UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SANTA CRUZ

Exile: An Intellectual Portrait of Andre Gorz

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

HISTORY

by

Christopher D. Brooks

June 2010

The Dissertation of Christopher D. Brooks

is approved:

Professor Emeritus Jonathan Beecher, Chair

Professor Edmund Burke, III

Professor Gopal Balakrishnan

Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
 UMI Number: 3421301

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 Copyright © by

Christopher D. Brooks

2010
 Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Exile 1
Chapter 2: From Ecriveur to Ecrivain 54
Chapter 3: The Red Years 103
Chapter 4: May of '68 and its Aftershocks 209
Chapter 5: The Demise of the Revolutionary Subject 289
Chapter 6: The Contemporary Gorz 355
Bibliography: 417

iii
 Abstract

Exile: An Intellectual Portrait of Andre Gorz

by

Christopher Brooks

The Austrian-born French philosopher and theorist Andre Gorz (1923 - 2007)

was one of the most important intellectuals to emerge from the circle of thinkers

associated with Jean-Paul Sartre in postwar France. This dissertation argues that

Gorz was a "pragmatic Utopian" whose dual vocation as a journalist and philosopher

allowed him to arrive at insights into the nature of capitalistic society that were both

highly original and historically consequential. It is a comprehensive intellectual

biography of Gorz's life and thought based on readings of Gorz's published material,

interviews with Gorz and his friends and colleagues, and extensive use of the

secondary material on French intellectual history.

 Dedication and Acknowledgements

Dedicated to my wife, Rebecca Brooks, for her support, patience, good

humor, and limitless perspicacity.

I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their

years of support and guidance. Jonathan Beecher has been a steadfast ally, freely

sharing with me his enormous wealth of knowledge about French intellectual history

and French culture, not to mention saving me from blunders with French spelling and

translation. Terry Burke has been a critical source of insight into the professional

requirements of the historical vocation and has brought a valuable outside perspective

to my own interest in intellectual history. I owe Gopal Balakrishnan a great deal for

guiding me through the radical historiography of western European thought, as well

as for counseling me on the project of intellectual biography itself.

My thanks to the bodies at UCSC that provided funding for research and

travel: the Department of History, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the

Graduate Division. The University of California's Education Abroad Program

funded transportation and some costs of lodging during my time as a graduate student

instructor at the UC Paris Study Center in 2008; my thanks to the administrators of

that program and to Barbara Prezelin, Shelly Ocafia, and Will Bishop at the Center.

In Paris, the staff and librarians of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France were

exceptionally helpful and courteous, as were the librarians of the McHenry Library at

UCSC. My thanks to Christine Von Koehler and Vincent Burret, who graciously

v
welcomed me into their home during my time in Paris. Thanks as well to Meg

Lilienthal, Stephanie Hinkle, Stephanie Bauman, and Christine Khoo on the history

department staff.

I have benefited enormously from my work with members of the UCSC

faculty. I thank Bruce Thompson, Lynn Westerkamp, Alice Yang-Murray, Buck

Sharp, Cindy Polecritti, Peter Kenez, and Jim Clifford in particular. I also received

invaluable guidance while pursuing both my bachelor's and master's degrees at the

University of Oregon and offer thanks to John McCole, George Sheridan, Joseph

Fracchia, David Luebke, and Louise Bishop.

I received helpful comments on the framing of my arguments about Gorz's

life and thought during presentations I made at the annual conferences of the Western

Society for French History and the Society for French Historical Studies in 2009 and

2010. I would thank Julian Bourg, Jonathan Judaken, and Patrick Hutton in particular

for their critical feedback.

I have had remarkably congenial, supportive, and insightful friends and

colleagues in my cohort of fellow graduate students. I thank them all. In particular,

at UCSC, my heartfelt thanks go out to Kelly Feinstein-Johnson, Elizabeth Mullins,

Ana Candela, Colin Tyner, Jeff Sanceri, Heather Paul, Noel Smyth, Troy Crowder,

Eliza Martin, Urmi Engineer, Michele Henrey, and Amanda Shuman, and at the UO,

to Elizabeth Medford, Camille Walsh, Veta Schlimgen, Lauren Hirshberg, Bob

Reinhardt, Matt Conn, Fernando Calderon, and Matt Ohlen.

vi
 Chapter 1: Exile

Introduction

Andre Gorz committed suicide with his wife, Dorine Kiel, on September 22,

2007. Their bodies were found lying next to each other in their modest house in

Vosnon, the small village southeast of Paris in which they had lived since the early

1980s. A brief note indicated that the police should be contacted, and the sleeping

pills they had taken together were found nearby. Notices followed shortly, as Gorz's

collaborators and friends from his many decades as a journalist and philosopher

saluted his life and work. Most were written by fellow leftist thinkers like Jean

Daniel, with whom Gorz had founded Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964, who noted that

Gorz "Had been the most secretive, the most enigmatic, the most stubborn, and the

most erudite of our group."1 An unlikely tribute came from French president Nicolas

Sarkozy, who despite his well-established contempt for radicalism noted that "It is

with sadness that I acknowledge his passing as well as that of his wife, who

accompanied him on his final voyage."2

Gorz and Dorine's suicide was tragic in that it ended Gorz's ongoing work on

the philosophy of labor, the critique of capitalism, and the theory of ecology, all of

which he had continued to pursue until his death.3 It also deprived the many friends

and correspondents of both Gorz and Dorine of their letters, which were warm,
1
Jean Daniel, "Partir avec elle," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 September 2007, 29. Translations from
the French are my own unless noted otherwise.
2
Nicolas Sarkozy, Communique, 24 September 2007.
His last book, Ecologica, was published posthumously in 2008.
1
thoughtful, and supportive. Gorz was, however, also perhaps the most important

philosopher of French existentialism after his friend and mentor Jean-Paul Sartre, and

in that, his and Dorine's suicide can be seen as the ultimate extension of the

existential principle that each person has an irreducible ability to choose his or her

fate.5

To understand the importance of Gorz, we must begin with Sartre.6 Sartre, in

his seminal existential writings of the late 1930s and early 1940s such as L 'Etre et la

neant {Being and Nothingness) and the novel La Nausee (Nausea), had claimed that

man was a "useless passion," a consciousness condemned to be free in a world

constituted by obstacles and restrictions. Confronted by their freedom, most

individuals tried to fool themselves into believing that they were obliged to act in

4
Interview with Francoise Gollain, October 22, 2008.
5
A point also made by Gorz's friend Christophe Fourel, who wrote "Yet this tragic gesture appeared in
(also) in its philosophical dimension: the author of Adieux cm proletariat and of Chemins duparadis
had definitively made the choice of freedom." Christophe Fourel, "En guise de presentation:
l'actualite d'Andre Gorz," in Christophe Fourel, ed., Andre Gorz: unpenseurpour le XXIe Siecle
(Paris: La Decouverte, 2009), 7.
6
The scholarly literature on Sartre is enormous. I base my arguments regarding Sartre primarily on the
following: my own readings of Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausee (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), Jean-Paul
Sartre, Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New
York: Philsoophical Library, 1956), Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New
York: Knopf, 1963), Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith
(London: Verso, 2002), as well as Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), two of the major biographies of Sartre, Annie
Cohen-Solal, Sartre, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987) and Bernard-Henri
Levy, Sartre: Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2003), a classic older work on Sartre's philosophy, Wilfrid Desan, The Marxism ofJean-Paul Sartre
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), and some of the major secondary works on Sartre written by
intellectual historians: Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004),
Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End
Press, 1981), Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventure of a Conceptfrom Lukacs to Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 331 - 360, Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and
the Jewish Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2006), and Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to
Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
2
certain ways, rather than acknowledging that they were the true authors of their fate.

Sartre called this phenomenon "bad faith." While there was no transcendental escape

from the condition of a freedom doomed to struggle against implacable odds, the

individual could still pursue "authenticity" by designating projects of action and

creation in the world and engaging in them without recourse to obfuscating excuses

like religion or ideological dogmatism.

Sartre conceived of his philosophy in the 1930s, first as one of the most

brilliant students at the legendary French institution of higher learning the Ecole

Normale Superieur and then during his brief stint as a philosophy teacher. At the

time, he was basically apolitical and his version of existentialism was starkly

individualistic, focusing on the fate of the lone consciousness in a world in which

other human beings were perceived as potential threats to one's freedom. As a

soldier in World War II, however, during which he served in the French army on the

Maginot Line and was subsequently captured and held as a prisoner of war, Sartre

underwent a kind of moral conversion that led him to consider the necessity of forms

of solidarity with other people. By the end of the war, having befriended many

members of the clandestine Parti Communiste Frangais (French Communist Party or

PCF), Sartre was convinced that Marxism was the key to the understanding of

history, and he devoted himself to creating a new version of existentialism compatible

with revolutionary politics.

These attempts were sometimes inspiring and brilliant, but were also haunted

by both errors of judgment and the weight of historical circumstances. Sartre and his
3
circle of intellectual friends and allies were rejected by the PCF, who had no use for

independent critique, even if it was offered up by professed allies of the party.

Nevertheless, as the lines of the Cold War hardened by 1947, Sartre drew closer to

the party in the name of political pragmatism, reaching the height of his "fellow

travelling" with both the PCF and its patron, the Soviet government, between

approximately 1952 and 1956.7 Philosophically, he struggled to reconcile his

radically atomistic system and the exigencies of radical mass politics, producing

works like his article "Les Communistes et la paix" ("The Communists and Peace")

that sometimes succumbed to dogmatism in the name of efficacy.8 More to the point,

even with Sartre's ingenuous attempts at a radical political theory, he never produced

a successful and innovative analysis of modern capitalism despite his immense

erudition and the originality of his philosophical and literary work.

