The Budapest School

Heller was born in Budapest in 1929. She was of Jewish origins, and parts of her family died in Auschwitz. After the war, as she studied and taught philosophy at the University of Budapest, she became member of a group of thinkers known as the “Budapest School,” one of the most creative in postwar Marxist thinking. The group’s tutelary figure was Georg Lukács, the author of History and Class Consciousness.

The relations of Lukács and the Budapest school with the Hungarian communist regime alternated between phases of repression and tolerance. During the period running from the 1956 Budapest uprising to the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, Heller took a stance in favor of “socialism with a human face.” She identified at this time with the international New Left that was emerging on both sides of the Iron Curtain, criticizing both US imperialism and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union.

During the 1970s, Heller went into exile in Australia and held teaching positions there as well as in Germany and the United States. She now broke with Marxism and defended a form of political liberalism where ethical issues increasingly took center stage. Toward the end of her life, Heller went back to live in Hungary, where she opposed Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian regime before dying in 2019 at the age of ninety.

Heller is the author of many articles and books, including The Theory of Need in Marx, which was written and published in the 1970s. The book is simultaneously an interpretation of Karl Marx and a development of her own theory of needs, which will remain as her major contribution to twentieth-century political thought. By elaborating the distinction between essential and artificial needs, her approach might help us put humanity on track for a sustainable and just future.

The Dialectic of Needs

Needs are Marx’s most fundamental concept, according to Heller. A commodity satisfies a need, real or imaginary. It therefore presupposes the existence of needs. The question is: What kind of needs? Are they essential or artificial?

Needs are located at the articulation of nature and culture. My need to eat is a natural need, even a vital one: if I do not eat, I will die. But it can be satisfied in countless ways; one only has to look at the history of food to be convinced of this. As Marx observed, “hunger is hunger; but the hunger that is satisfied by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork differs from hunger that devours raw meat with the help of hands, nails and teeth.”

Marx leaves an ambiguity hanging: Is it the need that evolves over the course of history or only the ways of satisfying it? It depends on the case. The decisive point is that needs are linked to the evolution of modes of production, and in particular of capitalism. In capitalism, “production therefore produces consumption,” according to Marx. Through needs, production poses itself as a mediating instance of the relations between nature and culture.

Need is a “limit concept,” says Heller, which defines the “existential frontier” of human life. If you don’t eat, you die. If ecosystems enter into crisis, the conditions of human life on Earth are no longer assured. “Nature” may well be produced and reproduced socially, but these determinations of our existence escape us in part.

Need often designates a lack or shortage of something. A population lacks drinking water; hence it needs it. In this way, the sense of need is potentially a vector of collective action, aiming to compensate for this lack.

For Heller, a need must never be thought of in isolation. It is the “overall structure of needs” that must be considered. The emergence of certain needs depends on the satisfaction of certain others: it is because I do not have to fight for my survival on a daily basis that my need to listen to music or travel, for instance, can take up more space in my life. The satisfaction of material needs gives rise to the development of more “qualitative” needs.

The “overall structure of needs” also refers to the fact that in modern societies, we depend on each other for the satisfaction of most of our needs. This is the effect of the division of labor, a process that has accelerated further with the globalization of capital in the last decades of the twentieth century. (Almost) no one grows their own tomatoes or builds their own computer.

Our needs are socialized. This socialization depends on the existence of complex material infrastructures and logistics. Eating requires possession of a fridge where food purchased at the supermarket is stored: this single banal observation involves a myriad of human and nonhuman actors whose activity must be coordinated in time and space.

Normative Needs

As well as being a descriptive concept, which describes a state of affairs, needs are also a normative concept. The norm, in modern societies, is to have a fridge but also the house or apartment in which it is located, clothes to protect oneself from the cold, and the ability to move in space by means of private or public transport, not to mention an education, means of communication, good hygiene, and access to medication in case of illness.

