MARX ON NEED AND TECHNOLOGY

Technology, both as a concept and as a phenomenon, has received growing attention for more than a century. The notion of need has most often been treated as a topic of ethics but both are fundamental to social theory and each is fraught with implications for the other. In what follows I shall develop what Marx had to say on these topics and I shall consider in particular two twentieth century Marxian thinkers, Agnes Heller and Cost's Axelos.

It will be my argument that the two notions are central to Marx' s ideas of human nature and of history but that his myopic fixation on humanity, and his refusal to see nature as anything more than an object for humanity, constitutes the critical failing of his view. Man is being of history, and history, in its turn, is being of man. The two are locked in an embrace; they circumnavigate the dance floor of the world - each wondering if the other is leading or following. It is the fundamental tension in Marx: man makes history while history makes Man. They only appear to have eyes for each other.

Beyond them, as far as Marxian thought is concerned, there seems to be nothing. What created this human, historical world?   What separates it as distinctively human and historical' Enter need and technology. 'As everything natural has to have its beginning, says Marx, man too has his act of origin--history... a conscious, self transcending act of origin. (MSS-1182)

Nowhere does Marx develop a more sustained account of the materialist view of history than in The German Ideology. There he gives us a first premise, two first historical acts, a second fundamental point and a third circumstance which collectively explicate this origin. He starts with "the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history, the premise namely that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to 'make history'.... The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself... .The second fundamental point, he continues, is that as soon as a need is satisfied (which implies the action of satisfying, and the acquisition of an instrument), new needs are made; and this production of new needs is the first historical act. (GIG-16-17)

So we have a peculiar first act. It is the production that satisfies those needs which Marx elsewhere terms natural or necessary. The second first act is another act of production, not of goods, but of new needs. As Heller points out, 'In so far as we create tools to satisfy our needs, the need for tools is already a new need, different from animal need.' (H-41)

But the significance goes beyond even the drastic introduction of technos into, and against, nature-for the ability to produce these new needs is itself radically new. Other animals produce a cycle of needs; each fulfilment is itself depleted and requires fulfilling again.

Only humans produce a progression of needs seemingly without limits. The object of man' s needs - writ large - is not merely in nature but is nature; and for Marx the effort to fulfill needs falls entirely to the lot of economic man. 'The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour. (Mss-145)

Agnes Heller, in her The Theory of Need in Marx, analyses need as a fundamental concept for the Marxian enterprise - as indeed, it would have to be for any humanistic social philosophy. She points out that, according to Marx, among the accomplishments of capitalism is '... the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs... (from Grundrisse in H-47) Heller notes the oft remarked ambiguity in Marx as to whether the process of history follows from a virtual law or whether it depends upon an element of human will, of conscious action.

In one of those seeming paradoxes that are none to rare in the universe of dialectic, she insists nonetheless that the revolution would be necessary because capitalism necessarily creates such needs; she does not mention the suppressed premise: that humans will necessarily react to them in such a way as to perpetuate the revolution. She quotes the Marx of the Manuscripts to testify for her analysis: Theory is actualized in a people only insofar as it actualizes their needs... .A deep-going revolution can only be a revolution in basic needs. (H-88)

One need, of course, is revolutionary per se - the need to over-come capitalist alienation; and this Heller describes, in a phrase from the Grundrisse, as creating a consciousness that 'exceeds its bounds. (H-95) It is generally accepted in Marxist scholarship that Marx maintained that nowhere and at no time has unalienated humanity yet existed.

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, did theorize a primitive, unalienated man; civilization was the negation of this condition, and the revolutionary negation of this negation will bring humankind back to freedom from alienation on a higher more developed plane.  But, (m)en are as they are manifested, says Kostas Axelos, such is Marx's idea, but their manifestation is alienation. Where then is their being' (A-134) Indeed, in at least one place, Marx seems to directly confirm this notion: ... all human activity hitherto has been labour-that is, industry-activity estranged from itself. (Mss,-142) This idea of the unalienated man whom no one has ever seen or experienced is, Axelos claims, one of Marx' s metaphysical notions-an unkinder description, in the Marxist lexicon, but essentially no different, than Heller' s characterization of the closely related idea of the man 'rich in need as 'philosophical. We started this inquiry with a two-pronged origin of humankind: human need and human production. If Heller zeroes in on the first, Axelos finds in the second the secret to Marxian thought. 'The use and the making of tools and the correlative development of productive forces ad instruments of production form the real guiding clue to the historical becoming of mankind...

(A-77) Thus, history '... becomes the history of the development of technique... it is... the world of human activity. (A-27) Axelos even asserts that Marx accepts the Benjamin Franklin definition of man as a tool-using animal.

Heller, not responding to Axelos, denies this and cites a footnote in Capital in which Marx does seem to discuss Franklin's characterization as just typical of a Yankee. (C-358)

However, in an earlier passage in the same work, he refers to this characterization in a way that indicates his support for Franklin-and Axelos. 'The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making animal. (C-200; my emphasis) In any case, Axelos is correct that tool use and technology generally must be, at least, a, if not the, defining trait of human.

