p As mentioned earlier Mills, Marcuse and other New Left ideologists, who allege that the working class in the developed capitalist countries does not represent a truly revolutionary force, link this conclusion not with changes in the position of the proletariat within the system of capitalist production, but with changes in respect of needs which in the final analysis influence the outlook of the worker and prevent him from appreciating his real position in society. Their train of thought is as follows: in the context of technically advanced society the ruling class is able through its reliance on the sophisticated system of “controls” (television, cinema, radio, advertising, press) to shape the outlook of the working people in accordance with specific stereotypes that play into its hands, foisting upon it “false”, “bourgeois” needs and in the final count levelling out the needs of antagonist classes, thereby “integrating” the proletariat into the overall system of state-monopoly capitalism. Marcuse declares, ".. .where the consumer gap is still wide, where the capitalist culture has not yet reached into every house or hut, the system of stabilizing needs has its limits; the glaring contrast between the privileged class and the exploited leads to a radicalization of the underprivileged. This is the case of the ghetto population and the unemployed in the United States; this is also the case of the laboring classes in the more backward capitalist countries.”  [118•*  However the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries, Marcuse also hastens to remind us, is in a quite different position, for the gulf between its needs and those of the bourgeoisie has grown much narrower, or may even have disappeared altogether. The satisfaction of material needs, which some time in the past provided a revolutionary stimulus, together with the inculcation of “false” needs have “de-revolutionised” the working class and pushed it back to the stage of a "class in itself". For "the majority of organized labor shares the stabilizing, counterrevolutionary needs of the middle classes, as evidenced by their behavior as consumers of the material and cultural merchandise, by their 119 emotional revulsion against the nonconformist intelligentsia."  [119•*  From this radicals go on to conclude that it is necessary to make a clean break with present-day requirements, rejected as “false”, and formulate qualitatively new needs (quite independently of those now existing), needs which would no longer promote the integration of the working people into the capitalist system, but rather transcendance, that is the placing of these needs beyond the confines of the existing system of social relations.

p As pointed out earlier, when substantiating his views Marcuse (like other ideologists of the radical Left anxious to bury the working class) starts out from the endeavour of the bourgeoisie to foster among the working people both material and non-material needs that would perpetuate the domination of capital. Another undeniable fact is that the bourgeoisie continues to buy over a certain sector of the working class, which thus ceases to be a vehicle for proletarian consciousness and proletarian needs. Yet does this provide enough substance for the categorical conclusion to the effect that in the developed capitalist countries the needs of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have been levelled out and the gulf between the structures of class needs has disappeared (or reached a negligible size)? In other words, are the proletariat’s present needs of a profoundly bourgeois stamp? Have those economic needs, which for the man-in-the-street (and the vulgar materialists) have by tradition always provided the unique reason for the revolutionary consciousness of the working class, really been fully satisfied? Finally, does the satisfaction of certain of the proletariat’s material needs rob it of its revolutionary character, which could only be regained if the proletariat were able artificially to create certain “distilled” needs, qualitatively different from those of which it is aware today?

p If we try to follow Marcuse’s logic, there is no help for it but to conclude that the very urge to possess things ( independent of any concrete socio-economic, political or cultural context) should be regarded as “consumerism” and the possession of things as “embourgeoisement”—a thesis carried to absurd lengths by the Maoists and their supporters. This 120 narrow, vulgar-economist approach lacks even a trace of any comprehensive analysis of phenomena at work in the sphere of consumption in modern bourgeois society.

p Marcuse starts out from the well-known fact that since the last war the working people of the developed capitalist countries have succeeded in wresting from the bourgeoisie a number of economic concessions (for which, incidentally, considerable credit should go to communist and workers’ parties in those countries), that the economic situation in those countries, such as the United States, Japan and West Germany, has in recent years been relatively favourable and the living standards of the working class there have improved in comparison with the prewar period: these developments could not fail to spread among a section of the working class reformist illusions engendering a “cheerful” consciousness.

