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Nov 7, 2026
Marx and the Politics of Need
Summary
When one hears about needs in the context of politics, one might imagine that they are dealing with facts that simply cannot be circumvented. Moving from this idea, Boss sees a tension, one in which politics, a field of negotiated agency, might find itself strangled by a closed concept. Without wanting to contend that people can actually live without having certain basic needs met, Boss wants to ensure that politics itself remains a realm of freedom, and finds in his own reading of Karl Marx a thread of thinking that slowly unwinds social and economic theories that unwittingly create situations they imagine themselves to be mirroring. Reading Marx in dialogue with economics, critical theory and contemporary political theory, Boss seeks to interrogate the ways in which our thinking about politics may not be best thought of as detached reflections on reality but active forms of participation in and creation of reality, a process that locks down what we should be trying to keep open. Marx and the Politics of Need (Routledge, 2026) is slowly but surely throughout the book turned into a need of politics, a careful and methodical reflection on what political thinking itself is.
George Boss is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.
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