois interests, and without a bourgeois ruling class they become nothing more than an ossified moral dogma.
A reevaluation of values requires a moral, aesthetic, and scientific exploration into a value system appropriate to modern society and the new ruling class which will recover the world from the Marcusians. This is one of the reasons that the various “redpills” are central to the reconstruction of a valid social science. Reconstructed values must conform to reality as it exists today, neither to utopian desires, nor romantic nostalgia. Likewise, a central part of Marcuse’s trans-valuation was the destruction of the concept of beauty which oriented individuals away from the material world and toward things of transcendent value. A restoration of values is incomplete without a restoration of art and aesthetics; indeed, perhaps aesthetics is a necessary prerequisite to a restored morality. It is natural for man to pursue what is beautiful, thus it is right that moral values should be beautiful.
Secondly, given a restored value system, how will those values be imparted to the masses? Marcuse’s solution is the capture of education, which will then permit the educators to indoctrinate the future elites into his value system. The benefit of such a system is that is avoids top-down coercion of the type which inspires counter-movements by portraying the new value system as high status. Government-sponsored morality programs tend toward inefficiency, from Octavian Augustus’s laws against adultery to today. The efficient means of value-inculcation is to make the masses police themselves against violations of the moral law, which is done effectively by the current system. The deep flaw of the modern system is found in Marcuse’s error; by assuming that human nature is infinitely plastic, it permits the creation of values which conflict with reality. Nature itself is a teacher of moral values and comes with its own set of benefits and punishments. Where Marcuse’s trans-valuated values conflict with the objective, natural needs of human beings, Nature steps in with disciplinary action.
Thus, a central need of the current ruling class is to mitigate the natural discipline faced by its adherents who pursue their subjective needs or desires at the expense of their objective needs. It supplies antidepressants and birth control to women, heroin to the rural poor, and copious entertainment and material goods to compensate for the fact that individuals are living lives objectively inferior to their grandparents, as in Tyler Cowen’s favelas with free internet. So long as the negative consequences of their actions can be ignored, the Marcusian virtue system is safe. Hence, the primary goal of any reactionary movement should be to strip the elite of the ability to shield the masses in this way. There must be no assistance of any form for those who suffer from the consequences of adhering to the trans-valuated values, who must be forced to suffer all the consequences of their adherence to liberalism in full.
Part of this will naturally occur when the welfare state reaches critical mass and implodes under the accumulated debt of the Boomer generation. Just as the skilled working and middle classes turned against classical liberalism when bourgeois virtues lead to actual suffering during the Great Depression, the modern upper-middle will quickly turn against their current masters when they do the “right thing,” play by the rules, and still find themselves suffering from unaffordable housing, spiraling debt (consumer and educational), and an inability to prevent themselves from falling into the working poor. A reactionary system must be in place which provides a moral system which explains their suffering in terms of the neoliberal Managerial system and provides a means out of their situation through loyalty to the new ruling class and rejection of the Marcusian anti-moral system. The loyalty of the upper-middle class, who hold the positions in society which permit the system to function, places the means to a social value restoration in the hands of the new ruling class through social forces instead of physical compulsion. Marcuse began with the teachers and the technocrats. This is a good place to start from.
Lastly, the Economics of Need must find a way to provide the actual needs of its constituents, that is, the goods which permit and inspire a eucivic lifestyle in conformity with Nature’s law. Assuming that the new ruling class and its new Outer Party members are well-educated and desire what is good, there should be minimal disruption of the market system. However, resting on this assumption is among the most common flaws in political economy dating all the way to Aristotle.
Even granting that moral laws in conformity with Nature will provide a positive feedback loop, as Nature itself grants benefits to those who adhere, it is human nature to be transgressive and immoral. Thus, some market intervention is necessary and proper in a eucivic economic system. The old dichotomy of capitalism and socialism, however, must be buried and left for dead. There is no more insight to be gained from idealist systems which only operate given caveats and “all other things being equal”. The economic questions of the future are questions of which policies promote eucivic outcomes in practice and which do not, which policies serve the actual needs of the new ruling class and the people, and which policies only serve dyscivic desires and passions. What are the resources that the new ruling class require to maintain their position, and what is the best means to acquire them from society? How can the remainder of society’s resources be distributed in order to maximize the congruity between the desires of the masses and their eucivic needs?
The efficiency of the economic system is a positive good. It is best if the provisioning of the desires of the masses also serves to provision the needs of the ruling class. Just as the current ruling class must invest a goodly portion of their national production power in the maintenance of their power, the new ruling class must also be willing to sacrifice market efficiency in the pursuit of overall system stability and the promotion of a self-sustaining socio-political system. Education must be supplemented by authority, and the power of the state used as a tool when Nature’s discipline and market forces fail to protect the integrity of society. The Economics of Need must transcend freedom versus control, because it must embrace freedom and control. Just as the failure of the rule of law has demonstrated, politics cannot be run by systems and “checks and balances” alone. Nothing substitutes for the governing judgment of a prince, exercising situational knowledge to deal with marginal cases through human intelligence. This is the missing link of an Economics of Need: market forces at the center, surrounded by human knowledge at the fringes, adapting economics for the truly human end of the well-lived life in conformity with Nature and Nature’s God.