p Furthermore, Marcuse, with no justification whatsoever, carries over trends typical of society in present-day America to other capitalist countries, without taking into account the considerable difference in the position of the working class (as far as economic prosperity is concerned), in, for instance, the United States and Italy, France and Japan; his conclusion based on rough analogies he then extends to the whole of the working class in the capitalist countries taken together. Moreover, Marcuse ignores the unstable character of the situation in the capitalist world, assuming that high economic standards are to be a permanent feature in the life of the most developed capitalist countries.

p However the main methodological flaw in the reasoning of this ideologist is that in considering the place of the proletariat in the system of revolutionary forces within modern capitalist society in the context of its needs he completely overlooks the processes linked with the qualitative change in these needs, their “increase”.  [120•* 

p When elaborating his doctrine concerning the revolutionary role of the working class in capitalist society, Lenin did not link the revolutionary character of the proletariat to its economic impoverishment; neither did he deduce it from the "law of the absolute impoverishment of the proletariat". He 121 based his doctrine on the tenet put forward by Marx  [121•*  and elaborated by Engels concerning the deterioration of the working class’s "modus vivendi", without identifying this deterioration with its economic “impoverishment”.

p It is no secret that Engels chose to disagree with the thesis put forward by Marx in his Draft Social Democratic Programme of 1891, according to which "the number and the misery of the proletariat increase continuously". In this connection Engels remarked: "This is incorrect when put in such a categorical way. The organisation of the workers and their constantly growing resistance will possibly check the increase of misery to a certain extent. However, what certainly does increase is the insecurity of existence."  [121•** 

p This thesis was further elaborated in Lenin’s writings. Lenin started out from the fact that a certain improvement in the proletariat’s economic position despite deterioration of its overall existence in conditions of capitalist development was quite possible. He pointed out that according to Marx "the more rapid the growth of wealth, the fuller the development of the productive forces of labour and its socialisation, and the better the position of the worker, or as much better as it can be under the present system of social economy.”  [121•***  However this factor cannot fundamentally alter the position of the proletariat as the class within capitalist society that is deprived of property and exploited.

p It is this fact above all which enables Engels and Lenin, despite the possibility of improvement in the workers’ economic position, to talk of them as a revolutionary class, as the bourgeoisie’s gravediggers. It is important here to bear in mind that some improvement in the welfare of the proletarian is neutralised by the emergence of his new needs stemming from changes in the objective conditions in which the working class functions as the creator of surplus value, needs which are not an indication of his “embourgeoisement” but an essential condition of his normal functioning in the context of new working conditions, needs, which can be 122 regarded not as an additional acquisition, but as compensation for the worker’s losses in connection with increasing exploitation, and which do not lead to the disappearance of the gap between the patterns and levels of proletarian and bourgeois consumption.

p In other words, in a context of growing social wealth the satisfaction of one set of the proletariat’s needs by no means represents satisfaction of the proletariat’s needs in general, for the needs that have been satisfied (and there is no telling where and when they may stop) give way to new, more elevated, needs, the urgency of whose satisfaction can play a no less revolutionising role than the hungry proletarian’s struggle for his daily bread.

p The closing gap between the consumption levels and patterns of the various classes and strata of bourgeois society noted by Marcuse applies only to needs, which, in the context of developed capitalist society, come under the heading of “primary” needs, the satisfaction of which merely ensures the reproduction of labour power essential in contemporary conditions and which come easily within the range of vision of the "social critics" with Utopian inclinations.

p At the turn of the century the motor-car was not essential for the American worker living close to “his” factory. In modern conditions as a result of changes in the structure of production siting, urbanisation and other processes born of the technological revolution, the American worker has started to need a car, if for nothing else at least in order to reach his factory.  [122•*  The worker however has not become a fraction more “bourgeois” in the process, for strictly speaking he has not received any supplementary (relatively speaking of course) advantage. The apparent advantage on closer examination turns out to be no more than essential compensation for losses resulting from changing conditions of social life. A similar picture is to be found on examination of other “advantages” gained by the workers. Looked at from 123 this angle the French worker’s holiday with pay turns out to be compensation for the increasing nervous strain and intensification of labour he is subjected to, “compensation” without which the proletarian would be unable in the new conditions to create surplus value—on the scale capital now requires— in his capacity as worker for a modern capitalist industrial enterprise.

