#1310 George Boss: Marx and the Politics of Need

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Richard Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. George Boss. He is Lever Holmer early career fellow at Queen Mary University of London, and today we're going to talk about his book Marx and the Politics of Need. So Dr. Boss, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:24 George Boss: Oh, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here.

00:28 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so before we get into the Marxian aspect of your book and your work, tell us first, what are the needs from the perspective of political science?

00:43 George Boss: Yeah, uh, thank you about that, and I think the interesting thing about needs uh is. As a, as an object of like political science study, they are treated as these kind of um external realities that we know or discover via one research method or another, right? So we use some sort of um empirical inquiry usually to discover what needs are. And then once they are discovered, needs then kind of bear in some way on our politics. So we find out the facts of needs, and that tells us, tells us sort of how our politics ought to operate or ought not to operate in one way or another. And there's very different approaches which are various different approaches to, to doing that, which I think we'll get into, but ultimately the kind of key thing across a lot of political science and political theory is this idea that needs are these kind of uh standards or realities external to our politics that kind of bear on it from the outside.

01:35 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but how are needs usually approached? I mean, not only in political science, but also in other areas. I mean, uh, what are the different approaches to how we understand or should understand needs out there?

01:55 George Boss: Yeah, OK, so I mean I think the, the, the core thing is understood as these kind of external facts, that the general. Inquiry around human needs is trying to identify kind of what these facts are. And and the, the problem that kind of theorists tend to face here is that. That beyond the kind of very, very minimal set of needs orientated around our kind of bare human survival. We have to understand what we need related to some sort of standard around a kind of decent or minimally good human life. And so we have to kind of build up from this, this kind of very minimalistic picture of what needs are. But as soon as we start doing that, we get into kind of controversial issues that reach into kind of, kind of bedrock of different kinds of moral and political perspectives on the world. I mean, a classic example in needs theory is questions like autonomy. Um, YOU know, is autonomy something that should be part of our kind of very basic understanding of what needs are for everyone, or are they associated from more critical perspectives with a kind of distinctly liberal conception of the good life? And so we get these kinds of disagreements, and so, kind of responding to this, this idea that we need this kind of wider conception of what needs are, but that we enter these controversies. And these theorists have tend to approach it in one of two main ways, really, in the kind of broadest sense historically. And that's to kind of either focus on a very thin picture of what needs are based on something like basic survival, or, or to sort of specify needs in a really, really abstract way that kind of apply across lots of contexts. Or to get these kind of thicker conceptions of need that apply in a specific context, um, related to culture or a particular way of life or something like that.

03:34 Ricardo Lopes: But what would you say are the most prominent theories of needs in political theory specifically? I mean, what are the ones that are usually the most debated that most people agree with, let's say, and so on.

03:53 George Boss: Yeah, good. OK, so, I mean, uh, one of the chapters, sort of early chapters in the book talks about kind of surveys the existing debate on needs. It's encountered this problem about disagreements over needs and about the kind of fundamental conflicts. So, and this tends to be kind of three main ways in which people have tried to approach these problems. One is to say that there is just sort of facts of human needs that we can discover via reason or some other empirical method. And so there just are this kind of universal truths of basic human needs, um. Another says, well, You know, we recognize this difference in arguments over needs, but there's nonetheless something like an agreement or an overlap between these different positions. And if we can identify something like a consensus between these different positions, we can then build a kind of theory of need from that overlap. Yeah. The third perspective, which is probably closest to where I come from, is. To say, well, look, actually these disagreements are fundamental and there's no way around them, and what we actually need to do is to make sure that these disagreements are conducted in the best way possible. And if we are going to disagree, we need something like legitimate political processes or some way of kind of working out these arguments despite the fact that we disagree. And so those are the sort of three broad camps that the book kind of speaks to.

05:07 Ricardo Lopes: But uh I mean, do you think there's any particular way of perhaps determining whether one of those approaches is better, and, and of course what we mean by better in this particular case we can discuss that is better than the others. I mean, could we solve that or resolve that through uh empirical data or is it more of a Philosophical debate and then if it's philosophy or if it's political theory, uh I, I, I mean in what ways could we solve the question. So what, what, what do you think would be if there's a an approach here to really figuring out which of these different approaches is the best, um, I mean what would it be?

06:00 George Boss: Yeah. And I think, I think the way you, you put it, Ricardo, is, is, is very apt in the sense that sort of solving this problem, and that has been the general approach across these three theories, is to say, well, look, we've got this problem here that we need to solve in one way or another, and it's that we need these theories, but that we have this disagreement. And there's different ways people have tried to approach it. They've tried to use kind of logical reasoning and say, well, look, we can reason our way through these disagreements to some. Kind of factual answer, or they've used empirical data to say, well, we can try and identify an overlap. So there's been a variety of different approaches, but they're all orientated towards this idea that there is a kind of a problem here to solve in one way or another. Um, TO, to a lesser extent, that third one I mentioned, which we'll maybe come back to, but ultimately it's this attempt to kind of solve this problem. And that's effectively, and I don't know if you want me to, to get into it at this point, Roberto, but that's effectively where the book tries to step in and says, well, what all of this has got wrong is that we actually shouldn't be. Trying to solve this issue. These point to something fundamental about needs themselves, the political nature of needs, and that rather trying to kind of solve these disagreements or work around them in one way or another, we need to build our theories from the facts of these disagreements.

