Date:          Sat, 26 Sep 1998 12:33:24 GMT + 2:00
Subject:       Re: AUT: Andre Gorz


Richard:

>         OK, my turn...  I was impressed by a piece of writing by Andre Gorz
> that I found in _An Anthology of Western Marxism_ (edited by Roger S.
> Gottlieb, Oxford University Press).  Does anybody have more information
> about this writer and/or know where I can find more of his works?
> 
> Richard Singer

Andre Gorz's books are available in English especially from Verso 
(previously NLR Books). Among them, I can now recount titles such as 
"Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology", "Farewell to the Working Class" and 
"Critique of Economic Reason" (1989), which I consider his best, and 
most theoretically grounded, book in English. Another notable book by 
him, "Metamorphoses du travail" (Methamorphoses of Work) has not been 
translated, yet. The arguments that Gorz has been developed in the 
past 25 years or so revolve around some basic points, that I can 
summarize as follow: 1) Organizational and technological 
restructuring of work and production has caused a generalized 
reduction of socially necessary time to produce commodity; 2) Such 
processes have been largely commanded by a rising transnational 
capital that could use these weapons to fragment and disarticulate 
the factory working class, especially through variable configurations 
of working times at the basis of new, 'atypical' forms of employment; 
3) Such capitalist offensive has been facilitated by the cultural and 
political backwardness of the "official" left, which has remained 
anchored to a model of working class politics based on industrialism, 
productivism and statism, therefore reinforcing the centrality of 
waged labour as the only progressive engine of history, and 
abdicating from the Marxian view of a liberation *from* wage labour; 
4) On the other hand, elements of such a liberation are present in 
embryonic forms in the current transformation, summarized above, 
whereby wage and formal employment are gradually losing their 
centrality as prime determinants of life strategies, identities and 
demands of the working class. 5) However, given the continuous 
capitalist domination of these dynamics, the embryos of a liberation 
from wage labour are suffocated and replaced by new inequalities 
(including that between a shrinking core of long term formally 
employed workers and a rising pool made of highly differentiated 
precarious and un-guaranteed employment relations), and forms of "new 
servitudes" (in the sense that the benefits of the reduction of 
socially necessary productive time are unequally distributed, and 
this originates new, highly exploited "servile" jobs in the sphere of 
"services to the person", such as domestic and homework services). 6) 
As a consequence, working class organizations should update their 
strategies in the direction of a new politics of citizenship which 
emphasize issues of generalized reduction of working times, a 
"progressive exit" from wage labour, guaranteed citizenship income, 
and quality of social life that can build alliances and linkages with 
other issues and movements (for example around environmental themes) 
and that can break the old left's dependence from state and 
manufacturing development.

This is just a summary of what I think are some of Gorz's main 
points, and it does not imply that I agree with all of them (even if 
I largely share his indictment of the "old" party and union left). I 
agree, for example, on criticisms raised to Gorz's thesis on the 
Italian journal "Riff Raff" (#1, 1993), where Gorz's project of 
emancipation from wage labour was accused of missing the question of 
how a grassroots antagonist project could be materialized in 
practice. Therefore, since Gorz's analysis does not start from the 
need of buildin the kind of movements he argues for, his political 
argument can be quite unspecified, leading to dangerous omissions and 
weaknesses in relation to emerging issues such as workfare, or forms 
of "incentive income" to facilitate the entry in the labour market, 
which, even if they might look formally similar, are nonetheless 
substantially different from the idea of "guaranteed citizenship 
income", being the former conducive to precariousness and wage-
dependence, and the latter more functional to an escape from wage 
labour. Finally, the whole issue of citizenship income is relatively 
un-developed by Gorz, who largely focuses on how to 
redistribute reductions of working time (the question of citizenship 
income is much more deeply dealt with in Philippe van Parijs' 
"Arguing for Basic Income", Verso). The fact that the two issues are 
inseparable and complementary to any project of proletarian self-
emancipation may constitute another weakness of Gorz's analysis.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
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Johannesburg
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E-Mail 029frb-AT-muse.arts.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
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