p As for “secondary” or “second-storey” needs that are not visible at first glance, here there can be no mention of any closing gap. At the level of “first-storey” needs, which in the nineteenth century and first half of this was the unchallenged province of the bourgeoisie, the gap is indeed closing, but after this began to appear a "second storey" of needs for the bourgeoisie made its appearance. There is good reason to assume that if in the future capitalism succeeds in mobilising its resources and making possible a narrower gap in what is today the "second storey"—in so far as the very structure of needs will change and the worker will require something more “bourgeois”, not just a car, for his normal functioning as a proletarian—the bourgeoisie by then will have constructed for itself a "third storey", etc—-Whatever happens there will exist a gap between need patterns and consumption levels of the exploiting and exploited classes. This gap which embodies the fundamental qualitative difference between levels of social being for antagonistic classes, constitutes the essential condition for the reproduction of the antagonistic social structure and predetermines the increasingly insecure existence of the proletarian in bourgeois society, is inevitable under capitalism. The gap will always be a factor making for disintegration and providing the objective material basis for the revolutionary tendencies of the proletariat.

p It should also be borne in mind that the closing gap with respect to so-called “primary” needs can prove in a number of cases to be nothing but a transient phenomenon, since the instability of the economic situation in the capitalist countries provides no firm guarantee of the retention of the current level of prosperity for the mass of workers. However the rising level of needs does not only make itself felt in respect of their enrichment, in the changes taking place in their structure, that is in the appearance of new needs unknown to earlier generations of the working class, which can lead to 124 changes in the forms and immediate aims of struggle and which if not satisfied could revolutionise the working class to the same degree as did the lack of elementary means of subsistence in the nineteenth century.

p The rising level of needs also makes itself felt in the changing degrees of revolutionising potential peculiar to various types of needs experienced by the working class in capitalist society.

p Using lines of argument similar to those of the vulgar economists certain ideologists of the New Left base their theories on the assumption that the revolutionary character of the working class within the system of capitalist social relations is determined only by the level of its material wellbeing, that is to say by its “satiety”. Yet under capitalism, the worker is alienated not only from the means and fruits of his labour, but also from political power, from culture in all its wealth, without which the door to all-round development of the individual is closed. At the very earliest stages of capitalist development political and aesthetic (in the broad sense of the word) alienation played a certain revolutionising role in the struggle against the capitalist order. However, while the worker’s standard of living remains extremely low. his dissatisfaction with his economic position obviously constitutes the most important revolutionising factor in his struggle against capitalist relations. When a man is hungry, what he needs most of all is food.

p “The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, povertystricken man has no sense for the finest play.. . .”  [124•*  Of course the most socially aware section of the working class even at the early stages of capitalist development comes to appreciate the need to struggle for its political rights, for a humane existence. However, the unsatisfactory nature of its economic position remains the most important motive for militancy, 125 and the political and ideological-cum-cultural struggle represents only an indirect form of solution for economic problems.

p After securing specific economic concessions in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, the working class becomes more aware of the indignity of its political and cultural inequality within bourgeois society, and without abandoning the struggle for economic demands makes political and cultural demands its first priority, particularly since by this time the essential material and technological prerequisites for socialist revolution are taking shape within the capitalist system.

p The revolutionising role of political and cultural needs increases after relative satisfaction of certain “primary” economic needs, in particular since the new technology and the new working conditions, which enable the capitalists to satisfy these needs, do not automatically cancel out political and cultural alienation, but, on the contrary, can even exacerbate these types of alienation, although they lend them a more disguised form.  [125•*  This means that “satiety” does not solve all the proletariat’s problems, for its existence remains precarious as before, with the one difference, namely that its precarious nature now no longer manifests itself in physical, but rather political and aesthetic hunger. Satisfaction of this hunger is by no means a luxury, as might appear at first to a proletarian lacking enough to eat. Needs are always shaped 126 by historical and social conditions and the true significance of this or that need can only be appreciated in this context.

p The revolutionising role of socio-political needs in modern capitalist society is also determined by the highly relevant factor that technology in the context of the confrontation of the two world systems, facilitating as it does relative economic prosperity of the worker, at the same time promotes the consolidation of the positions already secured by the militaryindustrial complex and can be used as a means of destroying and annihilating civilisation, not to mention the happy materially prosperous existence already achieved. In this situation the working class’s struggle to participate in the solution of social and political problems, not merely within the confines of the individual factory but also throughout society as a whole, becomes more than a question linked with the position of the worker in existing society, but rather a question of life and death in the literal sense of the word.