07:11 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so yeah, we'll come back to that later then. Uh, BUT which kinds of uses of the concept of need would you say, uh, have normative implications? I mean, because it could, we could just try to. Approach this from a descriptive standpoint, right and point that there's these different ways that people can understand needs and uh that's it, and I mean we could just ignore or don't care or, or even theoretically. I think that no normative forces would derive from whatever way we conceptualize need, right? But I mean, do you think that there are users of this concept that generate necessarily those normative forces?

08:02 George Boss: Yeah, I mean, I think there's 22 related questions in what you asked about. One is sort of one part of the problem with needs talk in general is it's very, very elastic and that there's many, many senses to the language of need. Um, WE can use needs in, in, in, in non- normative ways where I can see some, say something like the remote control needs batteries, and that has like no normative connotation whatsoever. But there is this sense of need that people do use in their daily life, which is to say something like we have a need, and it's that kind of noun structure that there is a clue, it's not perfect, but it's a clue to this struc you know, we talk about a need for water or a, a, a need for food. Um, AND I think that, that, you know, one way people have historically approached needs is to say, because of all this mess, because of all these disagreements, because of all these different senses of the language which are very hard to unpick. We should just avoid the language altogether and we should just not talk about needs, and you get this, for instance, in some sort of um economistic approaches which say, you know, think that, um, there's a sort of famous quotation that, that needs are just desires that people don't want to pay for. Um, AND, you know, we could, we could do that, we could go down that normative route when other people have recommended it for different reasons, but another sort of point that the book starts from is to say, well, actually, look. Needs are in our politics. Our political processes are full of needs talk, um, and we have to start from the recognition of that fact, right? I mean, you know, the number of state, uh, actions and policy areas where needs talk seems to be kind of intimately interwoven with what the state's doing, you know, any welfare state provision, education, and then we can think about sort of crises like the pandemic, a lot of book was written in the pandemic. So needs are just there, um, and so we have to deal with the fact that needs are just there and there are certain usage of that term around this idea of a kind of a need, um, that, that do seem to have this kind of political and moral force.

09:50 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but er I mean, why is it that at least some people tend to talk about needs as moral facts that sort of sit outside of politics?

10:04 George Boss: So why, why do people do that?

10:06 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, or, or how and why, actually,

10:10 George Boss: yeah. How, why? I mean, I, I think, I think this is the two answers to that why question really, and one of them is to say it's precisely this kind of appeal to kind of something like necessity or something beyond our current state of affairs or, or, or something that's kind of beyond political disagreement or beyond differences between something, something that's necessary in some way. And it's this idea of a. NECESSITY is deeply interwoven with these kind of normative senses of needs. Like, it couldn't be otherwise. Um, WE simply must have it, there's no way around it. And so it's precisely because it's that sense of need that has, uh, a moral connotation that people do try to reach for this extra political sense. Um, THERE'S also a more Marxian answer, which maybe we'll get into later, but, you know, another way to think of it is, you know, our ways of life make things appear very, very necessary and feel like they are necessary to our very self and our survival and our existence and any kind of minimal decency, when in fact that is part of our particular way of life. Um, AND I won't go on in case this is something we were gonna come to you later, Roberto, but I'm happy to, to, to talk more about that.

11:18 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, but before we get into the understanding of or an understanding of needs from a Marxian perspective, we've already touched here on the most prominent approaches to needs in political theory. So what would you say are perhaps the main issues and limitations with them?

11:41 George Boss: Yeah, and I, and I touched on it very briefly earlier, which is, you know, in all of them in different ways, try and get around what we might think of as the politics of need or the political problem of need, which is, you know, this idea that in order to have this kind of moral force, we have to reach beyond politics. And so they try and find ways to, to, to, to do that, and, and, and exactly how we've, we've talked about a little bit. But I see this as, as, um, problematic in, in, in two ways. One is conceptually. There's just been a, a, a, a, a failure to identify this ground, that there are conceptual problems with each of these different ways that end up encountering these kind of fundamental disagreements over what it is to lead a flourishing or minimally decent life. And so they, that ultimately these approaches fail. Politically as well, these approaches are quite, at least dangerous, not always bad, but certainly dangerous, and that by sort of simply saying these are facts that sit outside our politics, we end up. Kind of licensing different kinds of paternalism, telling people what they need from the outside and, and actually kind of entrenching existing power structures by treating things as kind of natural facts when actually we need to subject them to critical scrutiny.

12:47 Ricardo Lopes: So when it comes to Marxian approach to needs, one thing that you do in your book is that you talk about how the concept of need in Marxism has been interpreted in different ways, and then you give us Your reinterpretation of this concept from a Marxian perspective. So could you tell us first what are some of the most prominent ways that it has been interpreted from a Marxist perspective?

13:20 George Boss: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, and I, and I, here again, I sort of split things into three camps. So, the first camp would be something like an essentialist perspective on needs, which, which fits in with that kind of idea of a there are just facts about basic human needs. And this is often associated with kind of humanist versions of Marxism or or. Kind of versions of Marxism that emphasize the kind of ethical and moral role of the concept of needs in Marx, um, and in particular focusing on, on his theory of alienation, right? And so that, that's one camp. Um, A second camp focuses on needs as just kind of psychological drives or strongly felt desires. And this camp tends to be associated with, um, kind of scientific versions of Marxism. Which say that Marx, at a certain point in his life, kind of departed from all this ethical, moral stuff and just focused on developing a kind of science of history or kind of economic theory of capitalism. Um, AND so to take out all the moral stuff, they just say, well, look, it's just an empirical thing about how people feel. The third version kind of draws a link between Marx and Hegel and says that needs are, are, are dialectical in nature in the sense that, um, we have a dialectical relationship between human need, our labor, and, and the natural world. So we feel needs because we feel needs or have needs, we labor on the world to meet those needs. In laboring on the world, we transform that world, we build things, we cut down trees and so on. But in transforming the transforming the world, we also end up change, changing ourselves because we are part of that natural order. And that sets off new needs, creating this kind of historical cycle of changing needs, ultimately leading to a kind of utopian end in something like communism. So those are, are broadly the three camps, though there's lots of disagreements and variants within those as well.

