Outlaw Needs

Outlaw Needs the illegitimate, non-hegemonic ways we meet our basic needs of love, affection, education, leisure time, health care, food, shelter, etc. Examples: non-heterosexual love, using illegal drugs as a recreational activity or as a medicine, robbery

The fight for social justice isn’t just about anger and outrage.  Anger and outrage are merely the starting point for understanding why we’re so motivated (and unmotivated) to resist.  For example, many out there see the #Occupy Movement as just a mass riot of trouble making, angry anarchists with no objectives or demands. The anger is real and legitimate, precisely because our needs and the needs of our loved ones aren’t being met.  We’re out there because oppression and exploitation proliferate and control us.  Our health care is shitty, exploitative, profit motivated.  Our lives revolve around meaningless consumerism. Our jobs, if we have one, are alienating, boring, underpaid, meticulous, competitive. Our very lives and the lives of those we love are broken and fragmented, destroyed by forces which are kept invisible and hidden from our eyes.

Yes, this movement is fired by anger, an anger which should be understood, realized, and paid close attention to, but—complimentary to that—a movement endures through our love for others and for our community.  We human beings want fulfilling, enriching lives where we are free to act and love in a world which is safe, but we are, although rightfully, too busy with the agony and pain we are experiencing under a system that hasn’t been addressing our fundamental needs.

It is important to recognize that love is connected to our survival needs.  Historical Materialism¹, in fact, takes survival needs as a starting point (i.e., as a species we require food, shelter, etc.).  But humans meet these needs socially—through concrete, historically-specific modes of social organization. We keep our bodies alive through social interaction as we must support one another and care for one another in order to survive.  The easiest example is the one where caretakers feed, cloth, and care for young who are helpless on their own.  This demonstrates that we need one another and need love from others in order to survive and thrive.  Hence, social interaction IS a vital need just as water or food is a vital need.  Love IS a vital need as we need others to care about us in order to survive.

Workers in capitalist society, however, don’t control their human needs, but are in fact outlawed and controlled.  This is one site of struggle under capitalism.  When workers exchange their labor power for a wage, they’re forced to give up their human needs in several ways.  First, the minimum wage isn’t a livable wage as it doesn’t cover the costs of basic needs (i.e. food, clothing, housing, health care, education, intellectual and creative development).  Second, the production of labor power (i.e. care for the proceeding generations of workers, children) is not fully covered by wages.  The feeding, clothing, and caring of children is underpaid or unpaid as this has been seen as women’s natural unpaid role, i.e. the mother.  Third, and lastly, consciousness has been commodified, which has separated mind from body, public from private, ways of knowing from their historical material conditions, and love from the meeting of human needs.

Critical psychology was elaborated in the early 1970s by European Marxists who rejected mainstream bourgeois psychology. One of their key concepts is Action Potence, which refers to an individual’s ability to satisfy needs and assure a satisfactory life.  There are two types of Action Potence: Restricted Action Potence and Generalized Action Potence.  Restricted Action Potence refers to an individual trying to make the best of their current position. Generalized Action Potence, on the other hand, refers to an individual trying to go beyond their current positioning in order to better their existing position. The first refers to action that is immanent to the existing order, while the latter attempts to transcend that order.

Restricted Action Potence is encouraged under capitalism as it maintains the capitalist system by producing compliant subjects who accept their current, alienating social conditions.  Sexual identities (and all other reified identities) are an example of Restricted Action Potence as they restrict the power to collectively change the existing society as it divides social relationships.  So what is the Generalized Action Potence which can see change and go beyond our existing conditions?  Revolutionary love which begins with our human needs and relates them to the historical reality of capitalism and to the form of society that will emerge from its ashes. 

Outlaw needs are the grounds for beginning the process of politicizing capitalism and people.  We need to tap into people’s alienated labor, their costly health care, their dead end jobs which pay little, their dehumanized sexualities, their depleting leisure time, even their boredom.  This is the starting point for politicizing people and helping them see that capitalism is a dead end.  Our own personal lives are destructed and decaying due to the current exploitative system of capitalism which outlaws so many of our basic needs.

 We must also begin with the exiting realities and see that we cannot dismiss people’s experiences, which are organized through reified categories (like gender and sexual identities), but we must work on them and beyond them through the process of creating collective consciousness. And that’s not just a rational process, but one that is also affective, emotional and symbolic.  We should work on forming collective consciousness through disidentification. That is to say, through an unlearning practice/process where we work on our existing ways of identifying by uprooting them in order to see them in a historical frame which was produced from a mode of production which outlaws many human needs.  This process is not easy, and can lead to fear, anger, and frustration as it calls into question the identities we’ve relied on our whole lives.  This process is never over as we are limited by our historical position and always in a position of reworking our awareness to make visible the historical and material conditions of capitalist culture.

(1) According to The German Ideology by Marx and Engels, historical materialism’s starting point for social theory is the presence of real living individuals who need to produce what is needed to survive (i.e. Species Being).  Under Capitalism, our Species Being is mediated by the collective of human laborers, but these human laborers are stratified into a class structure where the product of their labor is owned and controlled by the bourgeoisie in order to accumulate a profit.  Capitalists extract this surplus labor from human laborers in order to obtain a profit.