p The fact that appreciation of the lack of precisely political and cultural rights can provide the rallying force behind modern movements of an anti-imperialist complexion is demonstrated beyond doubt by the New Left movement which was directly brought into being not by economic motives, but by the realisation of the unsatisfactory political and cultural position in which the working people of the capitalist countries found themselves. This was precisely the progressive element in that movement, although it should be added that accentuation of political and cultural demands resulted, in the New Left’s case, in disregard for the need to change property relations in modern capitalist society.

p In his arguments concerning the levelling out of bourgeois and proletarian needs Marcuse does not take into account the increase in the revolutionising potential of political and cultural needs, assuming that everything is determined by the availability of "two cars" and "three television sets". As one of Marcuse’s critics justly pointed out, a situation has taken shape in which ".. .man lives by ’bread alone’ and if belike a mere dog—is fed on time and not disturbed while eating, he will never set his foot on the dangerous path of revolt against the powers that be.”  [126•*  But if it turns out that man 127 lives "not by bread alone", if political and cultural needs are not swamped out by the above-mentioned feeding, but, on the contrary, rendered all the more acute by it and the bourgeoisie proves incapable of satisfying these needs, there is clearly insufficient ground for maintaining that the needs (taken as a whole) of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are being levelled out and that the working class no longer has any needs, the struggle for whose satisfaction could serve as a revolutionary stimulus. It thus stands to reason that there is also insufficient ground for categorically assuming that the proletariat of today has lost its sense of revolutionary and liberating mission.

p If this is the case, there is no hiding the illusory nature of Marcuse’s demands for the creation of new “genuine” needs which would lead the working class forth, beyond the confines of the "repression continuum", guaranteeing it "critical scope": nor is there much room for doubt as to the anarchistic and Utopian nature of his call to “create” these “new” needs on a basis of a radical break with old needs, for political and cultural needs which are under discussion here are not summoned forth by "social critics" in the tranquil isolation of their studies, but by the very history of the revolutionary movement and the class struggle—by life itself. On the other hand, there is no gulf between political, cultural and economic needs: they closely overlap genetically and functionally, leading one out of the other. Moreover, as was pointed out earlier, the increase in the revolutionary potential of those same cultural needs becomes possible only provided that “primary” economic needs have first been satisfied. If we were to imagine, that on the strength of some combination of circumstances a sharp fall in the economic situation had taken place in the developed capitalist countries, cultural needs would once again be pushed into the background and daily bread would once again become the main need revolutionising the class of hired toilers. Of course change in the revolutionising potential of various forms of capitalist alienation, in particular intensification of the revolutionising potential of political and cultural needs, does not imply the transfer of the main contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie from the domain of the basis to the domain of the superstructure—a situation put 128 forward by certain ideologists of the New Left, in particular Sartre.  [128•* 

p Making every attempt to stress the trend towards increasing economic prosperity of the working people in the developed capitalist countries, the New Left ideologists ignore the fact that in these countries another trend is also making itself felt, one which makes it impossible to maintain that the working class there is not faced by any economic problems and that in the economic sense it has already acquired a “cheerful” consciousness. The fact is that the very character and conditions of labour in the capitalist enterprise have changed. The introduction of up-to-the-minute machinery and improvements in technology inevitably lead in the capitalist context to intensification of labour, increased expenditure of mental energy, growing discontent with work on the part of the employee, since it involves fewer and fewer creative elements, and to growing fear among men in traditional trades and professions with regard to the future. Another important factor in this connection is the widening gap between rates at which intensification of labour proceeds and wages grow.

p Consequently the increase in the revolutionising potential of political and cultural demands made by the exploited mass does not signify sublation of the problem of ownership or the shift of contradictions between exploiter and exploited from the domain of basis to that of superstructure. It merely points to the modification of the manifestation of that contradiction.

