Re: Re: Re: needs

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 12/05/00 10:30AM >>>
Michael P. wrote:
>So, Marx, somewhere in the Grundrisse ... uses newspapers, I believe, as
>an example of a new need.  He never read a modern US newspaper and thus
>believed that they could be sources of information and education.

It  makes more sense to say that newspapers were a new _product_, which may
or may not be good. Then, social or economic or psychological conditions
might then turn it into a need (something that is necessary to civilized
human life).

(((((((((((

CB: Yes, use-values, new use-values.

((((((((((


What I found in the GRUNDRISSE was: > The workers should save enough [say
the political economists] at the times when business is good to be able
more or less to live in the bad times, to endure short time or the lowering
of wages. (The wage would then fall even lower.) That is, the demand that
they should always hold to a minimum of life's pleasures and make crises
easier to bear for the capitalists etc. Maintain themselves as pure
labouring machines and as far as possible pay their own wear and tear.
Quite apart from the sheer brutalization to which this would lead -- and
such a brutalization itself would make it impossible even to strive for
wealth in general form, as money, stockpiled money -- (and the worker's
participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for
his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating
his children, developing his taste etc., his only share of civilization
which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically only possible by
widening the sphere of his pleasures at the times when business is good,
where saving is to a certain degree possible), [apart from this,] he would,
if he saved his money in a properly ascetic manner and thus heaped up
premiums for the lumpenproletariat, pickpockets etc., who would increase in
proportion with the demand, he could conserve savings -- if they surpass
the piggy-bank amounts of the official savings banks, which pay him a
minimum of interest, so that the capitalists can strike high interest rates
out of his savings, or the state eats them up, thereby merely increasing
the power of his enemies and his own dependence -- conserve his savings and
make them fruitful only by putting them into banks etc., so that,
afterwards, in times of crisis he loses his deposits, after having in times
of prosperity foregone all life's pleasures in order to increase the power
of capital; thus has saved in every way for capital, not for himself.  <

This looks to me as if Marx didn't use the word "needs" in this context,
but instead referred to "higher cultural satisfactions." However, I can
imagine that the newspapers could be incorporated as part of what he later
called the social and historical component of subsistence requirements
(needs). But it's not the _needs_ which are (or can be) good, so that
"entrepreneurs" should be lauded for creating them. It's the goods themselves.





If I remember Bob Rowthorn's essay on Marx's theory of wages correctly,
it's the working class' struggle that converts things from being mere goods
or luxuries into part of working-class subsistence needs. In that case,
it's not the entrepreneurs who should be praised for "creating needs" as
much as the working class itself.  They can see it as a victory.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine