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Title: Desire and Need
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1967
Language: en
Topics: desire, needs, revolution, social revolution, Everyday life, dialectics
Source: Chapter from *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*.

Murray Bookchin

Desire and Need

Marat/Sade

Most of the articles that have been written thus far about the

Marat/Sade play have been drivel and the tritest remarks have come from

its author, Peter Weiss. A good idea can slip from the hands of its

creator and follow its own dialectic. This kept happening with Balzac,

so there is no reason why it shouldn’t happen with Weiss.

The play is mainly a dialogue between Desire and Need—a dialogue set up

under conditions where history froze them into antipodes and opposed

them violently to each other in the Great Revolution of 1789. In those

days, Desire clashed with Need: the one aristocratic, the other

plebeian; the one as the pleasures of the individual, the other as the

agony of the masses; the one as the satisfaction of the particular, the

other as the want of the general; the one as private reaction, the other

as social revolution. In our day, Marat and de Sade have not been

rediscovered; they have been reinterpreted. The dialogue goes on, but

now on a different level of possibility and toward a final resolution of

the problem. It is an old dialogue, but in a new context.

In Weiss’s play, the context is an asylum. The dialogue can only be

pursued by madmen among madmen. Sane men would have resolved the issues

raised by the dialogue years ago. They would have resolved them in

practice. But we talk about them endlessly and we refract them through a

thousand mystical prisms. Why? Because we are insane; we have been

turned into pathological cases. Weiss, on this score, is only just; he

places the dialogue where it belongs, in an asylum policed by guards,

nuns and an administrator. We are insane not only because of what we

have done, but also because of what we haven’t done. We “tolerate” too

much. We tremble and cower with “tolerance.”

How, then, are we to act? How, following the credo imputed to Marat, are

we to pull ourselves up by the hair, turn ourselves inside out, and see

the world with fresh eyes? “Weiss refuses to tell us,” says Peter Brook

in an introduction to the script, and then Brook trails off into talk

about facing contradictions. But this doesn’t carry any conviction. The

dialogue, launched by its literary creator and by its stage director,

has its own inner movement, its own dialectic. At Corday’s third visit,

de Sade lasciviously displays her before Marat and asks: “...what’s the

point of a revolution without general copulation?” De Sade’s words are

taken up by the mimes and then by all the “lunatics” in the play. Even

Brook cannot leave the answer alone. The ending of the play, equivocal

in the script version, turns into a riotous bacchanal in the movie

version. The “lunatics” overpower the guards, nuns, visitors and

administrator; they grab all the women on the stage and everybody fucks

like mad. The answer begins to emerge almost instinctively: the

revolution that seeks to annul Need must enthrone Desire for everybody.

Desire must become Need!

Desire and Need Polarized

Need—the need to survive, to secure the bare means of existence—could

never have produced a public credo of Desire. It could have produced a

religious credo of renunciation, to be sure, or a republican credo of

virtue, but not a public credo of sensuousness and sensibility. The

enthronement of Desire as Need, of the pleasure principle as the reality

principle, is nourished as a public issue by the productivity of modern

industry and by the possibility of a society without toil. Even the

widely touted recoil of the flower children from the verities of

consumption, drudgery and suburbia has its origin in the irrationalities

of modern affluence. Without the affluence, no recoil. To state the

matter bluntly, the revolutionary growth of modern technology has

brought into question every historical precept that promoted

renunciation, denial and toil. It vitiates every concept of Desire as a

privileged, aristocratic domain of life.

This technology creates a new dimension of Desire, one that completely

transcends the notions of de Sade, or for that matter of the French

symbolists, from whom we still derive our credo of sensibility. De

Sade’s unique one, Baudelaire’s dandy, Rimbaud’s visionary, each is an

isolated ego, a rare individual who takes flight from the mediocrity and

unreality of bourgeois life into hallucinated reveries. In spite of its

high, anti-bourgeois spirit of negation, this ego remains distinctly

privileged. Baudelaire, one of the most unequivocal of the symbolist

writers, expresses its aristocratic nature with bluntness in his notion

of Dandyism. The Dandy, the man of true sensibility, he tells us, enjoys

leisure and is untroubled by Need. This leisure is defined by the

opposition of the Dandy to the crowd, of the particular to the general.

