Marx’s categories of need (we shall see that he gives several interpretations of it) are not as a whole economic categories. He tends to treat concepts of need as non-economic categories, as historical-philosophical, that is as anthropological value categories, and therefore as not subject to definition within the economic system. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 1

In our view the “natural needs” are not a group of needs but a limit concept: a limit (different for different societies) beyond which human life is no longer reproducible as such, beyond which the limit of bare existence is passed […]. It would be sheer elitism, at least in our world, to eliminate this limit concept from the discussion of man’s needs. Therefore I shall speak not of “natural needs” but of the “existential limit to the satisfaction of needs”. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 1

No specific product or need possesses the quality of being a luxury product or a luxury need. That is determined solely by the question of whether the object is possessed and used (and therefore the corresponding need is satisfied) by the majority of the population or only by a minority which represents a significantly higher level of purchasing power as a result of the social division of labor. As a consequence of increasing productivity, and as a consequence of changes in the social structure, needs that originally were luxury needs become necessary needs, without them undergoing the slightest modification. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 1

According to Marx, the end of social production ought to be the satisfaction of social needs. But capitalist industry and agriculture do not produce for needs, nor for their satisfaction. The end of production is the valorisation of capital, and the satisfaction of needs (on the market) is only a means towards this end. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 1

Marx judges capitalism as a society that imposes quantitative limits on quality, and in two different relationships: “The transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production, [is equivalent to] restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.” […] Capitalism “quantifies” all its objective expressions and produces them (as it also produces the needs directed towards them) only if it is “profitable” to do so. Capitalism at the same time quantifies the complexly qualitative world of human needs, turns into quasi-exchange value and renders it “purchasable”; all qualitative needs that can neither be quantified nor purchased are inhibited. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 2

How can the values of radical criticism become the values of the masses, that is, how can Ought become the collective Ought? The reply is: “Theory is actualised in a people only in so far as it actualises their needs. … A deep-going revolution can only be a revolution in basic needs.” The “bearers” of radical needs are therefore those who can actualise radical deep-going theory. Marx then looks for the bearers of these radical needs and in the end he finds them in the working class. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 3

1. Capitalism is an antinomous society: its essence is alienation. The wealth of the species and the poverty of the individual are reciprocally based and reproduce each other. The antinomy is that of commodity production becoming universal. (Marx says: “Value having become capital, and living labour confronting it as a mere use value, so that living labor appears as a mere means to realise objectified, dead labor …, and having produced, as the end product, alien wealth on one side and, on the other, the penury which is living labour capacity’s sole possession.” 2. Capitalist society, as a totality, as a “social body”, produces not only alienation but the consciousness of alienation, in other words, radical needs. 3. This consciousness (radical needs) is necessarily generated by capitalism. 4. This consciousness (the complex of radical needs) already transcends capitalism by its existence, and its development makes it impossible for capitalism to remain the basis of production. The need to resolve the antinomy and the activity directed towards this end are therefore constituted in the collective Ought, in the consciousness that “exceeds its bounds”. This concept of “consciousness exceeding its bounds” is beyond question the same as the “imputed consciousness” which is a central category in Lukacs’ “History and Class Consciousness” […]. Although Marx does not say so, it is obvious that this “consciousness exceeding its bounds” is not identical with the “empirical consciousness” of the working class. It is not consciousness of misery and still less poverty in the narrow sense: the needs that flow from it (or which constitute its base) are not directed towards “greater possession” and still less towards higher wages or “a better standard of living”. It is the simple consciousness of alienation, the recognition that social relations are alienated. from this there follows (or this constitutes the base for) the need to overcome alienation, to overturn the alienated social and productive relations in a revolutionary way, and to create general social and productive relations which are not alienated. As yet, history has not answered the question as to whether capitalist society in fact produces this “consciousness exceeding its bounds”, which in Marx’s day did not exist, and whose existence Marx therefore had to project. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 3

The system of needs in communism must be dealt with from two different aspects: from that of material and non-material needs, and from that of the relation between these two types within a single structure of needs. By “material needs” I mean needs whose objects and means of satisfaction (used in consumption and in productive consumption) must be produced and continually reproduced. Needs of a non-material character are, in contrast, those whose objects of satisfaction are not “produced” in the organic interchange with nature or are not produced at all. (I know this is a not “pure” distinction. To satisfy the need of art, production it to some extent necessary: houses must be built, books must be printed. But the need for art as such is not satisfied either by the house or by the book but by the work of art, which as an objectivation does not belong to the sphere of production). […] In Marx’s view, the sphere of production is the field which will always remain “the field of necessity”; above it is the “realm of freedom”, which subordinates production to its own ends. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 4

The category of “socially necessary labor time” will be interpretable only in relation to the process of material production. (The concept of “socially necessary labor time” is not applicable to any “free” activity, whether medicine, teaching, planning, or scientific and artistic activity. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, Chapter 4