Leiss’s Critical Theory of Human Needs

Abstract

The contribution of William Leiss to socio-ecological theory has much in common with that of Bookchin and Gorz. They all purport to reveal the contradictions of social relations of exploitation and domination and to point the direction to a just society and sound ecology. Leiss focuses his critique of exploitative and repressive social relations of the capitalist form in particular, on the level of exchange of commodities, i.e. the level of circulation of capital. He does this in the belief that the crisis of society and ecology is generated by expanding consumerism which he sees as an aberration of human needs and as the source of ecological destruction. His critique of consumerism and indeed his theory of conserver society to which the critique takes him assume an anthropology of human nature remarkably similar to that of Bookchin and Gorz. We shall try to demonstrate in this section that it is another variation of the anthropology of asocial self-sufficiency. We shall argue the sense in which this conception of human nature underlies his critical proposition of consumerist human needs and his programme for a conserver society.