“Post-materialism”: 1796, 1840s, 1970s, and today

“Let all the arts perish”, declared the first communist manifesto of relatively modern times, written by Sylvain Maréchal for the Conspiracy of Equals in France in 1796.

“If need be”, he added, “as long as real equality remains!” With productive capacities as they were then, a meagre and uniform ration for all seemed to him the only answer. “But one education, but one nourishment... the same portion and the same quality of food... for each”.

In the notes which he wrote in Paris in 1844, as he moved from radical democratic politics to communism, Karl Marx criticised that “crude communism” or “barracks communism”.

“Crude communism is merely the culmination of... envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum... [Thus] an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined person who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it...

“The community is simply a community of labour and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist”.

Marx looked to a communism “going beyond” the dichotomies of private property, greed or asceticism, extravagance or thrift.

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is onlyours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc.... The life [the objects] serve is the life of private property, labour, and capitalisation”.

When we go beyond private property, “need or employment [will have] lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use”.

Four years later, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx would explain that “we by no means intend to abolish [the everyday] personal appropriation of the products of labour... for the maintenance and reproduction of human life”. People will still have personal property. But thesocial property which is now capitalist private property will become collective wealth.

Even in 1844, Marx could see the way capitalism expands human needs as a keystone of future emancipation. He also described the peculiar, twisted form of that expansion.

Under capitalism, one person “speculates on creating a new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him to make a new sacrifice, placing him in a new dependence and seducing him into a new kind of enjoyment and hence into economic ruin”. “Each new product is a new potentiality of mutual fraud and mutual pillage. The person becomes ever poorer as a person, and needs ever more money” to keep up with the whirl.

“Lack of moderation and intemperance become the true standard... All passions and all activity are lost in greed”.

The wealthier classes are caught in to-and-fro between empty individual extravagance and miserliness (in order to invest more, to get more money in future). And for the capitalists “the crude need of the worker is a much greater source of profit than the refined need of the rich... But the crudity on which it speculates is artificially produced... The English ginshops are, therefore, the symbolic representation of private property”.

Among the organised socialist workers whom he met in Paris, he found a new form of expansion of need, pointing the way to the future.

“When communist workers gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need — the need for society... Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The comradeship of humanity is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of humanity shines forth upon us”.

Paris in 1844 was in a period of radicalisation leading up to the 1848 revolution. Such communistic conversion of “need” flourished more in the 1970s, a period of high class struggle, than it does now. People talked of “post-materialism”, and green politics had its first stumbling start, in working-class actions in Australia.

It will come again: not imposed asceticism, not rationing-from-above, but a turn to human development beyond the escalating individual acquisition of private property.