15:04 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, sure, but, uh, in your reinterpretation of the Marxian concept of need, I mean, do you draw from any one of those earlier interpretations or not?

15:18 George Boss: Um, NOT particularly. I mean, I try and depart from them a little bit and I think the sort of common issue I, I, I, I take across them. Um, IS that in each of them, they're, they're trying to rescue Marx as some sort of theoretician, as I, as I call it, uh, as a, as a philosopher, or as an economist, or as ultimately sort of turning his theory into a single kind of theoretical object. And there's lots of complex historical reasons about why people have tried to do this with Marx, tied in with the history of the Marxist movement and lots of interpretive questions. But for all of these, they sort of extract Marx from his particular context and try and develop Marxism as a kind of theoretical approach to needs. Whereas my reading of Marx focuses much more on his kind of on the ground political activity and his political activism. Um, YOU know, Marx was never a kind of professional academic like me, um, or many of these people writing these other theories. Marx was a political agitator, Marx was a social critic. Marx suffered lots of political oppression and. You know, we have to look at his writings more in those engaged political contexts rather than trying to turn it into this kind of broad theory.

16:24 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So tell us more then about how you reinterpret the Marxian concept of it. I mean, and apart from what you've just said, are there, uh, what are the other ways that your reinterpretation differs from those other earlier interpretations that we've talked about here.

16:48 George Boss: So I think my, my version of the sort of Mark's story of needs, uh, probably follows from two main moves. One is to emphasize that needs are, are the products of a particular social system and historical state of affairs, so they're kind of social historical. Um, RATHER than being something that kind of sits outside society and explains how society is, or that we use to judge such society, we kind of reverse that order and say, well, actually, our existing social and historical order explains what our needs are. Um, THAT, that move is, is, is different from some of the others in, in, we can talk a little bit more about that, but I think the second move is probably the most distinctive in that not just, uh, the, the idea is not simply that those processes are social and historical, but that they're also fundamentally political. In the sense that these processes by which we go from our social historical system to needs are political processes. They involve power, struggle, um, they have kind of political benefits and burdens that are distributed differently across a particular population. And so once we look at those processes as fundamentally political, we open up new doors to different kinds of contestation and kind of critical scrutiny on what our needs are, how they are made the way they happen to be. And so as I described them in the book, I think what's distinctive about this way is it emphasizes the nature of needs as political all the way down.

18:11 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so those earlier interpretations, according to them, in needs from a Marxist perspective were not necessarily constitutively political, is that it?

18:26 George Boss: Yeah, and I think there's sort of different levels of politics involved in these different. Visions in a kind of humanist or essentialist approach, they just sit outside of politics in much of the way we've talked about already, from a kind of psychological approach, they're just facts. Again, that loses some of the kind of political interests, and they're more just sort of the, you know, the things that just happen under capitalism. There's no necessarily any kind of normative judgment there. The third Agalian approach has been kind of credited by lots of people as saying, well, actually this creates a kind of political opening, potentially, because there are social processes of construction here. But where a lot of people have come in to criticize that is, is this kind of um teleological or utopian element which says, well, ultimately what we're aiming for here is this kind of system of needs that arises under communism that's gonna kind of fix all these problems. Um, AND again, that's kind of reaching towards another kind of political closure. So I think what my reading tries to do is to say, well, look, rather than trying to find some point in Marx where all the politics stops, we can finally get on with some normative work. What happens if we just emphasize the politics on the ground within a political social order as key to understanding his interpretation and his text? So that's what I try and do across the book.

19:35 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, IN the book you also draw from Wittgenstein's work, right? So in what ways can his work also inform an approach such as yours to Ns?

19:49 George Boss: Oh, yeah, and, and I make a couple of parallels with different figures that came after Marx, um, including Wittgenstein, and, um, there's an interesting kind of Marx-Wittgenstein scholarship out there that I draw from. Um, AND I think the key thing is that both Marx and Wittgenstein in my reading, share this view that we, we can't adopt any kind of philosophical view from nowhere. Um, YOU know, one of the things that Marx famously, you know, is famously credited as saying is, uh, you know, consciousness is a social product. Um, AND one of the, the chapters in the book is consciousness is a social product, but even for philosophers. And the, the idea there is simply to say that one of Marx's key, uh, stages of intellectual development was to recognize that all thought, including theoretical thought, and importantly, his own theoretical thought, was a product of a particular social and historical order. And there was no way of stepping outside that to get some sort of, uh, view from nowhere, some. Extra political, a social perspective on the world and then theorize about it. Instead, that one has to recognize that in theorizing, you are embedded in a particular social historical context and you're working with the ideas, ways of talking, ways of thinking that are within that particular context. Um, AND I think that's really significant, you know, Wittgenstein's work in, in the philosophical investigations in particular, is very, very useful in emphasizing this idea that our modes of thinking and talking, uh, are very, very attached to a particular form of life. Um, AND that philosophical confusion arises precisely when we pretend otherwise. We pretend that our words and our ideas come from somewhere else or allow us to access some, something outside of our particular social contexts. Um, AND, and, and what I try and do by drawing this Marx- Wittgenstein connection is to say, well, you know, there's two significant things we maybe take from this. One of this is that to understand something like need, we can't look at it in the abstract. We have to understand how need fits into a particular form of life from the start. That's where our ideas of needs come from. The second is to say that, well, actually, you know, for Marx, and he emphasizes this in a way that, that, that Wittgenstein doesn't, is needs are themselves part of that lived context, right? Like, we, we don't start from sitting around, reasoning about needs, and then encounter the world and have to actually meet those needs. We start by eating and drinking and acting in the world to meet needs. We start from that practice that's needs orientated, and then we only come later to this process of thinking and philosophizing. And that I think really changes the way that he approaches concepts like need um across quite a lot of his work.

