Pregledni rad

Human Needs and Social Values

Ivan Kuvačić ; Odsjek za sociologiju, Filozofski fakultet Zagreb, Đure Salaja 3

Sažetak

The author elaborates the problem of human needs and social values within the state-system distortion of Marx’s theory, by which the human being is reduced to the economic being. Human needs, which are given an important role in the Marx's analysis of alienation, are almost completely neglected in this framework. The main source of this distortion is in the manipulative character of power, i. e. in the development of the big centers of power which, in order to manage more easily and effectively, manipulate the human needs, especially the elementary instincts and drives. As the manipulation is possible if disguised by ideology which is the integral part of a contemporary value system, the ideology is thus taking the function of the mediatory instrument by which the partial interests are presented as the dominant values.
To be fully capable to grasp this mechanism we have to take into account the human nature, which in itself is the historic category. Although man has developed new needs, the significant role is still played by the physiological ones and the need for security. Namely, the need for self-assertion in man is actually the need to be important to others. This is the example of the individual striving being subjected to the process of constant modification in accordance with the socially accepted values.
Further, the role of private proprietorship is discussed: in the development of man’s consciousness, separation from the traditional community and taking the initiative, but also in the alienation of all physical and mental senses, and the emergence of the sense of proprietorship. In this process the significant role is played by money amassing and power seizing, as both processes lead to power to influence, i. e. to putting some other man into position of one's instrument. That means that the generic being would be put in service to a lower need. The relative poverty of the human needs is conditioned by the social relations. Strivings of each individual and whole nations to realize full and free development are constantly hampered by lower, primary needs and drives which become the means of domination and stabilization of certain repressive modes of social life. The author stresses that such an elimination of private proprietorship which is pulling back to the crude leveling of the needs provides the basis from which the tyranny emerges. The way to human community is not through the egotistic individualism of the bourgeois society, but through the collective solidarity and readiness of individual to sacrifice for the community, as manifested in the proletarian combats from Paris Commune up to nowadays. Unfortunately, this is still more of an ideal than the reality, as this principle is viewed by some as the fruit of Marx’s youthful fantasies while others place it into some future higher level of development of the new society. The solution is in finding such modes of community which would lead to the universal enrichment of human strivings and needs at a given level of social development. The core of the problem is that the conception of human happiness as defined within the bourgeois framework rests still unchallenged by a real empirical socialist alternative.

Ključne riječi

Hrčak ID:

156237

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/156237

Datum izdavanja:

31.3.1976.

Podaci na drugim jezicima: hrvatski

Posjeta: 6.092 *