It was precisely in this period, following World War II, that Gorz met and

befriended Sartre and his circle.9 In turn, much of Gorz's importance lies in the

originality of his thought. Beginning with Sartrian existentialism, Gorz extended its

insights beyond Sartre's own political theory, culminating in a critique of capitalism

7
Here, I use Gorz's dates; in an interview he insisted that Sartre was only truly a fellow traveler of the
PCF in the early to mid 1950s. See Andre Gorz, "L'Homme est un etre qui a a se faire ce qui'il est," in
Christophe Fourel, ed., Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe siecle, 185.
8
Available in translation as Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace (New York: G. Braziller,
1968). The most damning critique of Sartre's writing of this period is Tony Judt, Past Imperfect:
French Intellectuals, 1944 - 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), considered in
much greater detail in the literature review section, below. See also David Caute, Communism and the
French Intellectuals (New York: McMillan, 1960), David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual
Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), and Sudhir Hazareesingh,
Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991).
9
See Chapter 2.
4
that was often more flexible and productive than that of Sartre himself. The core of

Gorz's thought was his insistence on the importance of the individual's experience

within the larger social field; he trenchantly opposed sociological and economic

theories that treated aggregates as their subjects. In 1988, Gorz wrote "I want to

make evident the common root of economic rationality and of "cognitive-

instrumental reason": this root is a (mathematical) formalization of thought which,

codifying it in technical processes, locks it against any possibility ofreflexivity and

against the certitudes of lived experience. (The) technicization, reification (and)

monetization of rapports have their cultural anchor in this technique of thought of

which the operations function without the implication of a subject and of which the

subjects, absent, are incapable of accounting for themselves."10 To Gorz, inspired by

Sartre's philosophy, the human being as subject was always the basis of any

meaningful social or cultural analysis, and sociological abstractions that overlooked

the subject were thus of dubious utility.

This quote is drawn from Gorz's Metamorphoses du travail, quete du sens

{Metamorphoses of Labor, Search for Meaning), published well after Gorz was

already a well-known and respected journalist, philosopher, and public intellectual in

France. Metamorphoses du Travail is not the book for which Gorz is best

remembered - his fascinating autobiography Le Traitre {The Traitor) is the work that

established him as a writer in 1958, and the tribute to Dorine, Lettre a D., histoire

Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du travail, quete du sens: critique de la raison economique (Paris:
Editions Galilee, 1988), 158. Parentheses and italics in original.
5
d'un amour {Letter to D., A Love Story), was Gorz's most successful work, published

a year before his death in 2007. u The former work saw Gorz enter into the public

sphere as a writer of note, applying a complex method of explication drawn not just

from Sartre, but from Marx and Freud to describe his own life and psychological

complexes. The latter revived interest in Gorz among the educated French reading

public even though the kind of intransigent radicalism he represented had been in

decline for decades.13 It was in Metamorphoses du travail, however, that Gorz most

effectively and clearly described the parameters of his intellectual project:

understanding the ideological and philosophical roots of modern capitalism and

searching for alternatives to them that might lead toward a new and better model of

society.

Writing about alternatives to capitalism in the postwar era was hardly

uncommon among intellectuals in France. Of course, the fact that Gorz continued to

write in that vein after the collapse of Marxism makes him an anomaly among

prominent French intellectuals; most, such as the famous Nouveau Philosophes (New

Philosophers), hastily and abruptly rejected their own erstwhile radicalism in the mid-

1970s, recasting themselves as the new champions of political liberalism.14 What

made Gorz different, and important, was his ongoing effort to specify what the Left

had to offer against the power of economic rationality. Put briefly, Gorz's central

1
' It sold over 21,000 copies in the first year. See Astrid de Larminat, "L'Amour se bonifie avec
l'age," Le Figaro.fr, <http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2006/12/14/03005-20061214ARTFIG90130-
l a m o u r s e b o n i f i e a v e c l age.php>.
12
See Chapter 2.
13
See Chapter 2 and the literature review section, below, for notes on the decline of French radicalism.
14
See Chapter 4 and the literature review section.
6
argument was that economic rationality, which above all else sought to render all

things calculable, could have no stopping point, seeking always to quantify human

lives and the natural world. Against that relentless quantifier, Gorz was the

philosophical champion of the qualitative, someone who used his deep understanding

of the existential philosophical tradition to make an absolute claim for the necessity

of each individual to give meaning to his or her life, a project that could not be made

calculable. This essential conflict was at the heart of Gorz's writing, even as his

specific arguments changed over time.

Gorz's trajectory as a writer and thinker was ironic; notoriously introverted,

preferring the abstract realm of thought to lived reality, the very definition of

"neurotic" in his personal habits and demeanor as a young man, the strength of Gorz's

writing nevertheless arose from his need to tie philosophical and theoretical

abstractions to the concrete circumstances of lived experiences. In other words,

despite his own (explicitly-stated and repeated) distaste for quotidian life, it was as a

hybrid journalist-philosopher that Gorz was able to create strikingly original takes on

politics, economics, and social theory. And while he would engage with the ideas of

other philosophers, Gorz was usually more concerned with the actual structures and

experiences of life, particularly the lives of workers, than he was in considering

theory for its own sake. In person, Gorz was cautious, withdrawn, and terribly shy,

but as a writer, in theory, he was the bitter opponent of any system that undermined

the quality of life or the breadth of choice available to human beings in the name of

inhuman requirements.
7
 Gorz himself credited Dorine with forcing him to confront the reality of other

humans and their own matrix of choices and obstacles as something different than the

"nausea" and resentment Sartre had described in L'Etre et la neant. While his

personal motivations were, of course, very complex and will be considered in greater

detail below, I would note from the outset that Gorz was profoundly sensitive to what

I would describe as "existential dignity," the minimum of space and time necessary to

be able to pursue one's freely-chosen projects.15 This belief would evolve in Gorz's

writing and emerge in his work of the early 1980s as the search for autonomy against

the "heteronomy" imposed by all of the social and political structures of modern

capitalism. The point here is that despite his own shyness and reticence, Gorz's

writing was profoundly rooted in the ethical concern for the possibility of happiness

and personal growth of other people, against economic, social, and political systems

he believed truncated or even destroyed that possibility. In turn, this motivated his

concern with the lived experiences of workers, not just theories about how capitalism

operated as a whole.

In his insistence on tying thought to experience, Gorz's writing was marked by

both its applicability and its accessibility in a way that made it distinct from the work

of the majority of French leftist thinkers. While the British scholar Finn Bowring,

Gorz's friend and former student, called attention to the mutual influence that Jean-

Paul Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique {Critique of Dialectical Reason) and

Gorz's simultaneously-written La Morale de Vhistoire {The Ethics of History) had on

15
See Chapter 2.
8
one another, what he does not point out is that Gorz's book is, despite its complexity,

is lucid and accessible in a way that Sartre's notoriously difficult tome is not.16 La

Morale de I 'Histoire was addressed to an audience that included labor strategists and

workers, not just philosophers. Likewise, all of Gorz's works after Le Traitre were

written within and about specific political concerns and circumstances, tying

philosophical inspiration and analysis to the specifics of French, European, and global

politics and rarely miring themselves in unnecessary abstraction.

One important reason for Gorz's approach was his lack of academic

credentials. He earned a degree {license) in chemistry from the Lausanne Polytechnic

in Switzerland in 1945, which remained his only academic title for the rest of his life.

His status as an intellectual in France grew from his personal involvement in the

circle surrounding Sartre and his own accomplishments as a writer, not from the kind

of academic achievement that was usually required for one to be taken seriously

among Paris's intellectual elite. To be a graduate of one of France's Grandes Ecoles,

the pinnacles of its highly-competitive, hierarchical, and rigorous educational system,

was to be invested with substantial intellectual credibility, something Gorz had to

earn through his writing alone. According to his friends and students, Gorz would

remain sensitive about his own lack of credentials for the his entire life, deliberately

distancing himself from the academic world of Paris and trying to reach broader

16
Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy: Arguments for a Person-Centered Social
Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 87. Note that Gorz wrote a remarkably concise and
accessible explication of Sartre's Critique, published as Andre Gorz, "Sartre and Marx," New Left
Review 37 (May - June 1966), 37 - 52.
17
It became widely read outside of France, particularly in Italy, shortly after its publication. See
Andre Gorz, Fondementspour une morale (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1977), 19.
9
audiences in both his journalism and his philosophy and social theory.

In fact, Gorz's writing reached the French reading public under his journalistic

pseudonym Michel Bosquet for several years before Le Traitre put him on the map as

a promising writer and philosopher. He kept the two pseudonyms separate and wrote

under them in different contexts: Bosquet for journalism, Gorz for philosophy and

political theory, as different aspects of his professional life. It was not until 1975,

with his landmark Ecologie et Politique {Ecology and Politics), that Gorz openly

combined the two names on a book cover, and as he retired from journalism in 1983,

he stopped writing as Bosquet entirely. As noted above, however, the dual vocations

of journalist and philosopher always influenced one another in Gorz's writing, and it

is from their combination that his work was consistently more topical, accessible, and

at times, insightful than many of his contemporaries.

It was also from this combination of approaches that Gorz was especially

sensitive to the great issues that plagued the French intellectual Left in the postwar

period. How could leftists committed to some form of direct democracy and local

organization be politically efficacious in a national and regional politics defined by

the Cold War? How could intellectuals reach a mass audience, especially among the

working class? And, in the social and cultural tumult of France in the 1960s and

1970s, how could leftist theory that had long defined itself in terms of Marxism

remain relevant when many of the traditional categories of Marxist theory, most

obviously "the proletariat" and "the bourgeoisie," seemed to be losing their

18
Interviews with Finn Bowring, September 18, 2008, and with Francoise Gollain, October 22, 2008.
10
descriptive power?

I want to suggest that one of the reasons that Gorz's thought is particularly

important in historical context, from the approach of intellectual history rather than

that of philosophy or "pure" theory, is that it traces the diffusion of the revolutionary

subject in French thought during the postwar period. Gorz was always extremely

sensitive to the epistemological status of "the proletariat" within Marxism, and he

was one of the most subtle and rigorous thinkers on the Left regarding the

proletariat's role in history. His aptly-named Adieux au proletariat {Farewell to the

Working Class) in 1980 marks not just a watershed in Gorz's thought, but in

European leftist thought in general. It offers one of the most powerful and

compelling arguments for the loss of the working class's potential revolutionary

status without, however, abandoning a relentless critique of the pernicious and

dehumanizing power of capitalism.19

Likewise, moving into the contemporary period, at precisely the time that

many of the great French thinkers were either embracing the liberal reaction of the

1980s and 1990s or refocusing their politics on questions of sexual or ethnic identity,

Gorz continued the difficult task of remaining a critic of the social and economic

matrix of capitalism and searching for new revolutionary subjects. At the same time,

he insisted on the importance of tying theories of liberation to the lived experiences of

actual people, making him an important counterpoint to and critic of thinkers like

Jiirgen Habmeras or Antonio Negri whose subjects of potential political liberation

19
See Chapter 5.
11
were usually sociological abstractions. Thus, from a historical perspective, Gorz's

thought is important because it followed some of the contours of the changing self-

understanding and self-definition of the western European intellectual left from the

postwar period to the present, and it did so with a remarkable flexibility and lack of

dogmatism.

