Agnes Heller and Ivan Illich on the Structure of Needs

In the 1970s need theory has seen a further development in the work of three significant thinkers, all of whom qualify as critical theorists in a broad sense, but each of whom interprets the concept of needs as it has been developed by Marx and his successors in such a way as to redress some of the revisionist aspects, in particular, the doctrine of true and false needs. These are Ivan Illich, whose Tools for Conviviality (1973) and Toward a History of Needs (1978) are directly relevant; Agnes Heller, whose The Theory of Need in Marx appeared first in German in 1974 and in English in 1976; and William Leiss, author of The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities (1976). All three thinkers see the problem of needs and commodities as the matrix of the capitalist system, challenging as a chimera the old assumption of political economy, that the market system can automatically diagnose and meet people’s needs. 1 Nevertheless, of the three, only Ivan Illich retains the notion of true and false needs in any recognisable form which Heller and Leiss specifically renounce. (Heller argues that Marx did not subscribe to such a distinction, although he was the first to discover the concept of manipulated needs.) All three are concerned with the problems of modern society which have been the focus of critical thinkers since Marcuse: the unsatisfactoriness of a consumer-oriented society, its shortfall in terms of individual satisfaction, and its damaging social consequences. In each case, the analysis of the problem by the three thinkers is more or less Marxist. Agnes Heller proceeds by a very careful textual analysis of the concept of needs in Marx and her own conclusions on the problem are to some extent concealed in her reinterpretation, although at crucial points she differentiates her view from that of Marx. Ivan Illich, by contrast, tackles head on the problems of modern industrial society and, in particular, the ecological and cultural ramifications of a high technology and consumer-oriented economy. His work is Marxist to the extent that he employs Marxist evaluative categories: use value, self-fulfilment of the individual, self-realisation of the species, the role of community, and so on, although he by no means advocates classical Marxist solutions. The same may be said of Leiss’s work. In all three thinkers, the notions of revolution, class, the privileged role of the proletariat, class consciousness, are significantly absent. In the case of Leiss, a veiled criticism of Marx is implied to the extent that Marx also advocated economic growth, the conquest of nature and an economy of abundance as prerequisites for a society of the future geared to the satisfaction of human needs. While Heller continues to subscribe to the notion of socialism as an economy of abundance, but true wealth as free time, Leiss and Illich, preoccupied with the energy crisis and the environmental aftermath of postwar profligate consumption, reject the model of socialism as a ‘saturation’ economy (Heller’s term for Marx’s model) favouring economic contraction rather than economic growth and discrediting the whole notion of need-satisfaction as a duty-worthy social goal.