22:27 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, no, it's, it's really amusing because I mean what you're saying there and then of course it could also be connected to other approaches in, for example, sociology of science and philosophy of science, but what you're saying there is something that unfortunately many intellectuals, I mean it doesn't really matter if they're from, if they're from the humanities or the sciences. DO not really like to contend with very much. I mean the fact that their thoughts and ideas are embedded within and influenced by a particular sociopolitical context, right? I mean sometimes people still tend to have this view of, yeah, OK, so there's ideas or there's I, I, I don't know, so, uh, it's really, I, I, I mean, for people who, who are influenced like you and I by uh Marx and by anthropology, sociology, and so on, it, it's a really difficult thing to conceive, but sometimes people tend to put their, or have an I. THAT intellectual stuff sits sort of above all or can sit above all of these influences from the social and political domain and sort of and we can sort of reason ourselves in the Purely reasoning way, let's say into our ideas without, uh, with uh without regard for all of these social and political influences,

24:20 George Boss: right? I mean I think you're absolutely right, and I, and I think, you know. Uh One of the The, the, there's been a sort of intellectual acceptance, I think, of some of these arguments, the sort of embeddedness of thinking in a particular context and a culture, a way of life, and so on. But it's very hard to actually execute that in practice. And this is something, you know, when I, as I'm writing the book and typing these, these pages, wondering to myself what, what's my particular contextual embeddedness as I, as I do this activity. But I think what Marx also reminds us is this, this way of thinking of intellectual activity is itself a product of our social order, right? Um, THAT, you know, we think about intellectual activity as separate from the world itself, precisely because we live in an order that creates that way of thinking about intellectual activity. And so, you know, we, uh, we, we can't escape that either. If we, if we really take his ideas seriously, you know, we are also slightly bound to, to do so. And he, and he's very good, you know, one of the, the big, uh, sort of, uh, texts that I focus on in the book. Is the German ideology manuscripts, and I've got lots to say about those if we wanna go on a, on a tangent. But, you know, one of the things that he does in the manuscripts is make fun of these people lots and talks about, kind of, theoretical castles in the sky and, you know, knights going out to, and he has all these funny lines about what the German, uh, young Hegelian German philosophers are doing, imagining they can do exactly what, what you describe about it is this sort of create this academic world outside of. A lived social order, but I, but I think, you know, we have to embrace the, the challenge that Mark sets us and recognize that it is a challenge to actually think and write and be an intellectual in that way.

25:56 Ricardo Lopes: So in this particular case then needs should be understood as, as you put it in your book, historically specific, socially constituted and deeply politically charged,

26:10 George Boss: right? Mhm, YEAH, absolutely, and, and I think, you know, each of those sort of, um, builds a little bit on, on, on the previous one in the sense that, you know, the idea that needs are socially constituted is not. A, a, a new idea, people have talked about the social construction of needs or partial social construction of needs for a long time. Um, AND, you know, we can all recognize the ways in which needs evolve as our society do, you know, we come to need things that we didn't need before. Certain needs drop out of the picture. You know, we need cars and phones now and we never use things like that. But what, what Marx then does is, is say, well, it, it, you know, we have to look at these social practices in a, in a historical perspective. And by that is we have to understand that social form as part of a, a, of a particular horror historical form that has a historical story. And what that adds, I think, to some of the social constructivist views is he exposes it to a kind of analysis, right? Um, RATHER than just saying sort of everything's relative and everything's social constructed and it just is what it is. It has a particular historical form that's associated with real historical processes that have happened that we can analyze, we can look at the structures underneath all these social processes and actually do some like concrete analysis about. How needs have come to be the way they are historically. Again, a car is a really good example, right? Like, the fact that people need cars didn't just happen because people decided one day they did. We rebuilt our urban infrastructures and we changed our way of life in fundamental ways such that we find ourselves now dependent on a car. Then the third element is to say, well, look. These historical processes were political as well. Like, this, this wasn't just sort of happy evolution of society. This was struggle, this was often violence, this was power, um, and that means that the, the order that we find ourselves in has a kind of political as well as a historical story behind it, as well as a kind of political set of consequences, like, um, you know, the fact that needs have come to be the way they are benefits certain people and places burdens on others. It puts some people under the power of, of other people. Um, AND we can assess those political consequences and we can ask ourselves questions about those political consequences. But also, precisely because needs were historically produced, they, they will be again in the future. And precisely because they were politically produced, they could be politically produced otherwise in the future. So he opens up a kind of contingency, um, and a way of doing things otherwise as well, which opens up kind of political possibility in a way that a kind of naturalized picture of need just kind of marginalizes and excludes.