In particular, Gorz's work represents perhaps the single most important body

of writing to emerge from the Sartrian circle besides that of Simone de Beauvoir and

of Sartre himself. Whereas Sartre's analysis of politics tended to trace the contours of

political struggle in terms of abstract philosophical categories, Gorz's career as a

journalist writing on economic and political subjects provided a strong intellectual

foundation for specific and grounded critiques of political events and debates. Put

simply, Gorz was never a litterateur; the examples he used to illustrate his arguments

were drawn from his contemporary political reality, not from novels or

impressionistic histories.

This should not imply that Gorz saw his own work as transcending Sartre's

political considerations. Instead, one of Gorz's lifelong tasks was to clarify and build

on and supplement the political implications of Sartrian existentialism. His earliest

writing, the monumental phenomenological treatise Fondements pour une morale

{Foundations for an Ethics), was directly inspired by Gorz's desire to construct an

ethics out of Sartre's L 'Etre et la neant. He was one of Sartre's best sympathetic
20
See Andre Gorz, Metamophoses du travail, 135 - 137, 212 - 220, and Andre Gorz, Miseres du
present, richesse du possible (Paris: Galilee, 1997), 70 - 77. Specifically, Gorz addressed Habermas's
Theory of Communicative Action and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Labor of Dionysus and
Empire, all of which he felt placed too much emphasis on abstract social conglomerates.
12
readers, publishing articles in defense of Sartre's work against critics on the Left and

clarifying the salient points of Sartre's work in the name of making them more

accessible to a broad audience.21 Gorz was convinced that human subjects had an

inherent need to attribute meaning to their lives, a need that contradicted restrictions

created by economic rationality, the form of reason that underlay capitalism.

Gorz was frequently accused of being a "utopian," an appellation he dissected

in several of his later works.22 To an extent, the term is appropriate for Gorz. Like

other great thinkers of the New Left, most obviously Herbert Marcuse, Gorz strove to

look beyond the empirical conditions of the present toward possible futures in which

contemporary problems could be resolved.23 More to the point, he looked within

present conditions in search of seeds of potential change. One of the striking things

about Gorz's oeuvre as it evolved over the decades of the 1950s through the first

years of the twenty-first century is that this searching for transformative potential was

always present in his thought and writing, even as he abandoned outdated hypotheses

and adopted new ones. This adaptability of thought is of great importance in

understanding the trajectory of Gorz's ideas over time. Gorz may have been a

Utopian in hoping for a radically different and better world, but he was a realist and a

pragmatist in his analyses of how a possible Utopia (normally a contradiction in

21
See Andre Gorz, "Sartre and Marx," New Left Review.
22
Interestingly, many of his accusers were more "orthodox" Marxists who took umbrage to Gorz's
innovations in Marxist theory. For example, see Richard Hyman, "Andre Gorz and his Disappearing
Proletariat," Socialist Register 20 (1983), 272 - 295. and Stefan Steinberg, "Social Theorist Andre
Gorz Dies, Aged 84," World Socialist Web Site, <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/oct2007/gorz-
o09.shtm)>.
23
Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography (London: Verso,
1982), 197 - 199. On the New Left in general, see Chapter 3.
13
terms) could be achieved. He sought out revolutionary potential, a term applicable

both in its Marxist connotations and in a broader sense of great change, in the shifting

field of political economy and in technology, as well as in the changes taking place in

the European labor movement.

Thus, while I think the terms "utopia" and "utopian" need to be interrogated

for their nuances and breadth of possible meanings, I nevertheless accept their utility

in describing Gorz, as indeed he did himself. Against their negative connotations, of

a fundamentally unrealistic search for fanciful paradises, usually contrasted with a

practical and grounded acceptance of the fundamental structures of the social or

political status quo, I insist on the pragmatic character of Gorz's utopianism. In

short, I argue that Gorz was a "pragmatic Utopian," a characterization that was

accurate for his entire life as a writer and thinker.

Gorz's pragmatic utopianism was related to his understanding of the

dialectical method and its application to concrete social and political phenomena. In

general, Gorz did not create future worlds in his writing, ones free from scarcity and

alienation. Instead, he sought within his contemporary context for paths to possible

futures, and he was cautious to the point of being skeptical at times about the

likelihood of their realization in the short-term or even medium-term future. His

impetus was always his disgust with the appalling conditions of labor under

capitalism and the destruction of both human life and the natural world at the hands

and tools of industrial society. However, he never allowed himself to be drawn to

escapist abstractions of what might be done to ameliorate the state of the world. If
14
those possibilities were to be found, Gorz knew they would have to be sought in the

world of things as much as in the world of theory.

Gorz's Intellectual Trajectory

In the broadest strokes, Gorz's search for revolutionary potential began with

his ongoing critique of the European, and particularly the French, labor movement in

the late 1950s through the 1960s. He wrote extensively on labor strategy, becoming

one of the foremost theorists of autogestion, or self-management. He also welcomed

the emergence of third-world revolutionary movements in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba,

and elsewhere, but unlike many of his contemporary leftists in France, his

approbation of third-world revolution was tempered by his critique of the possibilities

and challenges they faced in both succeeding at the local level and how they would

affect the prospects of further revolutionary changes in Europe and across the globe.24

After the Events of May of 1968 in France, in which thousands of student

radicals and millions of striking workers temporarily brought France to a standstill,

Gorz joined many of his fellow thinkers in searching for revolutionary potential in the

cultural revolution that had culminated in the student movement. He traveled to the

United States and interviewed individuals who had broken with mainstream society

and who were attempting to re-create their own lives according to different values

than those they felt had been imposed by the capitalist system. Again, however,

24
See Chapter 3.
15
Gorz's enthusiasm was restrained by the profound power imbalance between the

would-be revolutionaries of the new counter-culture and the forces of industry and the

capitalist state.

Gorz discovered ecology, a field for which he was quickly considered one of

the leading voices in France, in the early 1970s. In ecology, he did not discover a

new set of potential revolutionary forces. Instead, and perhaps more importantly, he

discovered a new set of revolutionary necessities. While this argument will be

developed in greater detail below, it should be noted at the outset that Gorz was never

a radical ecologist, in the sense that he endorsed a return to nature, the outright

rejection of advanced technology, or an ethics which denied humankind the right to

use natural resources. Gorz's ecology was instead a practical set of concerns, albeit

highly theoretically developed and strongly felt, with the potential disaster that

environmental degradation represented_/br human beings. Likewise, he saw in the

logic of ecology a set of values that contradicted the depredations of economic

rationality.26

Gorz wrote about political ecology for the rest of his life; the titles of his last

two books, published in 2006 and 2008 (the latter after his death) were Capitalisme,

Socialisme, Ecologie (Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology) and Ecologica (Ecologica).

Equally important to his concern with ecology and its relationship to advanced

industrial society, however, was his innovative philosophical and sociological writing

See Chapter 4.
See Chapter 4.
16
on alternatives to "work." Here, Gorz's break with traditional Marxism in his

Adieux au proletariat was of paramount importance.

In Adieux au proletariat, Gorz permanently abandoned the idea that the

working class could be the agent of revolutionary change. In fact, he argued that

revolution itself was no longer a realistic or even desirable goal in the face of the

failure of socialist governments to create appealing alternatives to western capitalism

and in the prevalence of the problems associated with advanced, post-Fordist

industrialism. Gorz did not, however, follow the path so many ex-Marxists had and

abandon his leftist convictions along with his adherence to Marxism; he remained a

political radical and a scathing critic of capitalism.28

In this phase of his writing, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Gorz found

in the relative success of capitalism in elevating standards of living a possible seed for

its transformation. He argued that the capitalistic work ethic that demanded total

devotion to and identification with one's work should be abandoned and that the

working-week should be reduced, while the pool of workers allowed access to more

skilled and lucrative industries be increased. By reducing the amount of work each

individual was obliged to do, a greater space of "autonomy" could be created for all, a

27
A note on translation: the French word travail translates in English to both "work" and "labor."
Gorz's analyses of the 1980s and after had more to do with "work" in the English sense of "working at
a job" than it did with "labor" in the sense of "the labor movement."
28
1 refer here to the complex hybrid of media event and philosophical movement embodied by the
New Philosophers in the late 1970s. While notoriously difficult to pin down to Left or Right, what the
New Philosophers unquestionably did was break with Marxism, a phenomenon that accelerated into
the 1980s. See Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics (Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press,
2007), 227 - 301, and Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The
Antitotalitarian Movement of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).
17
space of both public and private life that would be distinct from the pursuit of profit.

