Hegel and Marx on Needs: the Making of a Monster

Abstract

For Hegel and Marx, the simple satisfaction of needs leads to the creation of a society that becomes an animated, monstrous beast over individuals. Both focus on this development through the contradictory movement of human beings in the shaping and making of their world. Hegel concentrates on the subject as Will manifesting itself in society through the satisfaction of its needs. Marx’s concern is with workers’ antagonistic satisfaction of their needs within capital.

Need and labour … form on their own account a monstrous system of community… ; a life of the dead body, that moves itself within itself, one which ebbs and flows in its motion blindly, like the elements, and which requires strict dominance and taming like a wild beast.¹

Hegel

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour… By incorporating living labour-power into the material constituents of capital, the latter becomes an animated monster.²

Marx