Modern life is thus based on a set of “standards” that define the contours of what is considered a “decent” life. A large part of the planet’s population lives below these standards, while a minority located at the top of the social structure of the countries of the North (and increasingly also of certain countries of the South) lives well above. As Marx already knew, “in our age, the superfluous is easier to produce than the necessary.”

Heller subjects to criticism the “dictatorship over needs” that in her eyes the USSR and the countries of the Eastern Bloc constituted. (At the time she was writing, of course, these Soviet-style systems were still very much in place throughout Eastern Europe.) Within them, a caste of bureaucrats cut off from civil society decides which needs must be satisfied, thereby exercising a “dictatorship” over them. The “preferences” of individuals count for almost nothing in productive decisions.

In this framework, needs are defined and satisfied “from above.” This dictatorship proves to be increasingly dysfunctional over time, due to chronic mismatches between supply and demand. Its political legitimacy is almost zero, since citizens are not involved in the decisions that concern them.

Against this dictatorship, Heller develops the vision of an “individualist” Marxism. Marx’s goal, ultimately, is the full development of the person, namely their emancipation from both the dictatorship of the market and the Soviet-style “dictatorship over needs.”

Heller is certainly not an individualist in the sense of subscribing to liberalism. She does not maintain that individuals should be able to cultivate their needs outside of any collective constraints. She asserts that communism will consist of a free play of needs, where each person’s needs will be limited only by the needs of others.

Alienation and its Opposite

Heller develops an original theory of alienation, which takes the form of the concept of “radical needs.” Capitalism alienates needs. It does so firstly because within its limits, the definition and satisfaction of such needs is achieved through the market. If you do not have “purchasing power,” if the market considers the need you wish to satisfy unprofitable, it will simply not be addressed.

Capitalism also imposes its dictatorship on individual and collective time. A person who spends her life generating surplus value has neither the time nor the energy to cultivate her needs. The most likely outcome is that her needs will be “poor,” argues Heller. She goes so far as to say that the worker is a “being without needs” — in other words without real needs, without her needs. Capitalism engages in a “manipulation” of needs, particularly through advertising.

As a result, we are witnessing a “homogenization” of needs. This process affects not only the working classes but also the dominant classes, who are caught in the nets of alienation, even if they have more room for maneuver than workers. However, the situation is not without hope. Thanks to struggles that take advantage of the contradictions inherent in the dynamics of capitalism, the possibility of another world emerges.

Individuals become aware of alienation. This awareness of alienation is what Heller, following Marx, calls a “radical need.” As Marx says, “only a revolution of radical needs can be a radical revolution.” A radical need is a need that has emerged in capitalism, but one that capitalism is unable to satisfy. Its satisfaction therefore requires the transcendence of capitalism.

Leisure, free time, is a radical need par excellence. There is a historical tendency toward the reduction of working time in capitalism. However, capitalism can only reduce working time up to a certain point.

The valorization of capital depends on work — on surplus value. This is a fundamental limit, which nevertheless gives rise in the minds of workers to the idea that by going beyond capitalism, working time could be reduced even further, to the point of abolishing wage labor altogether. The awareness of alienation produces its opposite: the emancipation of workers. The radical need is the operator that allows us to move from one to the other.

A Degrowth Marxism?

Heller clearly understands the link between the question of needs and environmental issues. Following Marx, she insists on the fact that if wage labor — surplus value — is at the origin of capitalist value, all true wealth comes from the combination of work and nature. Communism therefore involves building a new relationship between the two.

“Waste” is an important theme in her work. By waste she means what is produced without necessity, without corresponding to a need, a real need. In the second half of the twentieth century, in capitalist countries, the problem of waste has increasingly become part of ecological awareness. The observation that it is in the nature of this system to waste resources and destroy ecosystems has gained ground.

We can also observe this awareness developing in the countries of the Soviet Bloc during its final decades. One of the consequences of the “dictatorship over needs” was that bureaucrats did not know whether the qualities and quantities of goods they produced corresponded to real demand. Therefore, they often produced too much or too little.