This theme matured over the course of the next two decades. Gorz's specific

positions, about the desirability of a guaranteed minimum income, for instance,

changed over time. Likewise, he later nuanced the distinction between autonomy and

heteronomy, not least because the very idea of complete autonomy was antithetical to

the existential description of the constant struggle of the thinking, choosing individual

confronted with implacable obstacles. Nevertheless, Gorz continued to seek out

alternatives to economic reason and spaces of relative autonomy in the changing face

of the labor force and in technological advances that might allow smaller, localized

sites of production and consumption, freeing communities or regions from the

seemingly all-powerful global networks of trade.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gorz focused on explicating precisely what

economic rationality was and how it infiltrated the spheres of human life that had

been distinct from it in the past. His exemplary work in this regard was

Metamorphoses du Travail. The critique of economic rationality as such opened

extremely productive areas of analysis to Gorz, since he was now able to move

toward what the political Left was and should be in the absence of a practical

revolutionary politics, a situation that was all the more pressing after the collapse of

the Soviet Union. Gorz maintained his allegiance to "socialism," but he worked to

specify what socialism could be in the absence of real large-scale national projects to

achieve it, however flawed or misdirected those attempts had been in the Eastern

18
 This situation was sharpened further by the rise of neoliberalism, the politics

of the new Right under Thatcher and Reagan that glorified the free market and sought

to curtail worker's protections and economic regulation. Gorz quickly sensed the

tremendous threat to the labor movement and to the quality of life of workers all over

the world posed by neoliberalism, as well as neoliberalism's ideological foundations

in economic rationality. He was particularly concerned with ties between neoliberal

ideology and globalization, since the loss of the national frame of reference for the

labor movement dramatically undermined its efficacy in negotiations with capital. At

the same time, even as globalization opened new regional markets to capital, Gorz

saw in the material conditions of the late twentieth century reasons to hope that new

alternatives were emerging to economic rationality. He also saw what he believed to

be fatal weaknesses to the neoliberal capitalism of the 1990s and early 2000s: its

inability to quantify the realm of intellectual property and the growing importance of

information itself in commodity form. This critique culminated in the last phase of

his life's work, his exploration of the status of "immaterial" labor and products,

particularly software, new media, and the whole realm of quasi-products that did not

exist primarily in physical form, but in digitized information exchanged over the

Internet.30

None of these commodity-forms could be pinned down to specific values in

See Chapter 5.
See Chapter 6.
19
the manner that the products of physical labor could, since their value was based

almost entirely on what the market would bear rather than the labor and material

invested in them. Also, the workers of the industries of the immaterial had to be

creative, intelligent, and highly trained, culminating in an individuality and

independence that was anathema to the underlying logic of economic rationality. In

that sense, Gorz saw in immaterial labor a growing cancer in the heart of advanced

capitalism itself, since capitalism was forced to rely on a whole sector of production

that it (capitalism) could not completely control and that operated according to

fundamentally different forms of social logic.

Marx, of course, had predicted that crises of overproduction would grow

larger and more serious as capitalism matured, allowing the revolutionary proletariat

the opportunity to seize control. At the end of his life, Gorz predicted something

different for advanced ("late") capitalism: crises arising from the rampant financial

speculation unleashed by neoliberalism's successful crusades to deregulate markets

starting in the 1980s. According to Gorz, the problem of speculation was similar to

the issues arising from immaterial commodities: in both cases, the material bases of

wealth were either impossible to determine or absent altogether. The entire system of

global capital was, by the early 2000s, deeply embedded in what was really just the

idea of money in the minds of an elite cadre of bankers. In the end, the ongoing long-

term crisis of post-Fordist capitalism would necessarily culminate in an acute and

20
abrupt moment of crisis, with disastrous consequences.31

The Project of Intellectual Biography

The title of this thesis is a play on Gorz's understanding not only of himself, as

an actual exile from the land of his birth during his adolescence, but of the entire

human condition as described by Sartrian existentialism. Much of Gorz's enormous

philosophical work Fondements pour une morale is comprised of descriptions of the

ways in which individuals try and fail to "be at home" with the world, by pretending

that God or nature or an ideology is entirely accurate and available and that He, She,

or It accords with their needs and desires.32 Gorz's status as a Utopian is thus both

ironic and appropriate: he, too, sought to imagine worlds closer to the needs and

ambitions of human subjects, something that he knew better than most could never be

achieved. This project, however, was the very definition of existential authenticity,

the attempt to try to make the world into one's "home" despite the knowledge that this

effort could never fully succeed.

It was also because Gorz was a self-understood exile that he was able to bring

such perspicacity to the analysis of social and economic systems. As he wrote in Le

31
See Chapter 6. Gorz did not live to see his predictions proved correct by the financial crisis of 2008,
but for a recent summary of the possible implications of the crisis for the future development of
capitalism totally compatible with Gorz's thought, see Gopal Balakrishnan, "Speculations on the
Stationary State," New Left Review, (September - October 2009), 5 - 26. See also Robert Brenner,
The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the World Economy (London: Verso, 2002).
32
See, for instance, the second part of Fondements, comprised largely of what Gorz described as
"galleries" depicting different attitudes toward life, all smacking of bad faith: Andre Gorz, Fondements
pour une morale, 141 - 429.
21
Traitre, "He (Gorz, writing about himself in the third person), as it turned out, was

one of those for whom everything was to be bought, except that he couldn't pay, a

petit bourgeois without money. There could be no question of earning money; he had

nothing to sell that anyone might have wanted to buy from him. Banished from the

social machinery by being forbidden to work, he was well placed to observe this

machinery in which each man is to the others what he is in relation to money, in

which each man has money by having the money of other men.. .the attempts to profit

by the statistical laws (market, exchange) in reality establish these laws, verify them

and perpetuate them without every increasing the total number of opportunities."33

Traditions, social forms, the importance of money and the status symbols

associated with it, all the detritus of cultural history was profoundly foreign to Gorz

as someone who had been terribly alienated from every other human being since

childhood. Nothing seemed natural to Gorz in how humans treated one another, and

particularly in how people treated money with such deference and awe. I would

argue that, at an intuitive level, Gorz saw and felt no reason why the world could not

be remade into something better, given the material and intellectual resources

available. All of the conceits of capitalists and all of the rank injustices of social

hierarchy were especially evident and repulsive to Gorz in that they seemed so

obviously artificial and mendacious to him.

My point here is that it was Gorz's personal alienation from the social

mainstream, his virtual exile, that actually aided him in being an insightful analyst of

33
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, trans. Richard Howard (London: Verso, 1989), 242 - 2 4 3 .
22
social and economic realities. Indeed, the whole project of Le Traitre was Gorz's

effort to make sense of why he was and had been alienated and to determine what

paths were open to him once he had pushed his analysis as far as he could. Having

made what peace he could with his past and his place in the world by the end of Le

Traitre, Gorz spent the next four decades battling in his journalism and theoretical

writing for the better worlds he could see as latent in the present one.

This thesis is an intellectual biography, an attempt to describe and critique the

entirety of Gorz's written work from his earliest philosophical writing to the last

essays written before his death in 2007. It is based on everything Gorz published in

book form, all of the articles he published in Le Nouvel Observateur and Les Temps

Modernes, and many of the articles published in other periodicals. It is also based on

interviews with certain of Gorz's friends and colleagues as well as interviews with

Gorz himself, published in various periodicals and books. It takes full advantage of

the considerable secondary literature on the French Left, the Sartrian circle, and the

ecology movement in an attempt to detail the contexts in which Gorz lived, worked

and wrote over the years.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, Gorz's personal papers are not available.

After his death, his papers (which are, apparently, quite extensive) were shipped to

the Institute memoires de I 'edition contemporaine (IMEC) in the town of Caen in

northern France. Consisting of his letters to friends and colleagues as well as his

personal notes, these papers would be, and hopefully will be, valuable to scholars

considering his life and work. Unfortunately, as of this writing, the papers remain un-
23
catalogued and inaccessible, as the institute suffers from chronic understaffing and a

lack of funds. Gorz's friend and fellow philosopher Francoise Gollain offered to help

catalog the papers for free if allowed access for her own research, but was rebuffed.

Thus, there is a gap that this issue introduces into the present work. Future

revisions will necessarily depend on the availability of Gorz's papers. Nevertheless,

this dissertation is framed in such a way as to take advantage of the sources that are

available: primarily Gorz's extensive published record. No work in French or

English currently considers his entire oeuvre and attempts to both summarize and

address its salient themes as does this thesis, nor do the other secondary works focus

on the broader intellectual context in which Gorz wrote.

In fact, the choice to refer to the subject of this dissertation as "Andre Gorz"

speaks to its specific focus on his public identity as a thinker and writer. His friends

and colleagues knew him by his given name, Gerard Horst,34 while the thousands that

read Le Nouvel Observateur every week knew him only as Michel Bosquet; at times

he would even publish articles as Gorz in Le Nouvel Observateur when their subjects

were not part of "Bosquet's" normal areas of expertise.35 In sum, though this thesis

does speak to both the life of Gerard Horst and the journalism of Michel Bosquet, its

Two of the posthumous tributes to Gorz by friends and colleagues noted this: see Jacques Julliard,
"Hommage: la mort choisi, les passions d'Andre Gorz," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 September 2007,
28 - 29, and Claude Lanzmann, "Pour Gerard Horst, Andre Gorz, Michel Bosquet," Les Temps
Modernes 645 - 646 (September 2007): 1 - 3. There is also an interesting shift in Simone de
Beauvoir's autobiographies; she refers to Gorz as "Gorz" in her La Force des choses (both volumes)
but as Horst in her posthumous tribute to Sartre, La ceremonie des adieux. See Simone de Beauvoir,
La ceremonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 80.
35
See Andre Gorz, "L'Occident est-il mur pour la revolution," Le Nouvel Observateur, November 23,
1970, 57 - 69, Andre Gorz, "Appel: pour Karl Heinz Roth," Le Nouvel Observateur, July 12, 1976, 33,
Andre Gorz, "Sartre et les sourds," Le Nouvel Observateur, June 27, 1977, 39, Andre Gorz, "Les
protestants du marxisme," Le Nouvel Observateur, May 7, 1979, 33 - 34.
24
major focus is the life-work of the philosopher and theorist Andre Gorz.

A note on translations: this study relies on the French originals of Gorz's

articles and books. For the most part, it does not use English translations, and all

translations from the French are thus my own unless noted otherwise. The one

exception is Le Traitre; I have consulted the excellent English translation published

by Verso, not least because of the interview with Gorz included in it, and I use its

translations since they were checked and revised by Gorz himself. One major reason

to examine the work of Gorz in the context of Anglophone intellectual history is that

certain key works by Gorz remain untranslated into English. First and foremost,

Gorz's monumental phenomenological treatise Fondements pour une morale is only

available in French. His first foray into Marxist philosophy and political economic

critique, La Morale de VHistoire, is also untranslated. As Gorz's reputation grew in

the 1960s, many of his books were translated quite quickly, but his last two books,

L'Immateriel and Ecologica, are untranslated as of this writing. Finally, his

journalistic articles outside of the collections are only available in French.

Gorz himself was a polyglot. His native language was German, which he

used in interviews and meetings when necessary, but which he deliberately

abandoned as the language in which he would pursue his career as a writer during his

university years in Switzerland. He embraced French with astonishing rigor,

mastering not only the language and its grammar, but a huge swath of its literature.

