Toward a Critique of Consumer Society

Los Angeles, July 14, 1942. The geopolitical constellation of this period is one of the century’s darkest. National Socialist Germany blanketed the world first with its politics, then its war, and stands at the zenith of its military accomplishments. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, its opponents – Western monopoly capitalism and Eastern state socialism – also appear only to represent different paths to a single historically generic irrevocable goal: the relentless steering of the individual through collectives and cartels, the abolition of the subject in an “administered world.” This, in any case, is the background assumption – as suggested by their political experience – of several scattered German emigres of the Frankfurt School who, “at the end of the flight, on the ocean, where the East again dawns in the furthest West,”1 found themselves in the company of like-minded intellectuals to discuss Nietzsche’s views on needs and culture. Why “needs,” why “culture,” why Nietzsche? “Needs” describe general feelings of physical or psychic conditions of deficiency and thus provide men and women with the means and ends of their activities. Since the Enlightenment they have been a theme in social philosophy, specifically under the sign of their expansion in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In the process of the emergence of bourgeois society, the dynamically growing “system of needs” (Hegel) burst open the feudal fetters. While the unleashing of needs was valued as a symbol of progress by liberal Enlightenment thinkers, in romantic-conservative sociology it was viewed as a cause and manifestation of cultural destruction. Both thematizations, the affirmative and the critical, joined in a peculiar combination in the tradition of German idealism and the Marxist critique of political economy. In the economic web of relationships in which the satisfaction of individual needs is intertwined at the same time with the satisfaction of the needs of others, Hegel perceived subjective egoism transformed into objective morality. In Marx, the recourse to needs even played the “secret leading role,”2 insofar as the politico-economic categories of the value of labor-power, surplus-value, and use-value all were defined with the help of the concept of needs. Marx also assumed “that every revolution and its results . . . were determined by needs.”3 So the discussants, who see themselves in this intellectual tradition, could not reject out of hand the assumption that total socialization [Vergesellschaftung] does not proceed smoothly and unperturbed, indeed that in the human nature of needs there exists a type of emancipatory potential for resistance. How, though,