28:41 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and it's very interesting because I mean, at least as far as I understand it, some, at least some people out there when they're trying to approach needs from a philosophical perspective and even sometimes informed by science, at least to some extent. They are trying to ask, OK, so what are the, the human needs? I mean they're trying to come up with sort of a list of human needs, but I mean from this more Marxist perspective of needs as historically specific, socially constituted, and, and politically charged. I mean that sort of question that stems from uh um. Uh, STEMS from people trying to come up with a universal list of human needs that apply independent of context doesn't really make sense anymore,

29:41 George Boss: right?

29:41 Ricardo Lopes: Hm.

29:42 George Boss: And, and, you know, it, it makes sense in the sense that people do it for a reason, as we talked about earlier, right, you know, it's often by emphasizing the necessity and kind of factuality of needs that we see them as having this kind of normative power. But, you know, and, and it also makes sense politically in that it's a good thing to, you know, it's an effective thing to do in politics. If we can persuade other people that needs are in fact natural and given, that can bring about political outcomes. And, and one of the things I say in the book is this isn't always bad, right, like, you know, there have been times when people have appealed to these naturalized ideas of needs in ways that have brought about really good forms of political change. But there's also been times where it's been quite bad, and it can be bad and it has political dangers. Um, AND, you know, what it, what it doesn't do is make sense as the kind of purely intellectual exercise that it's sometimes made into. Um, ONE of the things I sort of write about a little bit elsewhere, and I talk about very briefly in the book, is, you know, the, the climate change discourse at the moment and much of the studies around climate change are increasingly appealing to sort of needs-based pictures of how do we make sure that future generations have got what they need in order to live minimally decent lives. Um, ALL the way up to the point of creating like a kind of energy quota, saying we need X amounts of energy in order to ensure that people can lead decent lives. But all of that just takes away the politics of what a decent life counts as, and, and actually in doing so. Fixes a particular way of life and a particular set of needs as permanent and universal, even for these future generations. And I think that that, that takes some of the important political questions, but, well, actually, you know, how fundamentally do we have to change our way of life in order to meet the challenge of the climate crisis gets kind of cut away when we turn it into this purely empirical question.

31:23 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that's, that's interesting, but do you think that, uh, I mean, from this point of view, uh, from a more Marxist point of view, It would be possible for us to in any way predict or possibly predict what people in uh living in a world where uh climate change has really uh had a deep impact, not, not that it hasn't already had some impact, but even more uh has, has even, has been even more impactful than it already has and. Um, WE need to vary, I, I, I don't know to what extent, but probably drastically change the way our, of life, our way of life, our lifeways and our habits and customs and all of that. I mean, I think it's possible to predict if we are able to tell the kinds of conditions, material conditions we'll live in, what kinds of needs would develop in that context.

32:32 George Boss: Yeah, and I think, I think maybe the word I might. Push back on would be predict in the sense that prediction is a very, like, empirical exercise in terms of, like, we can just, you know, read this empirical reality and determine a set of needs. And I would maybe say something like imagine, or politically imagine what it might be like, which of course, you know, that imaginative exercise will have to link to the facts, right, will link to the way the world will be. But actually it would involve something more creative and imagining a different way of life and, you know, not only will we have to predict it, we'll have to enact it via politics, often involving struggle, um, you know, we will have to make the possibilities of a different way of life, you know, real by struggling over them and contesting and, you know, fighting with other people who might want to ring fence a particular way of life. Um, AND so once we put it in that slightly different political register, um, it, it, it just changes the nature of the debate from a purely empirical exercise about predicting people's future needs to a political and imaginative one about what do we want their way of life to look like. Um, YEAH.

33:35 Ricardo Lopes: Right, uh, another thing that you touched on in your book has to do with Judith Butler's theory of gender and thinking of needs as performatives. Could you tell us about that? I mean, uh, and in what ways would, uh, Butler's theory of gender, I mean, just for people to not be confused there because she's talking about gender and then you apply that to needs. I, I mean, what's the connection there?

34:05 George Boss: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that, um, it, it, you know, first to stress is that, that, that Butler's theory of performativity, the, the language of the performative is a, is a technical one drawn from the philosophy of language, and it is unlike the sense of performativity that we get when people say, oh, you're just doing it. It's nothing like performance. It's a technical sense, and it links to this idea that sometimes we use words, um, that make the realities. It looks like they just name. Um, AND, and, and we could go down a rabbit hole with, with philosophy of language, looking at different cases, but Butler's kind of innovative move is to say that this way of thinking about language applies to sex and gender. The idea being that we usually think of sex as something prior to gender. We have like biological sex, or certainly this, this has historically been an orthodox way of thinking about sex and gender. Um, WE have biological sex and then we have the kind of cultural construction of gender built on top, and we have a kind of causal ordering or an explanatory ordering that's something like that. And Butler flips the whole thing around and says, well, actually our ideas of natural sex are products of gender. They are, when we name sex, we name male and female, we are actually creating the realities we look like we're just naming. Um, WE are making them so in our social practices. And so there's this really interesting kind of flip around of the kind of causal order and temporal order, um, and explanatory order of the concepts from. Uh, A kind of natural to social, to a social to constructive naturalization. Um, AND I think we can look at Marx's way of talking about needs in much the same way that, you know, even in our everyday life and in much of our practices, needs look as this kind of natural foundation, and we have this kind of social order that's kind of secondary to it or built on top of it. Whereas the reality is the, is the opposite, that needs are produced by this social order. Um, AND, you know, so a, a butler provides a useful frame to understand Marx, and I, I, lots of people who like Marx really don't like Butler's work. So, the chapter does quite a lot of work trying to evidence this, uh, potential connection with this idea of construction. And, and what, what I think construction is a bad word because Butler themselves would, would, would not use that language, um, this performativity, um. Uh, IT, it is useful because Butler also uses that to open up a political avenue to understanding biological sex. Um, Butler's famous book, most famous book on the topic is Gender Trouble, and this idea of troubling is something I talk about in the book. By switching around the way we think about these concepts, we trouble them, we open them up to new kinds of scrutiny. And then we can also talk about them in ways that troubles them, that not only, like, changes the way they are as a concept or a thing, but also that problematizes them, um, that challenges them, that opens them to criticism. So I think both of these senses of, or these uses of performativity, one as a kind of conceptual one and one as a kind of political troubling one, are things we can take from Butler and that are echoed in different ways in, in what Marx has to say about needs.