His entire life's work was written in French, with occasional exceptions in the form of

articles published for foreign periodicals (such as New Left Review.) He already
25
spoke some English on meeting Dorine (who was British) in 1952, and he soon

became fluent living with her. Finally, he learned to read Italian using Italian

periodicals as a journalistic writer for Paris-Presse in the early 1950s and became one

of the champions of certain "independent" Italian Marxists, working to have their

writings translated and published in Les Temps Modernes in the 1960s.

One note in passing regarding Gorz's use of French instead of German: as will

become clear in examining Gorz's autobiographical writings, he deeply resented the

national culture of his native Austria, as well as the role played by German

nationalism in the historical disasters of the mid-twentieth century. When Dorine

began to learn German on her own in the mid-1950s, Gorz asked her to stop. He

recalled that he had said "I don't want you to learn a single world of that language. I

will never speak German again." Dorine as, apparently, sympathetic: "you could

understand this attitude on the part of an ''Austrian Jew.""36 Indeed, for the first

decades of his career as a writer, his references were invariably French, Italian, or

English - it was not until the 1980s that he incorporated significant numbers of

German sources in his work.37

At any rate, despite his remarkable lingual abilities and the breadth of his

36
Andre Gorz, Lettre a D.,42- 43. Italics in original; Gorz used English phrases for emphasis in
many passages of Lettre a D.
37
In fact, Bowring noted in a posthumous tribute to Gorz that Gorz himself had not spoken German
between 1943 and 1983, when he was visited by a group of young German socialist militants who
wanted to discuss political strategy. Bowring's assertion may be slightly off- Gorz writes of visiting
his mother to announce his marriage to Dorine, an event that occurred after the end of World War II,
and he would certainly have spoken German then - but it is still striking that Gorz went many decades
without using his native tongue. See Finn Bowring, "Obituary: The Writer's Malady, Andre Gorz,
1923 - 2007," Radical Philosophy, March - April 2008, 54, and Andre Gorz, Lettre aD.,22- 23.
26
knowledge, there is no question that Gorz was deeply embedded in the French

intellectual context. He aspired to French thought in his adolescence, seeking to

abandon the German-language social and intellectual milieu in which he had been

raised, and it was in France that he made his home and his career. In terms of

historical context, it is equally certain that it was the French intellectual world of the

postwar period that provided the vocabulary and the setting for Gorz's political

theory. In short, despite being born and raised in the Thirteenth Bezirk of Vienna,

Gorz was a French intellectual for most of his life, and it is as an important figure in

French intellectual history that I will consider his life and work.

Considerations of the Historical Literature

What of that history, and the scholarship surrounding it? Gorz's writing spans

the period between the mid-1950s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Le

Traitre reflects back on the years before and after World War II as well. Thus,

Gorz's work encompasses the entire postwar period. For the whole of his career,

Gorz's concerns were focused on the present; as both a journalist and philosopher, he

critiqued ongoing trends in politics, economics, and social change, and his positions

adapted over time. Gorz's thought traced these changes and performed an ongoing

existential and radical intervention, anticipating dangers to personal autonomy and

27
fighting against the growth of economic rationality. In sum, one can read Gorz as a

critic of his times, following his journalism and his books and essays through the

major alterations in the postwar intellectual climate in France.

For my part, there is a matter of personal interest regarding Gorz, but one that

I think reflects on larger concerns in the study of French intellectual history: like

many students and scholars who have studied postwar French thought, I believe there

is a frustrating gap between the power, sophistication, and coherence of the

philosophical work of many thinkers like Sartre and the relative simplicity of their

political positions. One explanation for this puzzling contrast is the degree to which

"French Thought" was produced in very specific contexts, typically addressing

political events or engaging in local polemics in the Parisian intellectual scene. Once

disinterred from those contexts, it becomes very challenging to understand its

limitations.39

Nevertheless, even if the political interventions of intellectuals in France is

understood to be context-sensitive, some of the positions of the thinkers in question

can still seem simplistic. In the case of Sartre especially, the incredible subtlety and

complexity of works like L 'Etre et la neant and the Critique de la raison dialectique

stand in contrast to his treatment of political economy, accepting Marxist categories

("the proletariat," "the bourgeoisie") as satisfactory and sufficient categories of

38
Both of these ideas, autonomy and economic rationality, grew increasingly complex in Gorz's
thought - listing them here in a somewhat summary fashion, I do not mean to imply that they were
shallow concepts.
39
On this point, see Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in
France, 1930 - 1981 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1 - 23, 169 - 238.
28
analysis, even when the actual sociological and economic reality of France was more

and more evidently out of tune with those conceptual frameworks. This simplicity

has made the polemical treatments of Sartre, and many other leftist intellectuals, all

the easier, and often, all the cruder. My point here is not to deride Sartre for his

limitations, but to argue that Gorz, as a political journalist, was often better able to

critique the politics of his day.

The setting for Gorz's thought was the intersection of two histories: the

postwar economic boom and subsequent retreat on the one hand, and the rise and fall

of French intellectual radicalism on the other. Gorz's writing followed these contours

closely but also broke with some of the narratives that were later constructed in

historical hindsight. Gorz was a Marxist intellectual who advocated a working-class

revolution in the 1960s, but he was both more subtle and more pragmatic about the

prospects for a revolution than were many of his fellow radical thinkers. As I noted

in the introduction, Gorz broke with key Marxist ideas in the late 1970s, but not with

the radical critique of capitalism. As the European and global neoliberal reaction set

in under Thatcher, Reagan, and Mitterand in the 1980s, Gorz did some of his most

important work in the critique of economic rationality.40 Finally, with Marxism all

but a dead letter in intellectual circles in France by the 1990s, Gorz launched some of

his most prescient attacks on unchecked capitalist expansion.

There is one other way that Gorz both matched and transcended a received

40
On contemporary neoliberalism and its emergence, see David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (London: Verso, 2007).
29
historical narrative: in terms of the chronology of modern French intellectual history.

Put simply, Gorz was a living champion of Sartrian existentialism long after its

supposed demise. Already by the 1950s, Sartre's structuralist (and later, post-

structuralist) critics were loudly proclaiming his, and existentialism's, irrelevance.

One particularly memorable example was Foucault's claim that "Za Critique de la

raison dialectique is the magnificent and pathetic effort of a nineteenth-century man

to conceive of the twentieth century."41 Sartre himself first relegated existentialism to

"parasitic" status vis-a-vis Marxism in his Question de methode {Search for a

Method), then turned away from philosophy to his laborious intellectual biographies

by the 1960s.42 Despite the political kinship between Sartre and the student radicals

of the Events of May of 1968, existential philosophy itself was already relegated to

the history of an earlier era.

Gorz defied this neat story of existentialism's obsolescence. He continued to

draw intellectual sustenance from the existential description of the human

consciousness in all of his writing, posing it against the entire field of cybernetics as

late as 2003,43 He used existentialism's insistence on the primacy of the individual

consciousness to refocus discussions of sociology and economics on the experience

of the individual, in other words, of the subject-position of the worker, the bureaucrat,

the housewife, and so on. Existentialism was not only Gorz's starting-point in his

41
Michel Foucault, "L'Homme est-il mort?" Arts et Loisirs, June 15, 1966. Quoted in Didier Eribon,
Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 161.
42
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, precede de question de methode (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960), Jean-Paul Sartre, L 'Idiot de lafamille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
43
See Andre Gorz, L 'lmmateriel: connaissance, valeur et capital (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2003), 105 -
150.
30
defense of the autonomy of workers within capitalism, but it provided a perspective

on leftist theory that allowed him to cut through the obfuscation present in works like

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire by refuting their use of vague

sociological categories and largely ignoring the experiences of individuals.44 In sum,

as stated in the introduction, existentialism did indeed lose its position as the most

trendy and glamorous philosophy after the late 1940s, but it lived on in Gorz's life

and writing.45

Thus, we must locate Gorz within a larger body of theory and historical

narrative to define both how he fit in and how he broke away from the defining trends

of postwar French intellectual history. Central to this task is the status of France and

the "French exception," since so much of Gorz's work was focused on French

thought, the French economy, and debates occurring in the French intellectual milieu.

The idea of the French exception is tied explicitly to international relations. Whereas

Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian nations joined NATO and supported

US policy within the context of Cold War struggles, France initially joined but then

became the only nation to formally withdraw from the Atlantic alliance. Perhaps

surprisingly, it was under the idiosyncratic center-right guidance of Charles de Gaulle

As noted above, Gorz first, sympathetically, took Habermas to task for this regarding the abstraction
of the Lebenswelt (i.e. Monde Vecu or Lifeworld): Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du travail, quite du
sens: critique de la raison economique (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1988), 212 - 220. He was more
critical of Hardt and Negri: Andre Gorz, Miseres du present, richesse du possible (Paris; Editions
Galilee, 1997), 7 0 - 7 7 .
45
The secondary literature on postwar French intellectual history has perpetuated the idea of the
obsolescence of existentialism. For instance, see Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, trans.
Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 7, Luc Ferry and Alain
Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H.S. Cattani
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), esp. 41, and Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt:
French Theory after May '68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
31
that the decision to break from the US and search for the nigh-mythical "third way"

between American capitalism and Soviet communism was made, not under pressure

from the Left.46

One way to consider the French exception is by comparing it to its German

equivalent, the ^Sonderweg^ (special path.) The Sonderweg thesis posited that

Germany took a "special path" into modernity, one that failed to follow the model of

a gradual and mostly peaceful transition to parliamentary democracy, as did Britain.

Instead, Germany became an industrial nation with a bureaucratic government, but

one in which archaic authoritarianism led it to the disaster of Nazism. The

Sonderweg concept has become less popular over the last few decades, not least

because its specious positing of a normal path of development versus the numerous

abnormal paths that were actually followed historically.47 It does, however, lend

itself to a kind of utility in talking about comparative historic political trajectories, if

it is assumed that all nations have a Sonderweg defined in contrast to their

contemporaries.

In turn, the French Sonderweg would go something like this: the French

Revolution was the birth of the ideologies of political modernity, but it failed to result

in the radically emancipatory promises of its doctrines. Instead, it resulted in a vast

and relatively stable and self-sufficient peasantry that would help keep France

46
The iconic moment of this break being France's withdrawal from NATO in 1966 under De Gaulle's
direction. The role of the French Revolution as justification for French leftist politics in the twentieth
century is examined in more detail below; the essential work is Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution:
The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
47
A skillful summary of the debate around the Sonderweg concept is Jiirgen Kocka, "Asymmetrical
Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg," History and Theory, February 1999.
32
underdeveloped vis-a-vis the other great European powers until the mid-twentieth

century. It also launched a never-ending series of political struggles in which

intransigent forces with largely incompatible doctrines struggled for power and forced

the nation through a bewildering series of revolutions, restorations, and partial

compromises. It was the birthplace of ideas, theories, and movements but always the

junior partner in actual economic modernization.