It is anchored in the very social conditions that breed Marats and the

enragés of 1793—the world of Need. Dandyism, to be sure, asserts itself

against the existing elites, but not against elitism; against the

prevailing privileges, but not against privilege. “Dandyism flourishes

especially in periods of transition,” Baudelaire notes with acuity,

“when democracy is not yet all-powerful and the aristocracy is just

beginning to totter and decay. Amidst the turmoil of these times, a

small group of men, déclassés, at loose ends, fed up—but all of them

rich in determination—will conceive the idea of founding a new sort of

aristocracy, stronger than the old, for it shall be based on only the

most precious, the most indestructible factors, on those heaven-sent

gifts that neither money nor ambition can confer.” The truth, however,

is that its gifts are not heaven-sent. This aesthetic elite floats on

the surface of the social war, a richly ornamented debris that

presupposes, objectively, the very aristocracy and bourgeoisie it

repudiates in spirit.

What, then, of the revolutionary movement—the movement that seeks to

reach below the surface of the social war into its very depths? For the

most part it dispenses almost completely with a concrete credo of

sensuousness. Marxism, the dominant project within the revolutionary

movement, offers itself to the proletariat as a harsh, sobering

doctrine, oriented toward the labor process, political activity, and the

conquest of state power. To sever all the ties between poetry and

revolution, it calls its socialism scientific and casts its goals in the

hard prose of economic theory. Where the French symbolists formed a

concrete image of man, defined by the specifics of play, sexuality and

sensuousness, the two great exiles in England formed an abstract image

of man, defined by the universals of class, commodity and property. The

whole person—concrete and abstract, sensuous and rational, personal and

social—never finds adequate representation in either credo.[1] This is

tragedy in the Hegelian sense that both sides are right. In retrospect,

it is only fair to add that the social situation of their time was

inadequate for the complete fulfillment of humanity. Ordinarily the

social period admits neither of the liberated personality nor of the

liberated society; its doors are closed to the free expression of

sensuousness and to the unfettered exercise of reason.

But the doors are never solid. There are moments when they, and indeed

the entire house, are shaken to the foundations by elemental events. In

such moments of crisis, when the senses of everyone are strained to

extraordinary acuity by social emergencies, the doors break down and the

people surge past the hanging portals, no longer as masses but as

awakened personalities. These people cannot be crucified on theoretical

formulas. They acquire their human reality in revolutionary action. The

Paris Commune of 1871 represents precisely such a moment when neither

aesthetic nor social theory adequately encompasses the over-all social

situation. The Communards of the Belleville district in Paris, who

fought the battles of the barricades and died by the tens of thousands

under the guns of the Versaillese, refused to confine their insurrection

to the private world described by symbolist poems or the public world

described by Marxist economics. They demanded the eating and the moral,

the filled belly and the heightened sensibility. The Commune floated on

a sea of alcohol—for weeks everyone in the Belleville district was

magnificently drunk. Lacking the middle-class proprieties of their

instructors, the Belleville Communards turned their insurrection into a

festival of public joy, play and solidarity. Perhaps it was foredoomed

that the prose of bourgeois society would eventually digest the songs of

the Commune—if not in an orgy of slaughter, then in the day-to-day

compromises and retreats required by work, material security and social

administration. Faced with a bloody conflict and nearly certain defeat,

the Communards flung life away with the abandon of individuals who,

having tasted of experience in the open, can no longer return to the

coffins of daily routine, drudgery and denial. They burned down half of

Paris, fighting suicidally to the very last on the heights of their

district.

In the Paris Commune of 1871, we have the expression not merely of

social interest, but of social libido.[2] It is hard to believe that the

repression following the fall of the Commune—the mass shootings, the

ruthless trials, the exile of thousands to penal colonies—owed its

savagery strictly to class vengeance. A review of the memoirs,

newspapers and letters of the time shows that the bourgeois directed his

vengeance against his own subterranean humanity. In the spontaneous

outburst of social libido which we call the Paris Commune the bourgeois

saw the breakdown of all the repressive mechanisms that maintain

hierarchical society. He recoiled with the horror and ferocity of a man

who suddenly comes face to face with his unconscious drives.

The Self: Myth and Reality

No one really learned from the Communards of the Belleville district,

with the result that Desire and the revolutionary credo developed away

from each other. In separating, both were divested of their human

content. The credo of Desire evaporated into a misty subjectivism, far

removed from all social concerns; the credo of revolution hardened into

a dense objectivism, almost completely absorbed in the techniques of

social manipulation. The need to round out the revolutionary credo with

Desire, or Desire with the revolutionary credo, remains a pressing,

perhaps the most pressing, problem of our times. Serious attempts to

achieve this totality were made in the 1920s, when the surrealists and

Wilhelm Reich tried to resynthesize Marxism and transcend it with a

larger conception of the revolutionary project. Although this project

did not succeed, it did not fail. All the issues were passed on to us,

transformed by new dimensions of thought and by a new sense of immediacy

produced by the technological advances of our time.