37:16 Ricardo Lopes: No, yeah, it's, it's really interesting because uh I mean, and again that's one of the reasons why I really appreciate um these scientific disciplines like anthropology and sociology, because the anthropologists and sociologists, because they deal with people embedded in a particular social and cultural environment, they are much more open and. Much more sophisticated understanding of these kinds of ideas than, for example, biologists, and this is not to say that of course biology is not legitimate, of course it is a legitimate science, but when it comes to, for example, people reacting to Butler's theory of gender and gender as performative. Uh, ONE of the most immediate responses that, uh, one gets from, uh, no, uh, uh, from scientists that do not come from the social sci sciences like biologists is that, oh, that's just, uh, post-modernist nonsense. I mean that, that, that is just pseudoscience or whatever, but actually, Uh, um, I mean, within, uh, within the context of philosophy of language and also if you look at it from a more socio-cultural standpoint, it makes sense and, uh, maybe, I think that maybe scientists should be a little, um, or um sci scient bio biological scientists should be a little bit more open to it also because philosophy of language can help you develop. Develop a more sophisticated view of even the theory and conceptualization within uh biology, in this case, the biology of section, uh, sex and gender, I guess. I mean, at least that's uh how I view it, so.

39:16 George Boss: Yeah, I mean, I, I, and, and, and I think there are really good examples as well as bad examples, and I think there's a lot that many different disciplines can learn from philosophy of language. I mean, there's really interesting things in physics. I think it's Karen Barard who, who talks about performativity and links it to, uh, the, um, kind of quantum physics in, in, in really interesting ways. So there are, you know. Ways in which these ideas um have permeated out towards the natural sciences, um, and I think, you know, one of the things that is fair to say about Butler, and I talk a bit about the book is that in their work. Um, SOME of the biological stuff. It becomes difficult to explain and has been a long source of debate, um, and they've worked very hard to push back against some of those criticisms and the body plays a really, really important role in, in their more recent work, um, and, you know, actually their, all their work really, the body has always been there but just in a different way than the biologists like to imagine it's just this kind of fixed biological thing that we just know. The body is playing a role in these performative processes. Um, I do think Butler is a little bit guilty about marginalizing some of the material stuff, and I can talk more about that if, if, if we're interested. But one of the things I think is really interesting with Marx is that for him, labor is always a really key part of these practices, right? Because, you know, I said there was this, this flip around where we move from seeing the natural and then the social, to seeing the socialist come out explaining natural, but that social is not like. Just social ideas in people's heads or culture as something that's totally outside of the natural world, those social practices are people working on the world in, you know, real physical ways, human bodies moving in space. Um, AND so from the start, you know, matter is there, it's just not there as a kind of fixed thing outside of the social, it's there as part of these social practices. Um, SO, I, you know, I think there's ways in, in Marx that there are this, this kind of material and social story of, are always intertwined from the start.

41:16 Ricardo Lopes: Right, right. So, uh, another question that you explore in your book has to do with what needs do in a capitalist society. So what do they actually do, what functions do they serve?

41:31 George Boss: Yeah, and I, and I think this is one of the ways in which Marxist attempt to politicize needs. Is really, really interesting because he sees, you know, the, the, the key to, to the critiquing needs as really, really understanding the political processes within a particular social order and historical order that can be analyzed. And for him, the kind of key element is, is establishing dependence, in particular the dependence of wage labor on selling their, their labor power for a wage in order to live. Um, AND the, the, the way the book kind of tells that story is, is with Marx's account of so-called primitive accumulation, uh, uh, towards the end of Capital Volume One. And one of the things we can, way to read that story is, so, you know, we had this sort of pre-capitalist social order where needs meeting was done in, in, in a kind of small status groups that were very, very relational, very, very known, and that capitalism came along and kind of wiped out these status groups, and it created, um, a system where we had individuals who the only way they could survive was to sell their labor for a wage. And one of the interesting things about the start of that story, and if we read capital in this way, is, you know, if we start with marks on simple accumulation or sorry, simple exchange at the the at the beginning of capital. He has this, this story of, of commodity exchange, and in that story, um, you know, where we were just buying and selling commodities, needs don't really feature. They don't appear at all. Um, WE just buy and sell from each other, and what, what you're doing with the product I sell to you, whether you're using it to meet a need or to, you know, just meet some desire or what, I, I've not, I know, the seller doesn't know. And actually in the social processes of exchange at that level, needs don't exist. And the way I describe it in the book is that if we imagine capitalist society in this way, needs disappear, they are forgotten in, in a certain part of the kind of capitalist story of accumulation. Um, AND where, where do they reappear? Well, they reappear with this wage contract. They reappear once we've created this situation where people have to sell their labor for a wage. It's only at that point where the capitalists and, you know, in the worker in their contract have to calculate, well, what's a fair wage? And so Marx uses his, his, his sort of classic theory of value where we think of, you know, this is the labor required to reproduce the commodity that is the laborer themselves and their work. And so needs have kind of been forgotten, only to be remembered within this particular point, um, of the, of the kind of story of capital. And the way I describe this in the book is, is, is almost a kind of weaponization of need, right? We've torn apart these previous social processes. We've created a situation where the only way needs come back into the social story is when we have this exchange of labor power, where, where, where the worker is fundamentally dependent on the capitalists in order to survive, in order to have any kind of form of need at all. And so it's at that point that needs become crystallized into this new social form as the worker's subsistence. Um, AND we can talk more exactly how that, that works, but, you know, it, it's that critical point of establishing dependence that's the core of the kind of political story of need for Marx.