Ideology always played a central role in French politics; De Gaulle believed

that French grandeur could not be achieved and maintained under American tutelage,

just as he (and the elite corps of technocrats trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and

Ecole Nationale d'Administration) did not believe that the market should be left to its

own devices without executive oversight.49 Likewise, until well into the 1970s a

significant percentage of the French electorate was intransigent about the (at least

nominal) goal of revolutionary transformation, despite France's explosive economic

growth during the trente glorieuses (the thirty glorious years) after 1945.50 And,

importantly, the devastating experience of decolonization was perhaps at its bloodiest

in France because of the seriousness of French nationalist ideology: not only the pieds

This point was argued by Barrington Moore. See his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 40-110.
49
The role of ideological "political traditions" in French history is nicely summarized in Sudhir
Hazareesing, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Regarding the importance of the graduates of the ENA and the Ecole Polytechnique see Ezra N.
Suleiman, Politics, Power, and Bureaucracy in France: The Administrative Elite (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1974).
50
The PCF won a full 26% of the vote for parliamentary representatives in the new Fourth Republic in
1945 and it remained one of the most powerful political parties until the late 1970s. See Philip
Williams, Politics in Post-War France: Parties and the Constitution in the Fourth Republic (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1958), 44 - 53. Note that the phrase "trente glorieuses" was created by the
French economist and sociologist Jean Fourieste in his 1979 work of the same name: Jean Fourastie,
Les Trente glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 a 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979).
33
noires (Algerian Frenchmen of European ancestry) but millions in France itself, not

least many members of the military, were absolutely determined to maintain French

control over Algeria, despite increasing evidence that the era of colonization had

come to an end all across the globe.51

Intellectual history lies at the heart of the historical investigation of modern

French history for several reasons. First, as noted above, it is possible to make a

strong causal argument about the role of ideology in political affairs, to emphasize the

power of ideas in political decision-making and social change, without at the same

time ignoring or under-emphasizing other factors (including demographic shifts,

technological progress, and global economic trends.)52 Second, it is precisely in the

period of 1945 - 1985, roughly from the hegemony of Sartrian existentialism to the

death of Michel Foucault, that French political, social, cultural, and literary theory

enjoyed its greatest period of productivity and effervescence.53 Third, and finally, the

seriousness with which ideas and intellectuals were treated in France in this period

51
Todd Shepherd's intervention in this regard is intriguing; he argued that the "inevitability" of
decolonization was invented after the fact to justify the loss of France's colonies as part of a self-
serving French universalism. See Todd Shepherd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War
and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Note also the semantic
difficulty in translating the term pied noir - literally, it means "black foot." Self-understood as French,
many pied noir were in fact descendents of Italian, Sicilian, and southern European immigrants from
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Were they thus "Algerian Frenchmen of European
ancestry" as I have described them, or were they more fundamentally alien to Algeria?
52
Tony Judt emphasizes the role that ideas themselves as political motivators play in French politics,
particularly on the Left. He made this point most explicitly in his first post-leftist work, a kind of
"staging" effort before delivering the crushing blow in Past Imperfect. See Tony Judt, Marxism and
the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830 - 1981 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986.)
53
The term "French theory" refers specifically to literary theory, and was an invention of American
academics in the late 1970s; see Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze
and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008). I refer instead to the broader field of different theories produced
in the postwar period in France, from existentialism through post-structuralism.
34
encouraged many of the maitres apenser (masters of thought) to push the limits of

their own disciplines and to investigate hitherto unexplored regions of philosophy and

social science. This begs questions about the role of context in producing the

memorable texts of existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

Despite the richness of the material, however, studying the intellectual history

of postwar France faces a serious challenge in the post-1991 era. Put simply, the

"liberal reaction," initially spearheaded by the formidable French historian Francois

Furet and the New Philosophers under Bernard-Henri Levy in the 1970s, was

vindicated after the collapse of the Soviet Union.54 Whereas for decades historians

and philosophers had been able to consider the output of radical thinkers within the

context of a living theory of Marxism, in the post-'89 era the intellectual door

slammed shut on Marxism and most everyone who had ever questioned the

desirability of the free market. For the next decade or so, at least in the American

academy, French thinkers of the postwar era were treated as valid objects of study in

relation to how little they had to do with Marxism; Foucault's crypto-materialism was

subtle enough, but Sartre and Althusser were increasingly declasse.

The exemplary work of this period was, of course, Tony Judt's Past

Imperfect.55 Himself a former radical leftist, educated at Oxford and the Ecole

54
Michael Scott Christofferson's French Intellectuals Against the Left is a timely history of precisely
this phenomenon, one that corrects many of the received notions of chronology and influence.
55
Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944 ~ 1956 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992). A far more strident and unimpressive member of the liberal reaction exemplified by Judt
is Mark Lilla. See Mark Lilla, ed., New French Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
and Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books,
2001).
35
Normale Superieure, and gifted with both formidable erudition and the ability to

deliver crushing polemics, Judt was well-suited to deliver the coup de grace to the

intellectual history of the left. The core argument of Past Imperfect was that a matrix

of cultural factors led many, perhaps even most, intellectuals in the immediate

postwar period to situate themselves within Marxism. The experience of the

Resistance was an important factor, but so was traditional French anti-Americanism,

the French intellectual predilection to explore ideas for their own sake, and the cult of

engagement which drove intellectuals to join political battles whether or not they

were especially well-informed regarding the relevant issues. In the end, Judt

castigated what he identified as a characteristically French intellectual attribute: the

reluctance to allow truth to be opaque and plural, along with the determination to

decipher the singular laws of historical development and human society.

Judt's specific arguments were airtight; it is significant that no major rejoinder

to his work was ever published, and to this day the prefaces of (Anglophone) works

on postwar French intellectual history often include a caveat addressing Past

Imperfect. Two points might yet be made, however, about writing about postwar

French intellectual history, not only in the post-'91 era, but in the post-Judt era.56

First, Past Imperfect was about the relationship of French intellectuals to Soviet

communism from 1945 - 1956, not to "Marxism" in a broader sense. In essence, it

was their (rather Sartrian) "bad faith" in supporting a regime that tortured, murdered,
56
Judt himself has moved on from discussions of French leftism. He authored an enormous, sweeping,
and characteristically erudite history of post-1945 Europe and regularly authors articles for the New
York Review of Books. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin,
2005).
36
and imprisoned its citizens that made postwar French intellectuals so vulnerable to the

Judtian critique. While it is certainly a more complex issue than the summary above

would indicate, the real problem with this approach is its scope; the New Left was

born of the events of 1956, and very few intellectuals of the left could countenance

Soviet-style communism after the invasion of Hungary. Thus, Judt closed his

investigation at the most convenient moment, whereas a further analysis of the 1960s

would have complicated it considerably.

The second problem is with Past Imperfect's tone and style, something even

more evident in the derivative works that were published after Judt's. In a discipline,

academic history, that encourages and awards argumentative prose, polemics

certainly have their place. They do, however, shift the scope of analysis away from

the immanent critique of the logics at work within a body of thought and toward a

resolutely monolithic judgment of what took place. To take a straightforward

example, Sartrian existentialism was more than just a great stupid error on the part of

some supposedly-intelligent people. It was a troubled, shifting project to reconcile

the insights of a major philosophical synthesis, existential phenomenology, with the

social reality of postwar France.57 There is no question that the work of Sartre and

Beauvoir themselves sometimes degenerated to simplistic polemics of their own, but

as often as not they wrote in a spirit of genuine inquiry, on the basis of an (accurate)

appraisal of capitalism as being incompatible with universal freedom and equality.

57
The best overall work on the subject remains Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France:
from Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
37
Judt's work was and remains an important corrective to earlier works of summary and

praise of leftist French theory, but it may well be time that a more comprehensive and

balanced perspective is brought to bear on an incredibly productive and interesting

period in the history of ideas in France.58

While Judt was the best-known, and most formidable, anti-Marxist historian

of French intellectual history writing in English, it is important to note that the same

reaction occurred in France itself in the 1980s and 1990s. The iconic figure here was

undoubtedly Francois Furet, who spearheaded a very successful intellectual campaign

to tie the idea of revolution to that of tyranny starting in the late 1970s.59 He assumed

the directorship of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1977 and

played the major role in creating both the Fondation Saint-Simon and the Institut

Raymond Aron in the early 1980s, both of which were directed toward undermining

the socialist leanings of the Mitterand regime and in producing center-right critiques

of socialism-as-totalitarianism.60 Furet worked closely with fellow historian Pierre

Nora, who began in the late 1980s to compile the enormous volumes of Les Lieux de

Memoires {Places of Memory), a kind of cultural history of France bereft of its

conflicts and divisions, celebrating a latent liberal tradition.

The Marxist intellectual historian Perry Anderson wrote "The orchestral

58
Along these lines, see Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and
Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004).
59
While he had already done significant scholarly work on the French Revolution, Furet's first all-out
assault on revolution as a historical phenomenon was Francois Furet, Penser la Revolution Franqais
(Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
60
A succinct summary of Furet's political and institutional activities is Perry Anderson,
"Degringolade," London Review of Books, September 2, 2004.
38
program of which Nora and Furet were the lead conductors in these years is best

described as the enthronement of liberalism as an all-encompassing paradigm of

French public life... The international conjuncture formed a highly favorable

environment for this turn: the global ascendancy of Anglo-American neo-liberalism

offered a formidable backdrop to the French scene."61 In fact, Past Imperfect was

published in 1991, a year before the last volume ofLieux de Memoire. In turn, the

capstone of the French liberal reaction was Furet's 1995 Le Passe d'une Illusion {The

Passing of an Illusion.)62 There, Furet hammered home the argument that there was a

slippery trajectory leading from socialistic policies to totalitarian tyranny, and that

liberalism was the necessary antidote.

