ABSTRACT
This chapter re-reads Marx's account of the needs of wage-labour as a performative political intervention. Drawing on Chapters Two and Three, it presents his method as one of critical re-presentation: a restaging of everyday life in commercial society that laid bare its oppressions, contradictions, struggles, and revolutionary possibilities. In doing so, Marx's approach collapsed the divide between theory and politics, deploying theoretical analysis as a political action to influence the very conflicts it described. Using that frame, the chapter reconstructs three notionally sequential political moments in Marx's account. First, the politics behind needs considers the constitutive role of the wage-relation and the violence of primitive accumulation in generating the capitalistic system of needs. Second, the politics in enacting needs examines how the exclusions and indeterminacies of the wage-contract produced both widespread harms and structural antagonisms that Marx sought to radicalise. Third, the politics following needs explores the capitalist system of needs’ inability to meet the very needs it generates, producing radical needs that push that system towards its own revolutionary transcendence. In advancing that reading, the chapter also stages its own re-presentation, showing how Marx's innovations disrupt the widespread depoliticisations of need in contemporary theory.