44:37 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, IN the book you also talk about the method of representation, representation with a, with a hyphen there when it comes to needs. So what is that method about and what can we learn from it?

44:55 George Boss: Yeah, and I think the way you put it is, you know, Marx wants to tell this political story. He wants to say, you know, once we understand needs for performative, we understand them as politically created, well, what does critique come in? Where does a social critic enter this story and what can they do? And part of the sort of classic problem and why people have often appealed to these extra social accounts of these is to say, well, look, if needs are just socially and politically constituted, how can they be used as standards of critique against a particular social order? If capitalism meets needs. Then how can they also be used to critique the capitalist social order. And I think what Marx cleverly does, and, and this is how I read Capital and how others have read Capital, is to say, well, look, if we're actually, let's take this story seriously, let's take this idea that, you know, um, if we need this external standard to de-critique, what we're saying is that if we look from things purely within the worldview of capital, we look from things internally. Then everything looks great. Everything looks peachy. The story is perfect. We can create this kind of perfect internal story where capitalism is insulated from critique. And you can read capital is, is taking this idea seriously. Let, let's tell this story and imagine, you know, creating a peachy looking, rosy picture of capital. And quickly things fall to pieces, right? The story just doesn't make sense, it collapses under its own self-contradictions. And the whole point there is to say that actually, you know, we don't need this external standard, that actually it's all there in front of us in the world. Critical resources to challenge our existing social order are there if we care to look. And the only reason we don't see them is because a story has been told that marginalizes them or excludes them or hides them. Presents them a particular way so that we don't see those critical resources, hence re-presentation. Well, look, if there are these presentations out there and he's focusing in particular on the kind of political economists of his time. If there are these presentations out there that make things look OK, even if they're full of all their problems and self-contradictions, they're a story that tries to do that, why don't we tell a different story that brings out the critical elements, the failings, the contradictions, the gaps, the possibilities for struggle, the impositions of power. So representation then is not to draw out the critical standard from the outside, it's to present the world in front of us in a different way so as to bring out this kind of critical perspective.

47:10 Ricardo Lopes: So earlier I asked you what kinds of approaches to needs would lead to normative consequences. I mean, would generate normative forces, but do you think that approaching needs as neutral acts of pure description, can it serve the interests of oppressive regimes actually?

47:38 George Boss: Mhm. And I'm, I mean, and I think this idea of pure description, is a really interesting one. Like, what do we mean by a pure description? And I think Marx and Wittgenstein would both say this whole idea of a pure description is a fantasy. It is a, is a social fantasy we create within a particular social and historical order that imagines we can just tell things purely descriptively. When we describe, we do. So as socially embedded beings with a particular sort of consciousness. We describe four reasons and in ways that invoke a particular social order that isn't neutral, right, that isn't pure itself, that favors some interests over others, has struggle, and so on. So, once we kind of explode this idea of pure description as a, as a kind of philosophical possibility, what happens when we do imagine that we could do pure description, we present things as pure description. And I think Marx's way of telling that story is something like, well, look, all this does is just disappear the politics that's there, the struggle, the harms, the power. Pure description just masks all that stuff that's going on to present itself as pure and neutral. Um, SO that neutralizes politics. It removes possibilities of struggle, it makes things seem necessary when in fact they are contestable. And in that sense they can serve oppressive regimes because if you can successfully present something as a pure description, then you can take away possibilities for conflict, dissent, you can, you can make power look natural, things like that.

49:04 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, I have one final question then. What would you say are the main implications of this Marxian approach to needs for the contemporary politics of need? I mean, looking at how the politics of need presents itself contemporarily, what would be the implications of this more Marxian approach?