Furet certainly makes the most convenient and iconic figure of and for the

French liberal reaction. The question remains, however, where did that reaction lead?

Anderson's critique was that the importance of France within the international

political landscape is precisely its exceptional status: the French Left and its refusal to

accept the inevitability of the global neoliberal realignment is a beacon of hope for a

genuinely alternative politics, compared to the bleak undifferentiated systems in place

in the US and UK. While Anderson, like many other radical scholars, was misleading

in conflating the politics of a Clinton (or, for that matter, an Obama) to those of a

Bush Jr., he was right to identify the stubborn core of true anti-capitalist radicalism as

being one of the important political legacies present in French society. Per Anderson,

61
Perry Anderson, "Union Sucree," London Review of Books, September 23, 2004.
62
Francois Furet, Le Passe d'une Illusion: essaisur I'idee communiste auXXe Siecle (Paris:
Gallimard, 1995).
39
the rise of extremist parties like the Front Nationale was explained less by growing

French racism and xenophobia than by a desire for a genuine political alternative to

the banality of both UMP and PS (the two major political parties of contemporary

France.)63

The status of that leftist core, one Gorz was of course associated with and

deeply invested in as a thinker, is all the more beleaguered in contemporary France.

On July 20, 2009, Manuel Vails, a Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party) representative and

the mayor of Evry, published an editorial in the English periodical The Financial

Times. Vails argued that the French Socialist Party had to "change or die," that its

series of electoral defeats was symptomatic of a fundamental failure on its part to

remain relevant to French society and global economic and political realities. In fact,

per Vails, the very term "socialist" was outdated, irrelevant, and pernicious,

undermining the efforts of the party to play a positive, ameliorative role in French

politics. Vails concluded by declaring his intention to run against Martine Aubry for

the Socialist Party candidacy in 2012.64

In turn, former Nouveau Philosophe Bernard-Henri Levy concluded in a

follow-up editorial in the Journal du Dimanche that Vails was on the right track, but

hadn't gone quite far enough; as far as Levy was concerned, the PS was already

63
Perry Anderson, ibid. Anderson and other scholars associated with New Left Review tend to
understate the genuine distinctions between the policies of American Democrats and Republicans, as
well as British Labor and Tories, since all of the above moved to openly embrace free market
principles in the 1990s. This critique arises from the fact that their scholarship remains rooted in
historical materialism; for examples see Perry Anderson, The Origins ofPostmodemity (New York:
Verso, 1998), and David Harvey, A Brief History ofNeoliberalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
64
Manuel Vails, "France's Socialist Party Must Change or Die," Financial Times, July 20, 2009.
40
dead. Where Levy and Vails agreed was that the task of the Left of the future

would be to attempt to restrain, constrain, and reshape capitalism's unstoppable

expansion, in order to protect people in a spirit of greater "fairness," as well as to

occasionally remind political leaders that the global ecosystem was in a state of

ongoing collapse. Any larger vision of a universalistic alternative to the capitalist

world order, however, was naive, outdated, and hopeless.

Over a year earlier, the diehard radical philosopher Alain Badiou conceded

that Sarkozy's election demonstrated that neoliberalism reigned supreme even in the

former heartland of leftist theory. He refused to see that triumph as permanent,

however, noting that various eras of modern European history had seen the temporary

quiescence of the Left, only to be followed by its resurgence (his most important

example being post-1848 Europe.) The "communist hypothesis" was "the

proposition that the subordination of labor to the dominant class is not inevitable,"

and that hypothesis lived on, particularly in the possibility of new alliances between

immigrant laborers, the traditional working class, and intellectuals.66

Badiou's argument is totally compatible with Gorz's work of the 1980s and

beyond. Gorz believed that a new coalition of leftists would have to be drawn from

much more varied constituencies than had earlier socialist and communist parties. As

early as the late 1960s, Gorz was already arguing that leftist intellectuals had to reach

Bernard-Henri Levy, "Le PS doit disparaitre," Journal du Dimanche, Juillet 19, 2009.
Alain Badiou, "The Communist Hypothesis," New Left Review (January - February 2008), 29 - 42.
41
out to disaffected white-collar workers. By the early 1980s, he shifted focus to the

"non-class of non-workers," the growing mass of individuals in advanced capitalist

economies who worked at temporary jobs with little security or benefits, since the

traditional working class was shrinking in both size and political power.68 Finally, by

the 1990s, Gorz envisaged a broad coalition of the disaffected and marginalized, one

that would grow ever-larger as neoliberal policies further undermined stable full-time

employment around the globe.

Gorz's proposed solutions to the myriad problems of late capitalism came

increasingly to focus on state oversight in every aspect of the economy, a line of

reasoning completely in line with established French political tendencies on both

sides of the Left - Right divide. Sudhir Hazareesingh noted that the great innovation

of Gaullism was its successful reconciliation of two strands of French political culture

that had long been antithetical: conservatism and republicanism. One of the methods

by which Gaullism achieved that feat was its use of etatism and dirigisme, thereby

maintaining the social hierarchy dear to French conservatism, while still recognizing

the legitimacy of republican political forms. In other words, Gaullism created a new

political and cultural style, a new French conservatism, without relinquishing the

traditional central role of the state in the national economy.69

French revolutionary rhetoric contained a parallel fusion of seemingly

incompatible strands of thought. Sunil Khilnani, a member of the liberal reaction

67
See Chapter 3.
68
See Chapter 5.
69
Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France, 261-285.
42
working in London, focused on how such a thing as a revolutionary tradition could

even exist in political discourse - after all, the constituent elements of revolution and

tradition would seem to be contradictory. Much of Khilnani's Arguing Revolution

was a laudatory summary of Furet's crusade to undermine the prestige of the theory

of revolution. Khilnani's more original point was that the French Left had drawn

much of its discursive (not to mention electoral) strength from the revolutionary

provenance of French republican government itself. Even if French radicals agitated

for the destruction of the existing French state, they could still lay claim to what

amounted to a peculiar kind of patriotism.70 Thus, the collapse of intellectual

Marxism, and revolutionary theory more generally, represented an enormous change

within French political theory in the last few decades. The idea of revolution was one

of the central components of French political discourse since 1789, and even if the

quotidian politics of the parties of the Left rarely amounted to real revolutionary

aspirations, the concept remained the ideological core of French leftism.

The French Right, meanwhile, has also undergone major changes, these of

even more recent vintage. While the UMP under Sarkozy has retained the

characteristic cult of personality around its leader, Badiou emphasized the great break

it nonetheless represented in French politics. Where there had once been major

substantive differences between the political parties, the rout of the socialists in 2007

was due in large part to the fact that they no longer represented a real alternative; as

70
Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
43
he wrote, "since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy

and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?"71 Indeed, the defining

characteristic of Sarkozy himself and the phenomenon he represents, per Badiou, is

precisely the attempt to permanently undo the deep-seated French reluctance to

embrace the free market, and it is that break that most clearly demarcates Sarkozy

from his Gaullist predecessors as well as the (so-called) socialists.72

The point here is to emphasize the resonance of Gorz's thought within this

fundamental (post-) modern political question: what is the Left in the absence of a

revolutionary subject? It is certain that French radicalism had its heyday in the 1960s

and 1970s, only to weaken and be overcome by neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

But just as this process was unfolding, and just as he served as a living, productive,

innovative link with Sartrian philosophy, Gorz's political and economic theory

constantly grappled with the identity of the Left against the backdrop of its apparent

decline. This is one of the contexts in which Gorz's thought is of tremendous

importance within the larger field of French intellectual history, both for its

contemporary relevance and its historical interest. Much of this thesis will focus on

Gorz's definitions and redefinitions of leftist politics.

Shifting away from the "pro-" or "anti-" stance of a Judt, Furet, Anderson, or

Badiou to the legacy of French radicalism, other scholars have instead attempted to

elucidate the contours of various specific thinkers and schools of thought, as well as

71
Alain Badiou, "The Communist Hypothesis,", 30.
72
Obviously, Sarkozy and the UMP have cooled their free-market rhetoric since the crise financiere
began in 2008.
44
their intellectual lineage and setting. An exemplary work in this regard is J.G.

Merquior's From Prague to Paris, which traced the history of structuralism from the

Russian Formalists Jakobson and Mukarovsky through to the major post-structuralist

scholars Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.73 Merquior's approach was to draw

not only chronological intellectual linkages between individual thinkers (Claude

Levi-Strauss studying with Jakobson in New York during World War II, for

instance), but to sift through the vast bodies of work of various thinkers and

synthesize their major binding concepts and arguments.

To take two iconic examples, Merquior demonstrated convincingly that Levi-

Strauss's anthropological outlook celebrated so-called "cold" societies that changed

very little and maintained a kind of equilibrium with the natural environment over

"hot" societies that grew and consumed progressively more natural resources, and

that Levi-Strauss's work was shot through with a profound pessimism about the

modern human condition. For that, however, Merquior maintained that the

structuralist approach had proved productive within the human sciences, lending

genuine insights to the ways in which various societies, "modern" and otherwise,

actually functioned. In contrast, Merquior demolished the work of Jacques Derrida,

arguing that for all his subtlety, Derrida's entire corpus of writing amounted to a great

mass of word-games and puns that systematically denigrated rational discourse.

"Deconstruction" had, in fact, proved cowrcter-productive to scholarship, allowing

73
Jose Guilherme Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist
Thought (London: Verso, 1986).
45
academic literature departments a free hand to unravel the meaning of texts and

substitute arbitrary relationships between words in a kind of orgy of intellectual

nihilism.

One of the mainstays of postwar French intellectual history, again told outside

of the field of polemics, has to do with the chronology of movements of thought. In

his massive History of Structuralism, Francois Dosse began by dismissing Sartrian

existentialism outright, claiming in simple terms that its heyday came and went in the

mid-1940s through the early 1950s and then simply vanished from the scene.74 It is

interesting to note, however, that earlier works of scholarship did not present the

changes in French intellectual life in quite so neat a pattern. Mark Poster's 1975

Existential Marxism in Postwar France, written before the decline of French

radicalism but well into the "post-existential" phase of postwar French intellectual

life, in fact sought out the points of compatibility and confluence between

existentialism and (post-) structuralism.75

Likewise, Badiou himself was not just a polemicist on behalf of radicalism.