In (true) communism, material needs will occupy a secondary place in the overall structure of needs. They will be “relatively stagnant,” says Heller. If there are indeed productivist formulas we can find in the writings of Marx, as in those of most nineteenth-century thinkers, there is also a clear awareness of natural “limits.” Marx is against “excess.”

This is what Heller calls the “saturation model” in Marx. Saturation of what? Material needs. Once they are satisfied — “saturated” — needs continue to evolve. New needs always arise, because the human species is creative. But these are no longer material needs — they are of another order.

What kind of order? There is a tendency toward the “intellectualization” of needs. Not that everyone becomes an “intellectual” in the current sense of the term — but as material needs become secondary, “qualitative” needs become more important.

Their qualitative character implies increased reflexivity on the part of the people who experience them. These needs are social, in the sense that their emergence often presupposes an intensification and diversification of social interactions. They are “oriented towards other men,” says Heller.

The growing importance of qualitative needs reduces the pressure on ecosystems. Unlike material needs, they are not intensive in natural resources. Society gains control over productive processes and ceases to be a prisoner of productivism.

Heller anticipates theories of “post-growth” — not immediate degrowth but a transitional period consisting of a first phase of investment in infrastructure and “green” energy, allowing for degrowth in a second phase, and then finally a “stationary” economy, which no longer grows in the sense of expanding GDP.

With “full automation,” science, the “general intellect,” becomes a central factor of production — a thesis borrowed from Marx’s Grundrisse. The satisfaction of material needs is now increasingly ensured “automatically,” which frees up working time for the development of qualitative needs. Heller was not aware at the time that such “full automation” would involve exorbitant energy costs, but that is another problem.

Who Decides?

We haven’t asked the most important question yet: “Who decides?” Who decides which needs must or must not be satisfied? If the “dictatorship over needs,” the power of bureaucrats, must be fought, what should we replaced it with, both to respect the needs of each person and to comply with collectively established goals of social justice and sustainability?

The logic of competition implies that capitalism produces first and then asks itself what needs the (over)produced goods will satisfy, hence the importance within this structure of advertising and planned obsolescence. Alienated needs and waste are the result of this process.

In the society of “associated producers” (communism), on the other hand, it will be a question of first thinking about needs and then putting the productive apparatus at the service of their satisfaction. The definition and satisfaction of needs are not to be left to the market: they are to be controlled democratically.

But what concrete form will this deliberation on needs take? In complex societies like ours with a strong division of labor, where individuals and social groups have different interests and trajectories, the answer to this question is far from self-evident. One possible answer Heller explores is cooperatives. Marx sometimes defines communism as the generalization of cooperatives to the entire economy. Within it, workers control both the work tool and the productive decisions.

But there is an important limit to this argument. The cooperative form concerns what happens in the company but not between companies. We can easily imagine an economy where the production units would be entirely self-managed by workers but where the market would continue to govern the relations between producers, and between producers and consumers. Some variants of “market socialism” are in fact close to this model.

Self-management of workers will of course be a central element of communism. But breaking with capitalism requires imagining not only an alternative mode of management but also of coordination of the economy. This alternative mode of coordination is what is historically known as economic planning. What remains to be designed is the institutional architecture that corresponds to it. This is a question that Marxists in general, and Heller in particular, have hardly addressed.

The institutional architecture of the democratic deliberation on needs should take the form of an ecological federalism, based on a dialectical relationship of centralization and decentralization. According to a principle stated by Heller, the definition of needs must be carried out as close as possible to individuals, in order to respect their subjectivities as much as possible. Thus any issue that can be dealt with at the lowest political level must be tackled there.

The process of scaling up — centralization — results from a double necessity. It occurs first when the definition and satisfaction of a need concerns a larger population and territory. All the citizens concerned then have a say. It also intervenes to determine the rules within the framework of which the deliberation on needs takes place.

This deliberation cannot, of course, give rise to the satisfaction of polluting, alienating needs, or those that increase inequalities. At each federal level, the deliberation on needs will therefore take place under constraints — environmental and social justice constraints. This institutional architecture will help you answer the question: How many of the goods you own would you consider indispensable?