Ironically, the greatest single obstacle to fulfilling this project is

the revolutionary credo itself. Leninism, and its various offshoots have

refocused the revolutionist’s attention from social goals to political

means, from utopia to strategy and tactics. Lacking any clear definition

of its human goals, the revolutionary movement, at least in its

currently organized forms, has assimilated the hierarchical

institutions, puritanism, work ethic and general characterology of the

very society it professes to oppose. The goals of Marxism are largely

contained in the demand for the seizure of power rather than the

dissolution of power; the former implies the existence of hierarchy and

the power of an elite over society as a whole.

Almost equally important as an obstacle to the project envisioned by the

surrealists and Reich is the emergence of a crude, undifferentiated

subjectivism that casts the rediscovery of man exclusively in terms of

self-discovery—in the journey inward. What is basically wrong with this

form of subjectivism is not its emphasis on the subject, on the concrete

individual. Indeed, as Kierkegaard has emphasized, we have been overfed

with the universals of science, philosophy and sociology. The error that

vitiates this subjectivism is its operating principle that the self can

be divorced completely from society, subjectivity from objectivity,

consciousness from action. Ironically, this inner, isolated self turns

out to be one of the most fictitious of universals, one of the most

treacherous abstractions, a metaphysical concept in which consciousness,

far from expanding, contracts into banalities and trivia.

Philosophically, its ultimate state is pure being, a purity of

experience and inner repose that adds up to nothing.[3] Its ultimate

state, in short, is the dissolution of Desire into contemplation.

The fact is, the self cannot be resolved into an inherent “it,” a

cryptic “soul” covered and obscured by layers of reality. In this

abstract form, the self remains an undifferentiated potentiality, a mere

bundle of individual proclivities, until it interacts with the real

world. Without dealing with the world it simply cannot be created in any

human sense. Nietzsche reveals this feature of the Self when he declares

“...your true nature lies not concealed deep in you, but immeasurably

high above you, or at least what you call your self.” Valid

introspection turns out to be the conscious appropriation of a self

formed largely by the world, and thus a judgment of the world and of the

actions needed to reconstitute it along new lines. This order of

self-consciousness reaches its height during our time in revolutionary

action. To revolt, to live revolt, is the complete reconstitution of the

individual revolutionary, a change as far-reaching and as radical as the

remaking of society. In the process of discarding accumulated

experiences, of integrating and re-integrating new experience, a self

grows out of the old. For this reason it is idiotic to predict the

behavior of people after a revolution in terms of their behavior before

it. They will not be the same people.

If it is true that valid introspection must culminate in action, in a

reworking of the self by experience with the real world, this reworking

achieves a sense of direction only insofar as it moves from the existent

to the possible, from the “what is” to the “what could be.” Precisely

this dialectic is what we mean by psychic growth. Desire itself is the

sensuous apprehension of possibility, a complete psychic synthesis

achieved by a “yearning for...” Without the pain of this dialectic,

without the struggle that yields the achievement of the possible, growth

and Desire are divested of all differentiation and content. The very

issues which provide a concept of the possible are never formulated. The

real responsibility we face is to eliminate not the psychic pain of

growth but rather the psychic suffering of dehumanization, the torment

that accompanies the frustrated and aborted life.

The goal of crude subjectivism is stasis—the absence of pain, the

achievement of undisturbed repose. This stasis yields an all-embracing

placidity that dissolves anger into love, action into contemplation,

willfulness into passivity. The absence of emotional differentiation

means the end of real emotion. Confronted with the goal of insensate

stasis, dialectical growth could justly demand any right to

emotion—including the right to hate—to reclaim a real state of

sensibility, including the ability to love selectively. The apostle of

the undifferentiated type of sensibility (more precisely, sensation) is

Marshall McLuhan, whose fantasies of integral communication consist

entirely of kicks and highs. Technique, here, is degraded into ends, the

message into the media.