Marx himself, as we have seen, traces the origin of humans and history to the first act of production-and human production means the use of tools. Indeed, Axelos tells us that, in Marx' s thought, even more than the development of productive forces it is, let us call it, technological development that counts first. He then, in substantiation, goes on to quote the well known passage in The Poverty of Philosophy: The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. (A-293)

Marx makes the fundamental cleavage in the division of labour between material and mental, but the distinction cannot be drawn with precision or cogency. What is basically at issue is the position of thought or 'mental conceptions'  in relation to a primary technos which governs the distinctively human interchange with nature. If anything, thought 'production' must be more primary - not less - than the material output that proceeds from and is guided in accordance with the thought. This is a clear import of Marx' s own well known comment about architects and bees: what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure In imagination before he erects it in reality.

At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. (C-198) In his discussion of labour in Capital, Marx asserts that a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour, in addition to those things that are used for directly transferring labour to its subject... all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour process. These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it is either impossible for it to take place at all, or possible only to a partial extent.

(C-200-201) Though Axelos starts off on the second of our two legs of humankind, he arrives eventually at a place similar to Heller' s-as would be expected if these two factors are locked in a dialectical dance. What they produce and the way they produce it determine men. The satisfaction of needs, which is the aim of work, never comes to an end. 'Primary' needs, once satisfied, engender (produce) new needs that in turn demand satisfaction and so on. Natural needs and human, social labour develop dialectically and progressively, and their ultimate limit is beyond seeing. (A-54) One smells the aroma of Heller' s consciousness that exceeds its bounds; and indeed, a consciousness that continually did so would lead exactly to a historical limit beyond seeing. It is a mist shrouded vortex, and, as one squints into it, one begins to wonder whether there is anything here which satisfies a perennial human need-the sense that there is some point to it all.

Alienation as a heretofore constant condition of historical man and the existence of this complex techno-culture as a response to need which inaugurated history are starting to look suspiciously co-existensive. One wonders if the notion of an insufficient or imperfect actualization does not bear some generic relation to the idea of alienation. Man fully actualized would constitute the end of alienation and a real end to 'pre-history. Presumably, it would amount to the inauguration of a god like man. Did not the Philosopher claim that the unmoved mover was, of necessity, pure act' But I am on the wrong track here for there surely is no fixed Aristotelian essence allowed. The human nature that delineated potential is itself in process changing and, perhaps, developing. We appear to be verging upon a specifying trait of humans as the insatiable animal, The dialectic of needs and technique does indeed stretch beyond seeing, as well as beyond the possibility of calculating the consequences. As with many scenarios, this one can be tinted as a rosy hue or one greyer and grimmer.

Axelos argues-plausibly enough - that inherent in the notion of a technologically driven history is the complete  'technification of nature. Contemporary events reveal this as an implausible destiny, as a one way ticket to the end of both prehistory and post-history. As Axelos also points out, Marx is not interested in ontology beyond the scope of historical reality. He rivets his eye with tunnel vision on history; and he sees no physics or cosmos beyond humanity, not even the possibility of a reality not already graced with the imprint of the subject.

Marx adopts a sort of Kantianism with a practical, rather than theoretical, twist. Any part of the world not engaged by man is nothing for him; and any part that is so engaged is humanized, is no longer nature-in-itself but nature-for-man. Axelos wonders whether technique itself might not be alienating. Humanity has ever been unalienated. It originated with technique-culture or, at least, technique in conjunction with need, but this latter was originally a purely biological, not a specifically human, factor. Hence the existence of humanity, alienation and technique are all coextensive. The tread of all alienated history is technique, not private property, not class - not merely in their modern form, but in any form. Mankind condemned itself irrevocably when it separated from nature - when it first interposed a tool between itself and the bosom of Mother Nature. But then the point we seek may be incurably blunted. The existentialists are right; man' s alienation is permanent, a part of the human condition. We have seen human history as driven by an interaction between needs and technique-culture.

Nominally, the goal is the satisfaction of needs, but this turns out to be an ever-receding will-of-the-wisp. The needs develop on the basis, and just ahead, of the techniques that develop on the basis of them. This need not alarm; if man is ever insatiate, he is at least ever challenged. The real quandary lies in whether man will ever cease to be i thrall to this externalized and developing nature of his. If history comprises the unravelling of human potential, it has been abundantly confirmed that much of this potential had much better been left furled. The growing techno power of humankind make the actualization of these nasty potentials ever more horrible. But, aside from these many criminal escapades - the condemnation of which will gain the assent of the majority of mankind -there remains the main tendency of technical civilization - still almost universally hailed: the pell mell rationalization and instrumentalization - on the basis of ever greater powers - of more and more of human society in the service of production without limit. Here Marx' s inability o see nature in non-human terms - which has bee shared in general by modern man - proves to be a true Achilles heel.

Nature is a system pre-existing humankind, and it is one that cannot be subjected to endless technification and rationalization. If he fails to gasp nature as a non-unlimited, extra human reality, man will also fail to fulfil that first premise: namely that men must be in a position to live in order to be able [to continue] to 'make history'.