Performing capitalism, performing need

This chapter explores the role of need in Marx's critique of political economy. Re-reading that critique as a subversive political intervention rather than as theoretical exposition, it highlights Marx's concern with the nature of economic categories. The problem he identified was that his opponents and rivals had conceptualised those categories in ways that had depoliticised them. One way they did so, moreover, was to smuggle naturalised conceptions of need into their accounts as timeless foundations, thereby legitimising the categories and relations of commercial society. Against that move, Marx insisted that needs are historically specific, socially constituted, and politically charged. Drawing out that conception, the chapter stages a dialogue between Marx and Judith Butler. Like Butler's analysis of gender, Marx's account treats need – and economic categories more generally – as performatives: arising through their repeated redeployment in everyday social practices, and impossible to reduce to any notionally external, given, or ‘natural’ reality. Probing two tensions between Marx's work and Butler's – concerning the body and the character of political agency – the chapter develops a distinctively Marxian conception of performativity centred on labour rather than discourse. It was from this vantage point, then, that Marx brought the radical political potential of need into view.