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Can Socialism Fulfill Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

When democratic socialists advocate for a better future, we imagine a society where all people’s essential needs are met.  But to what extent can socialism actually deal with the issues we face on a systemic level? In this article, Maslow’s hierarchy – as flawed as it is as a psychological theory – is applied to the prospect of democratic socialism in the United States to evaluate its potential effectiveness in lifting the working class to self-actualization.

By Bryce Springfield, 24 June, 2022

When democratic socialists envision an ideal society, what do we picture? An end to corruption? Universal healthcare and tertiary education? Workplace democracy? Personal butlers for all?

 As democratic socialists, we imagine a society in which all people’s essential needs are met and radical democracy is in place, not only for government matters but also in the workplace, to bring about stronger decision-making processes rooted in popular sovereignty.

Considering the failure of capitalism to address many of these needs, this elicits the question: to what extent can an alternative socioeconomic model, such as democratic socialism, solve the most pressing problems we face in the US and internationally?

One of the most culturally significant concepts cultivated from the field of psychology to analyze the satisfaction of human needs and desires is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy posits that before higher needs and desires can be addressed, individuals tend to favor satisfying their more essential needs first.

Abraham Maslow identified these needs, from most essential to least, as physiological, safety, love and belonging, and esteem needs, with the individual’s ultimate goal being to reach the Nirvana of self-actualization.

Before I utilize the model as a comparison, let me preface by making an obligatory note that Maslow’s hierarchy is very imperfect. For one, Abraham Maslow failed to study a wider population than the upper point-one percent of academics. Thishierarchy was largely developed based on little more than personal conjecture, as he strictly studied a select few people for analysis he deemed a “master race” of people – such figures as Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Addams.

In fact, as a preemptive response to concerns regarding this fundamentally flawed and ungeneralizable sampling method, he wrote in Motivation and Personality that “the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.”

Such classism and disregard for the value of those he viewed as an underclass of “specimens” – not to mention the fact that his model solely focuses on individualist societies – forces me to concede that Maslow’s hierarchy is far from an ideal model to work off of.

However, considering modern Western culture’s familiarity with  Maslow’s hierarchy, I feel that it is necessary to apply it to a potential democratic socialist future in the United States and enumerate how socialism can lift the working classes closer to reaching self-actualization in accordance with Maslow’s theory.

Physiological Needs

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that clean air, water, food, shelter, rest, clothing, and reproduction are essential human rights. Maslow, likewise, classifies these as physiological needs.

A developed socialist society would provide for these rights through a variety of means. At the most basic level, it would ensure workers’ ownership of their workplaces and provide strong social services – whether through a state or other collective entities – that cover common needs for water, food, decent housing, and clothing.

A strong concern for environmental sustainability and comprehensive regulations vis-à-vis ecological exploitation would ensure clean air and water and a desirable environmental future for the communities we live in. Extending this line of thought, workers’ rights would be guaranteed and reinforced through workplace democracy or collective bargaining, and workers would have the right to limited work weeks, strong pay and benefits, and more direct involvement in workplace decisions.

Ideally, it would hold sacred reproduction rights by guaranteeing access to reproductive care via a public, universal healthcare system and a guarantee of adequate parental leave from work to enable parents to make their own decisions regarding family planning and bodily autonomy.

Safety Needs

Maslow’s second rung involves one’s security and social connections. In other words, this concerns one’s sense of a community safety net, financial security, protection, and access to necessary resources to participate in their community.

Our society would avert the traditional, draconian notion that punishment is the only manner, or even a desirable manner at all, through which we can solve our problems and provide security. As worded by the great political activist and professor Angela Davis of the University of California, “Prisons do not disappear social problems; they disappear human beings.”

Nowhere does this quote ring truer than in the United States, where the horrors of our bloated prison system and the overlapping systemic problems involving the police and private capital have removed vast swaths of the population, particularly of the poor and of racial minority groups, from being able to contribute to society or even have a solid chance of reintegrating into society.

Among Western countries, we are an exception in that we permanently place prisoners and former prisoners into an underclass deprived of the rights and assistance other Americans enjoy, including the ability to get employment, to receive housing or food assistance, or to even be legally eligible to contribute to the electoral process.

No other country has so rapidly grown its prison population to the highest rate of incarceration in the world – despite consistent drops in actual crime for decades – and no other country is so stringent in its criminalization of poverty, color, and nonviolent crime.

Instead, a socialist society should opt for a rehabilitative and preventative community safety model. The former part should involve incorporating social workers and mental health professionals into emergency dispatches and prisons, and even moving beyond modern conceptions of dealing with crime.

The latter part should involve addressing many of the aforementioned physiological needs, such as housing, along with addressing other areas of need, such as illiteracy, unemployment, physical and mental illness, and drug addiction. This, far more than a punitive system designed to satisfy visceral feelings of vengefulness and authoritarianism rather than resolve our societal problems, is bound to direct more people toward satisfying futures where they are active and constructive participants in their communities.