p It can be argued that political, and particularly cultural needs today have not yet secured a firm place for themselves and have not yet come to the fore in relation to the whole complex of those needs, which play a revolutionising role for many sectors of the working class in the developed capitalist countries. When objections of this type are made an important factor is usually forgotten: the "increase in needs", 129 possessed of revolutionary potential is organically linked with the "increased stature" of the working class itself, that is with the change in its composition, its intellectualisation (an inevitable development in the context of the technological revolution and the transformation of science into a directly productive force), with the succession of generations within the working class. The proletariat is not immune to change. It is unchanging only in the sense that it continues throughout its existence to be the exploited class of capitalist society creating surplus value for the bourgeoisie, and as a result retaining a specific place within the system of capitalist production. Yet within the working class different generations follow on one from the other, which display common features —in the sphere of needs as elsewhere—and also distinctive ones. Each generation, starting out from the complex of needs peculiar to it and historically shaped, carries out its historical mission in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and secures in varying degrees the satisfaction of those needs, which feat appears as an achievement, and to a certain extent the result, of the social activity and struggle of the generation in question. For the generation which comes after it, this result is a starting-point that constitutes a historical prerequisite for the formulation and realisation of new demands dictated by new conditions of labour and the reproduction of labour power.

p Not one generation of the working class is in a position to resolve all the problems of that class as a community caught up in a process of historical development. Each generation (as Hegel pointed out) resolves only one—“its” “new” problem, and is only able to do this after acknowledging all previous solutions and with reference to them, while at the same time taking note of new demands stemming from change in the character of labour, levels of technological development, etc. There was ample justification for Gus Hall, when analysing the tasks facing the working class in the United States, to emphasise the role of the younger generation of American workers. At the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in 1969 he stated: "The young workers, who are new in industry, are also in great numbers becoming the shock brigades for the working class. They spark the rank-and-file movements. They are pushing 130 for a revitalisation of the trade-union movement. It is these young workers, many of whom were themselves recently students, who form the link between the students and the working class. They are a strong force in the struggle against racism because they do not have some of the hangups afflicting many of the older workers. They are of the radicalised generation. They are more open to new socialist ideas. In our industrial concentration efforts these young workers are our central concern.”  [130•* 

p It is during the succession of one generation after another, as each new generation is urged on towards revolutionary action by new, “higher” needs and setting itself and resolving new “higher” tasks, that the working class increases in stature and its self-reproduction as a "class for itself" takes place. This increase in stature should of course be regarded as a dialectically contradictory process. The transformation of the working class from a "class in itself" to "a class for itself", that is the working class’s appreciation of its specific position in capitalist society, its specific interests and needs, as different from those of the bourgeoisie, and hence the appreciation of its historic liberating mission constitutes a permanent process, i.e., one which is reproduced anew at each new stage of social development. (The phases of this dynamic process do not necessarily coincide in time for the various ethnic contingents of the proletariat.) The permanent character of this process is bound up with the fact that the conditions shaping the social existence of the proletariat do not remain unchanged and it is obliged each time, once more to grasp the changed conditions of its existence, that is reproduce itself anew as a "class for itself". It should be borne in mind that a time-gap can occur between actual changes in the working class’s existence and the appreciation of those changes by its various sections. The bourgeoisie strives if not to immortalise, then at least to retain this gap for as long as possible, using to this end the mass media under its control, economic levers and outright repression directed against vanguard detachments of the proletariat, above all against its party, which is called upon to help the 131 working class appreciate the changing conditions of its existence and its new needs.

This time-gap can lead to a certain slacking-off in the revolutionary activity of the proletariat at certain stages of its development (which creates the illusion of conciliation between the workers and the capitalist establishment, a “ merger” with the bourgeoisie and affirmation in its ranks of the “cheerful” consciousness). However the removal of this gap (more often than not precisely by the efforts of a new generation within that class) is not simply a reversal to former positions but a step forward to an appreciation of new needs and the solution of new problems. The question of needs and their dynamic structure, if viewed in its proper historical perspective, adds weight not to the radical thesis concerning the “integration” of the working class, but rather to the dialectical conception of revolutionary development and the formation of revolutionary forces, which examines the position of the working class within a changing socio- political context and maintains that there is a real gap between the actual position of the worker and the bourgeois—a gap which provides direct revolutionary stimulus for the constantly evolving proletariat.