How many of the goods that you own would you consider indispensable? And how many are unnecessary? This is not merely a personal question; it is a political one.
Goods are made of stuff taken from nature. With the environmental crisis, raw materials are increasingly scarce, and pollution resulting from the production process leads to disastrous consequences for ecosystems.
Hence the task of distinguishing between goods that satisfy essential needs and goods that satisfy artificial ones is crucial. We need a theory that enables us to do that. Fortunately, we have one, formulated by the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller.
Heller was born in Budapest in 1929. She was of Jewish origins, and parts of her family died in Auschwitz. After the war, as she studied and taught philosophy at the University of Budapest, she became member of a group of thinkers known as the “Budapest School,” one of the most creative in postwar Marxist thinking. The group’s tutelary figure was Georg Lukács, the author of History and Class Consciousness.
The relations of Lukács and the Budapest school with the Hungarian communist regime alternated between phases of repression and tolerance. During the period running from the 1956 Budapest uprising to the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, Heller took a stance in favor of “socialism with a human face.” She identified at this time with the international New Left that was emerging on both sides of the Iron Curtain, criticizing both US imperialism and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union.
From the 1956…
Auteur: Razmig Keucheyan
