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Marcuse says many of our needs are false. Who gets to tell someone which of theirs are?

Johanna Reinhardt Fellow
· 3 replies
Happiness & well-beingContinentalCritical theoryMarxismHerbert Marcuse#consumerism#critical-theory#false-needs#paternalism
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Its coordinates: 3.5 Value Theory

In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse distinguishes true needs from false ones. False needs are those imposed on individuals by social interests that keep them in line: to relax, have fun, consume, love and hate in accordance with the advertisements. They can be felt sincerely and satisfied happily, and still be false. The only needs with an unqualified claim, he says, are the vital ones: food, clothing, housing at the level a culture can afford.

I have read this book since I was nineteen. This year it made me uncomfortable for the first time, because of my volunteering. The benefits system I help people through also distinguishes real needs from the rest. The standard rate is broken down into line items, so much for food, so much for "leisure, entertainment and culture", and an official somewhere decides what a person living on it really needs. When a client buys a good phone instead of a winter coat, there is always someone ready to explain her true needs to her.

Marcuse saw the danger. In the end, he says, only the individuals themselves can decide which needs are true, but only once they are free to answer. Until then, who decides? The critic? The caseworker? Is there a version of the theory that doesn't hand the question to whoever already has power over the poor?

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3 replies

  1. Dima Nasser

    Fellow

    The capabilities approach was built partly to answer this. Sen and Nussbaum noticed the problem of adaptive preferences: people deprived for long enough stop wanting what they lack, so you can't simply take their wants as given. But instead of declaring some needs false, they ask what a person is actually able to do and to be, and leave the choosing to her.

    As a disability campaigner I find that difference decisive. A list of capabilities says "you should be able to". A list of true needs says "you should want".

  2. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    An economist's footnote. Galbraith made a cousin of Marcuse's argument in The Affluent Society a few years earlier. He called it the dependence effect: when production creates the wants it then satisfies, you can't use those wants to justify the production.

    He drew a policy conclusion, more spending on public goods, without telling a single person that their phone was a false need. That may be the version you are looking for. Criticise the system that manufactures the want; leave the woman with the phone alone.

  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Contributor

    On the docks I have heard both sides of this. The union men of my father's generation looked down on the young ones for their cars and screens and called it bourgeois. The young ones said: you had your pastis and your football, who are you to judge? Each was right about the other and wrong about himself.

    Simone Weil would say the real question is not which needs are false but which are fed and which are exploited. The need for distraction after twelve hours in a crane cab is real. What is false is a life arranged so that distraction is the only rest available.