The Disintegrating Self

The fact remains, nonetheless, that there can be no meaningful

revolutionary credo that fails to include the subject in its point of

departure. We have passed beyond a time when the real world can be

discussed without taking up in depth the basic problems and needs of the

psyche—a psyche that is neither strictly concrete nor strictly

universal, but both newly integrated and transcended. The rediscovery of

the concrete psyche is the most valid contribution of modem subjectivism

and existentialist philosophy to the revolutionary credo, albeit the

rediscovered psyche is partial and incomplete, and often tends to become

abstracted. In an era of relative affluence, when material immiseration

is not the exclusive source of social restiveness, the revolution tends

to acquire intensely subjective and personal qualities. Revolutionary

opposition centers increasingly around the disintegration of the quality

of life, around the anti-life perspectives and methods of bourgeois

society.

To put this matter differently, the revolutionist is created and

nourished by the breakdown of all the great bourgeois

universals—property, class, hierarchy, free enterprise, the work ethic,

patriarchalism, the nuclear family and so on, ad nauseam. From all of

this wreckage, the self begins to achieve self-consciousness and Desire

begins to recover its integrity. When the entire institutional fabric

becomes unstable, when everyone lacks a sense of destiny, be it in job

or social affiliations, the lumpen periphery of society tends to become

its center and the déclassés begin to chart out the most advanced forms

of social and personal consciousness. It is for this reason that any

work of art can be meaningful today only if it is lumpenized.

The lumpen’s self is permeated by negativity, a reflection of the

overall social negativity. Its consciousness is satyr-like and its

mockery is acquired by its distance from the verities of bourgeois

society. But this very mockery constitutes the self’s transcendance of

the repressive ideologies of toil and renunciation. The lumpen’s acts of

disorder become the nuclei of a new order and his spontaneity implies

the means by which it can be achieved.

Hegel understood this fact beautifully. In a brilliant review of

Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, he writes: “The mocking laughter at

existence, at the confusion of the whole and at itself, is the

disintegrated consciousness, aware of itself and expressing itself, and

is at the same time the last audible echo of all this confusion... It is

the self-disintegrating nature of all relations and their conscious

disintegration... In this aspect of the return to self, the vanity of

all things is the self’s own vanity, or the self is itself vanity...but

as the indignant consciousness it is aware of its own dis integration

and by that knowledge has immediately transcended it... Every part of

this world either gets its mind expressed here or is spoken of

intellectually and declared for what it is. The honest consciousness

(the role that Diderot allots to himself in the dialogue[4]] takes each

element for a permanent entity and does not realize in its uneducated

thoughtfulness that it is doing just the opposite. But the disintegrated

consciousness is the consciousness of reversal and indeed of absolute

reversal; its dominating element is the concept, which draws together

the thoughts that to the honest consciousness lie so wide apart; hence

the brilliance of its own language. Thus the contents of the mind’s

speech about itself consist in the reversal of all conceptions and

realities; the universal deception of oneself and others and the

shamelessness of declaring this conception is therefore the greatest

truth... To the quiet consciousness which in its honest way goes on

singing the melody of the True and the Good in even tones, i.e., on one

note, this speech appears as ‘a farrago of wisdom and madness...?”[5]

Hegel’s analysis, written more than a century and a half ago,

anticipates and contains all the elements of the “absolute refusal”

advanced so poignantly at the present time. Today, the spirit of

negativity must extend to all areas of life if it is to have any

content; it must demand a complete frankness which, in Maurice

Blanchot’s words, “no longer tolerates complicity.” To lessen this

spirit of negativity is to place the very integrity of the self in the

balance. The established order tends to be totalistic: it stakes out its

sovereignty not only over surface facets of the self but also over its

innermost recesses. It seeks complicity not only in appearances but also

from the most guarded depths of the human spirit. It tries to mobilize

the very dream—life of the individual—as witness the proliferation of

techniques and art forms for manipulating the unconscious. It attempts,

in short, to gain command over the self’s sense of possibility, over its

capacity for Desire.

Desire and Revolution

Out of the disintegrating consciousness must come the recovery, the

reintegration and the advance of Desire a new sensuousness based on

possibility. If this sense of possibility lacks a humanistic social

content, if it remains crudely egoistic, then it will simply follow the

logic of the irrational social order and slip into a vicious

nihilism.[6] In the long run, the choices confronting the modern

bohemian—hip or freak—are not between a socially passive subjectivism

and a politically active reformism (the prevailing society, as it moves

from crisis to crisis, will eliminate these traditional luxuries), but

between the reactionary extremism of the SS man and the revolutionary

extremism of the anarchist.