49:30 George Boss: Um, AND I think there's, there's two main ones I'll draw out here. Um, YOU know, one of them, I think it, it, it is conceptual, but it's a conceptual move that opens up the politics, and that is, you know, in so many of contemporary needs theory and it, and it needs talk more generally in, you know, you know, political spheres in practice. The question's always driven towards, you know, what. What do people really need? What are the facts of needs, and what do we do about those facts? And what I think Marx pushes us to do is to ask different sorts of questions like what had to happen for needs to appear in the way that they do to us today. And when things happen that way, what politically led to that happening and, and, and what were the consequences for us? Who wins, who loses, who gets harmed, who gets power, things like that. Whose interests are served. And then, you know, that opens up questions of how things can do differently. So to sort of switch around from what needs fundamentally are to what does our talk about needs and our way of thinking about needs do in the world, and what, you know, should we accept it as it is? Should we try to change it. I think that's one element. A second element is probably the centrality of work, and I spoke about that very briefly with this idea of the wage contract. And I, and I think there are, there are others who have sort of emphasized, uh, elements of the politics of need in different ways. And what I think Marx's analysis does is, is to reveal the, you know, key to getting a, a really good critical perspective on the politics of needs is to understand the kind of underlying structures of power within that politics, you know, how do those structures come about, who wins, who loses. Um, AND, and his part of that story really centers on work, the role of needs in, um, this, this, in rendering us dependent on work to live, and how that not only. HAS an important role in, in, in kind of uh. Uh, CREATING a kind of dependence on work, um, but how that also shapes our needs. And, you know, we can see that in the world around us, how often our needs are shaped by the needs of work, our education, our healthcare, all these sorts of things are often really strongly centered around, uh, the role of work in shaping our needs. And what I think Marx does is bring that work story back into the critical conversation, re-centers it, and that I think provides a really useful kind of critical perspective on the contemporary politics of need.

51:49 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. But, but I mean the way we understand work and the implications that ask for needs in our contemporary society, I, I mean that, that, that's again, uh, how work. Um, WORKS, I mean, so to speak, uh, um, I mean, uh, how work is done in this, uh, capitalist system, right? I mean, because in other kinds of social organizations, uh, I, I don't know if we lived in a hunter-gatherer society or a hor a horticulturalist society or Um, an agricultural feudalist society, the way we would understand work and the need we would attach to it would again be, uh, contextual. I mean, and it would be different from how we understand it in this capitalist context, correct?

52:49 George Boss: Yeah, that's, I mean, and, and much of what we've said today about, about need could probably be said about work as well. Work itself is a particular historical form that. Takes a particular kind of kind of shape in in what we might call the work society, um, and our understanding of what work is and its role in our life is, is, is shaped by that society and needs is a really big part of that story. Um, AND I think what the, and it brings into conversation, you know, there is a, an active conversation in, in political practice and in political theory about the work society, what it does, and, you know, looking at sort of post-work theories, which are increasingly prominent. And I think what the, the Marxian approach to me does very effectively is to bring these two kind of discourses into, into useful conversation and say, you know, one of the really important ways we have to understand the work society is to understand how it's created a particular sort of human life with a particular set of needs. Those needs feel very natural and appear very natural, and in fact they, you know, they are important right now. It's not to say that they don't matter, they do matter, but precisely because we are historical beings who live in the world that we do, these things are really important. We can't just pretend they aren't there. But they could be different, and then we have to open these critical questions about, well, look, what kind of society might generate a different sort of human life and a different set of needs? In what ways might that release us from relationships of power, independence that structure our, our current way of living and, and, and so on.

54:12 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, which is interesting because I think that in a sense it can also free you, free us from the idea that, OK, there is this set of human needs that are universal and are independent of context, and we will always need to care about these set of needs that we are currently attached to. But I mean, it frees us from that idea and it allows for us to perhaps think more of how we could reshape society economically, politically, socially in ways that we could construct new needs and in our needs that, I mean, even if you want to put it in those terms, that would be better for us.

55:09 George Boss: Hm, yeah, and, and, and, and yeah, we, we, we could probably have another hour on what better means. Uh

55:14 Ricardo Lopes: YEAH, sure, that, that's what, that's the reason why I said if you want to put it in those terms,

55:20 George Boss: right? Yeah, and I, I certainly think we can, what we can do is look at the political consequences and realities of our existing sets of needs, judge those consequences, and, and, and reach for something different if we, if we judge them negatively. Um, AND also there's big questions about who we is here. I mean, Marx himself would, you know, as part of this very socially embedded perspective, would also have, have, have, have stressed, you know, the, the class-orientated nature of our perspectives, right? In the sense that, you know, there is no view from nowhere, there's also no view from a class nowhere. You're, you're talking either as bourgeois or as proletarian, and, and so, in a sense, there's a way in which what Marx is trying to do in capital is not. Produce a better theory than the bourgeois political economists as he would frame them, but to present the proletarian version of that same theory, um, he calls himself the theoretician of the proletarian class at one point. Um, SO I think there's are really important questions here about, uh, you know, how we understand where we look at these political processes from, how we judge them, and then how we reach something else. What I think Marx really achieves is opening up a set of political questions that are, that were previously closed down and, and opening a kind of. Form of scrutiny that in my mind is more necessary now than ever with things like climate change, with the, you know, increasing role I see of, of needs in our political discourses with things like the challenges to contemporary welfare states, um, with things like aging populations, you know, given how central needs are to so much of our political discourse, we also need to be asking these kind of critical political questions about the discourse of need, and I think Marx provides some really useful openings to do that.

56:59 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So the book is again Marx and the Politics of Need, and I of course we'll be leaving a link in the description of the interview. And Dr. Boss, apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?

57:15 George Boss: Absolutely. So I'm at Queen Mary, um, so I have a page at the Queen Mary website, but I also have, uh, my own personal website. If you just Google Doctor George Bass, it comes up pretty, pretty quickly in the, in the solutions. Um, AND you can see stuff there. I try and take some of this stuff forward in the Leverhulme project, talking about the role of needs talk in more kind of contemporary politics. Um, AND the book is also open access, um, I, I should, I should note, so it's free to read.

57:40 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

57:46 George Boss: Well, thank you so much, it's been great and uh I've really appreciated this chat, it's been great fun.

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