Wants and Needs: On Desire and Left Moralism

There is some confusion about wants and needs out there. This became clear to me when I watched the documentary “You Need This” at CPH DOX this spring. The film’s argument is one I am sympathetic to; the hyperconsumerism that drives contemporary capitalism is painfully destructive to the planet and to ourselves, and it should be stopped. Cool. But the articulation of this argument rests on a reductive dichotomy between wants and needs, which ultimately makes this message fall flat. Needs are framed as good things to be addressed. These are things like food, shelter, healthcare, community and environmental stability, etc. Wants, on the other hand, are positioned as trivial things, like the want for a Bugatti, or an infinity pool or a Labubu. The film argues that through economic dominance, marketing and lobbying, capitalists have manufactured wants that we don’t organically have for things we don’t need, and these manufactured wants are getting in the way of us dealing with the stuff that really matters. Thus, the film claims that something needs to be done to change this.

But this is not a great picture of what has happened. Yes, wants have been industrially manufactured, but this is not what gets in the way of meeting what the film calls our needs. It is the rapaciousness with which these wants and their objects are manufactured and the profits generated from these manufactured wants are not redistributed, that gets in the way of what we need. Indeed, as will be shown later on, manufacturing wants through social dynamics is pretty much the condition of being a person. While we may not like the wants being manufactured, we can not believe there was some pure being only driven by needs that we can or would wish to return to. This means that trying to activate political, social and economic change on the basis of what is presented in this film will never amount to anything because it doesn’t understand its audience or its object.

Why is this? Taking up this wants/needs dichotomy would mean that the actual entanglement of wants and needs will quickly derail any attempt to act on the film’s call for change. In short, if your film is about the way that capitalism has unleashed the destructive powers of the market and human greed by manufacturing wants that drive people to act in ways that allow them to feel like they might get what they now want, then it is important to pay attention to how this dynamic of power works rather than just moralise about it. Capitalism made the world the way that it is, not by asserting the necessity of making the world this way. It did so by making people want things that meant things needed to be like this for them to have a chance to get them. And if the aim is to undo this through a mass mobilisation comparable to the mass market mobilisation that got us here, you will have to engage with the same mechanism rather than dismiss it as ideological delusion. People have to want to change the world in order to do what is necessary to make that change happen.

In essence, what I am saying is very simple, very clear. Needs are conditional, and wants are unconditional. This means that while you could theoretically want anything, no matter how impossible, with the only limit being your imagination (a Kiwi unicorn butler, for example), your needs are only relevant to some goal you want that lies beyond them. Your needs are conditioned by your wants. You only need shelter, food, healthcare, community, etc., because you want to live with comfort and dignity. You only need the 80-hour-a-week consultancy job because you want the summer house, and you only need the summer house because you want to prove something to one or both parents, probably. You only need to attend the protest because you want something to change (and/or you want to affirm your identity within a community whose cultural capital you value).

When “You Need This” pits wants against needs, it is giving up ground on the thing in human life (and perhaps life more generally, but we can save that for another day) that makes things happen. It hasn’t actually removed wants from what it says needs to happen – that is structurally impossible – but it has recast wanting wants as the problem. Rather than pulling off what capitalism has done – manufacturing wants that feel like to the extent that they may as well be our own – the film has positioned the need to bring this system down as extrinsic to our corrupted wants, of which the film has told us to be suspicious. Thus , “You Need This” has made its message somewhat alienating to anyone not already convinced. It has made the want to see capitalism come to an end, akin to the command of a parent or teacher, telling the kids playing a cruel game that the fun is over and you need to eat your greens. But if you don’t actually have the power to make the kids stop, then they will keep playing. Similarly, if a voice of authority tells people that consumerism is wrong and should be stopped, but has no force with which to do so and doesn’t care to seduce them to want to stop, they won’t act to stop it.

This wants/needs confusion is everywhere on the left. I think this came about as an attempt to do is to make the business-as-usual politics of neoliberal capitalism seem trivial and insubstantial, and to position those who work to perpetuate the system as evil and cruel. Weirdly, it is kind of an anti-Marxist strategy. Marx was famously not moralistic about how capitalism functioned to exploit the majority to enrich the minority. In his analysis, this exploitation was a functional outcome of the imperatives of capital. If you have capital, you have to keep making more of it as fast and efficiently as possible, or another capitalist will take your capital for their own, forcing the unprofitable capitalist into the undesirable position of having to sell their labour power to survive like everyone else. By the same token, and despite his political preference for it, it was not a virtue of the working class that Marx argued it would tend toward revolution; it was simply a dialectical tendency of the contradictions inherent to capitalist production and social relations. So, it was not a matter of capitalists wanting exploitation and workers needing revolution; both were understood to do what was needed to address their interests; another way of saying their wants.