Bluntly, to drop out is to drop in. There is no facet of human life that

is not infiltrated by social phenomena and there is no imaginative

experience that does not float on the data of social reality. Unless the

sense of the merveilleux, so earnestly fostered by the surrealists, is

to culminate in a credo of death (a credo advanced with consistency by

Villiers de l’Isle Adam in Axel), honesty requires that we acknowledge

the social roots of our dreams, our imagination and our poetry. The real

question we face is where we drop in, where we stand in relation to the

whole.

By the same token, there is nothing in the prevailing reality that is

not polluted by the degeneration of the whole. Until the child is

discharged from the diseased womb, liberation must take its point of

departure from a diagnosis of the illness, an awareness of the problem,

and a striving to be born. Introspection must be corrected by social

analysis. Our freedom is anchored in revolutionary consciousness and

culminates in revolutionary action.

But the revolution can no longer be imprisoned in the realm of Need. It

can no longer be satisfied merely with the prose of political economy.

The task of the Marxian critique has been completed and must be

transcended. The subject has entered the revolutionary project with

entirely new demands for experience, for re-integration, for

fulfillment, for the merveilleux. The very character structure promoted

by the revolutionary project in the past is now at issue in its most

nuclear forms. Any hierarchical organization of human differences

sexual, ethnic, generational or physical—must now give way to the

dialectical principle of unity in diversity. In ecology, this principle

is already taken for granted: the conservation, indeed elaboration, of

variety is regarded as a precondition for natural stability. All species

are equally important in maintaining the unity and balance of an

ecosystem. There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed

by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in

function between and within living things. The revolutionary project

will always remain incomplete and one-sided until it recognizes the need

to remove all hierarchical modes of thought, indeed all conceptions of

“otherness” based on domination, from its own midst. Social hierarchy is

undeniably real today in the sense that it stems from a clash of

objectively conflicting interests, a clash that up to now has been

validated by unavoidable material scarcity. But precisely because this

hierarchical organization of appearances exists in bourgeois society at

a time when the problem of scarcity can be solved, it must be eliminated

completely from the revolutionary community. And it must be eliminated

not only in the revolutionary organization, but in the outlook and

character structure of the individual revolutionary.

To rephrase Pierre Reverdy’s words, the poet now stands on the ram

parts—not only as dreamer, but also as fighter. Stalking through the

dream, permeating the surreal experience, stirring the imagination to

entirely new evocative heights are the liberatory possibilities of the

objective world. For the first time in history, object and subject can

be joined in the revolutionary affinity group—the anarchic,

revolutionary collectivity of sisters and brothers. Theory and praxis

can be united in the purposive revolutionary deed. Thought and intuition

can be merged in the new revolutionary vision. Conscious and unconscious

can be integrated in the revolutionary revel. Liberation may not be

complete—for us, at least—but it can be totalistic, involving every

facet of life and experience. Its fulfillment may be beyond our wildest

visions, but we can move toward what we can see and imagine. Our Being

is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our

Desire is Revolution.

New York June

1967

[1] A sense of incompleteness haunts Western philosophy after Hegel’s

death and explains much of the work of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,

Stirner, Nietzsche, the surrealists and the contemporary

existentialists. For the Marxians merely to dismiss this post Hegelian

development as “bourgeois ideology” is to dismiss the problem itself.

[2] Is it any different in other great revolutions? Can we resolve the

anarchic, intoxicating phase that opens all the great revolutions of

history merely into an expression of class interest and the opportunity

to redistribute social wealth?

[3] My concern with this philosophical aspect of subjectivism stems from

the fact that it is advanced not only by a salad of Hindu Cagliostros

but also by serious thinkers such as Norman 0. Brown.

[4] Diderot takes the role of the virtuous man, the petty bourgeois,

engaged in a dialogue with Rameau’s nephew, a Figaro-like scamp and

pimp.

[5] Hegel, op. cit. The passage cited here is quoted in Marx and Engels,

Selected Correspondence, pp. 542–43.

[6] This is perhaps as good a place as any to emphasize that capitalism

promotes egotism, not individuality or “individualism.” Although

bourgeois society loosened the hold of precapitalist unitary societies

on the ego, the ego it created was as shriveled as the one it replaced.

The tendency in modern state capitalism is to homogenize and massify the

ego on a scale that can be compared only with the totalitarian societies

of the archaic Oriental world. The term “bourgeois individualism,” an

epithet widely used by the left today against libertarian elements,

reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideology permeates the socialist

project; indeed, the extent to which the “socialist” project (as

distinguished from the libertarian communist project) is a mode of state

capitalism.