We must ensure social mobility, financial security, and community connection for all people through a strong jobs guarantee program; access to a strong universal healthcare system dealing with both physical and mental health, public transportation, the Internet, and news media invested in the betterment of the people’s quality of life, independent of the profit motive; the establishment of community recreation centers and parks for common enjoyment; and ensuring personal property rights.

Further, a democratic socialist society should ensure that an ecologically stable future is ahead of us and our descendants by transitioning to a society based on renewable energy and sustainability, particularly by including such efforts into collectively subsidized training and employment programs.

Love and Belonging Needs

Admittedly, for the third rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, the onus is largely on the individual to address it. However, a socialist society can provide the basis for such interactions that establish sentiments of love and belonging to occur by, again, providing opportunities for social connection.

Such opportunities might transpire via the establishment of public parks, community centers, afterschool programs, and community events, and the employment of those who seek work. Connection with family may also factor into this through vacation time and strong benefits for workers.

Esteem Needs

 Esteem needs refer to the individual’s desire for achievement and freedom. There are several ways a socialist society can address this desire.

A society of collective ownership can ensure esteem needs are met by guaranteeing sociocultural freedoms outright, such as by codifying the right to bodily autonomy; rejecting punishment and accepting rehabilitation as our criminal justice model, especially for nonviolent offenders; rejecting unfair discrimination; and promoting freedom of personal expression.

Additionally, we can promote the satisfaction of esteem needs by guaranteeing universal access to education from preschool through tertiary education, providing training and employment opportunities, valuing decentralized popular initiative and agitation for social progress, and orienting around reducing socioeconomic inequalities and maximizing mobility.

Further, we can only truly satisfy society’s esteem needs if we follow a radical democratic agenda based on anti-corruption and free and open government elections that include all groups of people, including through enacting strong limits on lobbying and campaign finance, implementing automatic voter registration, providing felons and former felons the right to vote, expanding voting rights to young taxpayers and students who will see to the greatest extent the consequences of today’s government policy actions, and adopting an election system based on ranked-choice and proportional representation.

Not only this, but a socialist society could also reinforce participatory democratic principles by incorporating direct democracy and popular amendments into regular elections.

Self-Actualization Needs

Only once the previously mentioned types of needs are addressed can our society move on to assist the people in lifting themselves to their self-actualization phase, according to Maslow. Much like the “Love and Belonging Needs” layer, there is relatively little that collective entities can do to directly beget self-actualization. However, there are still ways for a socialist government to lay the bedrock for this ultimate development of the self.

A socialist government can operate to provide direct discretionary community assistance in cases that existing organized programs fail to fully provide for essential needs. It can provide resources for cooperative enterprises and workers’ councils, as well as provide the economic resources for municipalities to run local projects and events and develop opportunities for community-based volunteering.

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For countries other than the US, many of these ideas are not radical by any means. In fact, some of them are quite standard.

For instance, there is not a single highly industrialized nation, short of the United States, that fails to provide some form of universal healthcare to its people, as they recognize the importance of maintaining a healthy workforce and general population regardless of income. The majority of major industrialized nations provide zero-tuition or negligible-tuition postsecondary education, as they recognize the value of investing in labor power and educational advancement.

Germany actively urges its prisoners to participate in their elections; they don’t view prisoners as an undeserving class of subhumans. Similarly, Norway is well-known for its magnanimous criminal justice model of rehabilitation based on education, employment training, and social assistance, which has enabled relatively low rates of prison recidivism and ease of reintegrating prisoners into society.

Yet, America’s slanted political and education systems assure the political and economic elite that the working class is deprived of class consciousness and remains ignorant of global and alternative perspectives of dealing with poverty, inequality, and happiness.

Democratic socialism can address all of these layers of Maslow’s hierarchy by being more responsive than the establishment to the working class through systemic alterations to the flawed democracy of the United States, and by providing a basis for individuals to bring about their self-satisfaction.

A capitalist society that deems solving social issues such as poverty and illiteracy subordinate to the profit margins of the most tightly concentrated private dictatorships – large corporations such as Amazon, Walmart, and Facebook – is a system that is not interested in advancing the people toward self-actualization, but rather in largely limiting self-actualization to the minuscule capitalist class whose inordinate opulence and wealth hoarding are the result of exploitation and inheritance in far more cases than not.

We must refuse to accept the notion that we have to accept the status quo. We must commit ourselves to strive for the realization of a democratic socialist society designed to serve the needs of the many before the parasitic desires of the obscenely wealthy. Only through democratic and anti-authoritarian socialism can we supplant the limiting nature of capitalism with a more humanistic system engrossed in the advancement of the masses.

Bryce Springfield is an author and frequent contributor for Young Patriots Magazine.