Somewhere along the way, though, this got twisted. Maybe in the following attempts to make Marxism “scientific” and thus a natural law rather than a lens for political-economic analysis. Idealism sneaking back into Marxist materialism. However, our understanding of political economy certainly was not helped as these economically progressive ways of understanding the world became entangled with more liberal and idealist ways of thinking that tried to ground social justice in the discourse of “inalienable rights”. A thorough genealogy of this confusion about wants and needs must still be performed. But whatever its cause, the way this all too stark distinction between wants and needs works now is as a shortcut political struggle and its discourses into moral categories in which those who address needs are good and those who indulge wants are bad. And while such stark contrasts have the advantage of apparent clarity, the drawback is that they make it harder to gain sympathy from anyone who has ever wanted something other than what has been traditionally defined as a need, which is everyone. The effect of this is not total. After all, there are a small number of people who consider themselves to be on the redistributive left, but even amongst them, you will from time to time hear the doubt expressed that the world they are fighting for might be without the pleasures of getting what you want.

A better word for want, in the sense that I am using it here, is desire because it is more readily objectified and more easily recognised as having an embodied feeling to it. There can be some confusion when talking about desire, that it might just pertain to sex, or other things that a church might label as an indulgence. But this is only true in the sense that we gain from psychoanalysis. That sense being that sex is not ever only about sex. And the same is true for those other indulgences. Taking sex as an example, it is about so much more than just the physical act. Or at least it is when it’s an actually pleasurable experience. Sex is about identity and power and connection and affection and discovery and meaning. So, to the extent that desire can be about sex, it is so only in the sense that it is about something else too. This constant deferral to something else is what characterises desire, and it is in this sense that the wants proper to desire are unconditional.

Desire, when it is allowed to flow, is an opening up of fantasy through actuality, which, in so doing, gives meaning, however fragile, to the chaotic torrent of reality. At a very basic level, without some amount of desire, we would not be able to construct our needs as such. If we were to purely act in response to the pleasure and pain we experience – eating, drinking, resting and fucking –, then we would not so much be meeting our needs as managing stimulation (indeed, this may be all we are doing anyway, but the extra steps of meaning making seem important as they are inherent to our situation). These things become needs only when they take us to what we want as an excessive unfolding of meaningful associations.

This gets us to what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write in Anti-Oedipus, “there is only desire and the social, and no thing else”. What we know as our needs have been produced by the material process of our desires – our excessive fantasies – always already becoming entangled in the social world. This is the situation of both wanting and needing. This is not to say the social and the desire are somehow separate from material realities. On the contrary, our desires emerge from these material realities and are what make these realities thinkable and knowable. This is why it is dangerous to dismiss wants as trivial things enjoyed only by the greedy and the evil. We can and must be critical of our wants in the concrete and, if possible, our desires as they are articulated, but we should not be critical of our having them as such in all their unreasonableness.

Capitalism has done and is doing a lot of violence to our desires. In addition to the material violence it enacts on people, which makes it more difficult for people to get what they need to live with dignity or, in many cases, live at all, capitalism has taken the capacity we have to inject our fantasies into actuality and made it fit into this economic systems structures and functions to serve its ends. And yet, at the same time that it has done this, it has been able to do so only by way of the very mechanism of desire and the social making reality what it is. The entity that has captured our desires is also a product of our desires. This is a tricky idea to grapple with. Read ungenerously, it could sound as if the claim is that the victims of exploitation and violence wanted their suffering. But this is not exactly the point. Desire and the social energised and organised the emergence of capitalism in relation to the historical unfolding of the environment and experience. Had anything been different, it could have been any other way.

This points to the ambivalence that desire is to be held in. And part of holding it in this ambivalence has to be refusing to reject it as the wants/needs moralism does. One of the abiding ideological images that capitalists deploy to dissuade the public from moving towards some kind of communism is one in which individuality, spontaneity, excess and enjoyment are subsumed into the state machine. Wants/needs moralism does this for them, sparing capitalism’s propagandists the expense of a marketing consultant. For all that there is to find fault with in projects like “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, “Left accelerations” or even “Abundance”, and there are severe problems with all of them, the power and appeal of these projects comes from the refusal they make to cede desire and excess to capital. Because without holding on to these things, without holding on to the infinite capacity of desire to drive us to rebuild the world as we want it, we won’t know what we need to do or have to make it an actuality.