In his lectures on twentieth century thought, no such cut-and-dry division is made

between the major movements of postwar philosophy. In a complex analysis

spanning the breadth of poetry, literature, and philosophy, Badiou argued that the

great, defining project of humanity during the twentieth century had been the search

See Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism.

Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France.
46
for "the real" in the midst of cluttered, meaningless "reality." Artists, philosophers,

and political theorists all claimed (implicitly or explicitly) that the truth of human life

was inaccessible unless mankind was willing to purge, prune, and cut its way to a

new future, a process that invariably led to violence against both older aesthetic and

epistemological systems and actual, living human beings. To accomplish this,

twentieth-century ideologies created new solidarities in which the "I" of the

individual was collapsed into a shared "we" of the movement, a "we" whose very

definition depended on the existence of an external enemy to be identified and

destroyed. According to Badiou, this process was central to everyone from the

various artistic movements of the avant-garde to Stalinist and Maoist communism

and, of course, Fascism in any of its national variants.

Badiou was primarily concerned with the intellectual consequences of the end

of the twentieth century, which he identified with the demise of attempts to create a

new kind of (philosophical) human being. Despite all of the bloodshed of those

projects, the quasi-scientific trappings that justified ideologies of race war or purge,

Badiou was unwilling to write off the Promethean project itself in light of what was

left in its absence: nothing that could spiritually or intellectually justify human life.

Whereas the Sartrean project of radical humanism had sought to inspire man to create

himself anew in a spirit of freedom and possibility, and the Foucaultian project of

radical anti-humanism had created an intellectual space in which new possibilities of

human action and life might be considered from totally original positions, the

76
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscana (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 64.
47
prevailing twenty-first century orthodoxy was mere "animal humanism," a cowardly

ideology that saw humankind only in terms of "natural" drives and needs and not only

left the search for meaning and truth unanswered, but tried to prevent the discussion

from arising at all. Without the philosophical search for meaning, Badiou argued,
77

man wasn't "worth a fig."

Badiou's lectures are suggestive in outlining a new approach to French

intellectual history, one entirely compatible with a shift in scope from the polemical

to the expository. As noted by various commentators, including members of the

liberal reaction with nothing but contempt for leftist politics, structuralism and post-

structuralism had very little to say about politics, since they tended to describe fields

of stasis, of power relations in which the actors changed but the structures remained

intact.78 Other schools of thought, including the liberal as well as the existential, did

have a vocabulary to describe political struggle and arrive at coherent positions within

it. More to the point, the individual thinkers and their respective schools were, in

fact, in conversation with one another for decades, even though it is of course true

that specific movements happened in a certain sequence. In passing, it is noteworthy

that as late as 1982 Foucault was still commenting about Sartrian philosophy in

interviews.79

Given the richness of the material, and the inherent interest of the subject, it is
77
Ibid., 174-175.
78
Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism,
Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 8-19.
79
Michel Foucault in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
351.
48
surprising how little has been written about Gorz within the literature on postwar

French intellectual history and political theory. In this sense, Gorz was (and remains)

an exile from the scholarly discussion of the time and place in which he wrote. There

are a total of three English-language studies on Gorz: Adrian Little's The Political

Thought of Andre Gorz, Finn Bowring's Andre Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy, and

Conrad Kodziak and Jeremy Tatman's Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction. All three

originate from a group of self-proclaimed "Gorzian" scholars working at the

University of Nottingham in the UK in the 1990s. Bowring's work, in particular, is a

clear and nuanced account of the major themes and arguments of Gorz's writing

through the 1980s. All three are admirable works of intellectual synthesis, but are

also fairly brief and approach Gorz's work in terms of its potential utility to leftist

political strategists, rather than accounting for it historically.80

Scholars sympathetic to the Sartrian school and the New Left produced many

summaries of the major strands of leftist thought in the 1970s and 1980s that included

Gorz as one of their subjects, including Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Postwar

France and Arthur Hirsh's The French New Left. These works, however, rarely

extend beyond basic accounts of Gorz's political theories as put forth in his earlier

books, ignoring his journalism. Furthermore, they are focused solely on the period

during which Gorz was closest to Sartre and was focused almost entirely on the

80
There is also a recent study of "post-critical economy" that includes a chapter on Gorz: Gary
Browning and Andrew Kilmister, Critical and Post-Critical Political Economy (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006). They summarize the major themes of Gorz's work of the 1980s and 1990s but
question his use of empirical data (expressing a preference for theory disinterred from empirical
reality.)
49
question of labor union strategy: the 1960s.81 More recent studies of Gorz in the

context of the intellectual history of postwar France are fairly uncommon, although

there are a handful of articles that invoke Gorz in discussing his important

interventions into ecological theory and his extensive considerations of labor in the

(post-) modern economy. To the best of my knowledge, there is no English-language

monograph on Gorz that takes his entire oeuvre into account; in particular, the works

on Gorz neglect his journalistic work and fail to account for the major changes of his

thinking over time.

That being noted, the most extensive treatment of Gorz outside of the

specialist studies by the Nottingham "Gorzians" is the detailed study of Les Temps

Modernes by Howard Davies. Since Gorz was such a major figure at the journal

during the 1960s and early 1970s, Davies devoted considerable attention to tracing

his (Gorz's) writing and, to a lesser extent, the relationship between Gorz and Sartre.

What Davies makes clear is that Gorz was absolutely central to the Sartrian political

project in its enunciations by the mid-1960s, as Sartre himself was increasingly

distracted by his study of Flaubert. While Sartre's political interventions had become

largely symbolic (petitions, press conferences, his nominal editorship of radical

journals like the Maoist group the Gauche Proletarienne's La Cause du Peuple),

81
Arthur Hirsh, The French new Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End
Press, 1981), 221 - 233. One should not be misled by the title of Hirsh's work; Gorz is included in it
solely because he is the last thinker considered chronologically. Hirsh's treatment of his thought is
summary and fairly shallow. See also Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, 363 -
369. Poster concentrates only on Gorz's Strategic ourvier et neocapitalisme {Strategy for Labor),
leaving him out of the larger history of the period.
50
Gorz spearheaded Les Temps Modernes'' substantive political analysis.

The French-language literature on Gorz is not a great deal more extensive.

Full-length books include Nicolas Guillerot's Capitalisme et revenu minimum :

reflexions apartir de Voeuvre d'Andre Gorz, Marc-Andre Houle's Crise du travail et

transformation de la societe apartir d'une etude d'auteurs Robert Castel, Andre Gorz

et Rolande Pinard, and Veronique Parel's L'Envers de la technique : etude sur le

concept d'alienation du travail chez Andre Gorz. All of them are focused on certain

key concepts within Gorz's work, often taking it as a starting-point for original

philosophical and theoretical accounts within the broader field of labor theory. In

addition, there are two very recent works on Gorz, a collection of essays, Andre Gorz:

un penseur pour le XXIe Siecle, which highlights the applicability of Gorz's thought

in the face of contemporary economic and political issues, and Andre Gorz ou le

socialisme difficile, a very short book summarizing some of the major themes of

Gorz's thought83

There is thus a modest literature devoted to Gorz and his thought. The most

important and promising writing underway on Gorz is that of Francoise Gollain, who

is writing the first full-length account of Gorz's thought in French. As mentioned

above, however, Gollain has been unable to access Gorz's personal files, delaying the

Howard Davies, Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes,' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), esp. 172-202.
83
Christophe Fourel, ed., Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe Siecle (Paris: Editions la Decouverte,
2009), Arno Munster, Andre Gorz ou le socialisme difficile (Clamecy: Nouvelles Editions Lignes,
2008).
51
completion of what will surely be an essential work on the subject. It should be

noted that like most of the scholars who have written about Gorz, Gollain is a

philosopher and sociologist by training, and her existing work on Gorz explores

philosophical themes in his writing rather than attempting to create a historical

portrait of his context.

Placing Gorz in his context is the major goal of this thesis. In contrast to

some of his colleagues, at times including Sartre, Gorz was attentive to the changing

face of the empirical social reality of French society. He simply outlived the thinkers

of Sartre's generation, and unlike them, he often modified his outlook according to

changing socio-economic realities. Thus, particularly because he was in tune with

issues like ecology that were nonexistent during the early New Left, Gorz stands out

as a leftist thinker of potentially greater relevance to the present than his predecessors,

not just in terms of his impact on contemporary political issues, but as a theorist

whose work was consistently more in tune with historical circumstances than was that

of his colleagues. Gorz was, I believe, a historical personage who can help answer

the question of what it means to be "of the Left" in an era in which Marxism as it was

understood for well over a century is no longer relevant. In other words, one of the

driving questions behind my inquiry is: how does Gorz's thought help illuminate how

we might evaluate a new problematic of capitalism, one dislodged from earlier

84
In the meantime, Gollain recently published an article on the inseparability of the major strands of
Gorz's thought: the concern with alienation, selfhood, ecology, and autonomy. See Francoise Gollain,
"Andre, mon maitre, hommage a Andre Gorz," Revue du Mauss 18 (First Semester 2008), 315-327.
See also her book, based on her doctoral dissertation in sociology, on the theory of labor: Francoise
Gollain, Un critique du travail: entre ecologie et socialisme (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 2000).
52
rigidities and pieties of thought?

53
 Chapter 2: From Ecriveur to Ecrivain

Autobiography

Gorz wrote two autobiographical pieces: his landmark Le Traitre {The

Traitor), which described his life from childhood to his first years in Paris in the late

1940s, and his tribute to Dorine, Lettre a D, {Letter to D.), covering their life together

in its entirety. Neither are conventional autobiographies. Gorz wrote the former as a

rigorous, sometimes tortured self-analysis after his Fondements pour une morale

{Foundations for an Ethics), a piece that took him ten years to write, solicited no

interest from Sartre. Lettre a D. was both a heartfelt testimony to Dorine's character

and intelligence, written as she was dying from cancer, and an attempt by Gorz to

revise the unfair and inaccurate portrayal of her in Le Traitre, written fifty ears

earlier.

Le Traitre can be a frustrating source for the would-be biographer of Gorz. Its

purpose was not to catalog events, to reflect on history as it was lived by the author,

nor to provide some kind of justification for actions taken in the past. It was instead a

rigorous application of the method Gorz had developed in Fondements pour une

morale, a method whose most important antecedent was Sartre's "progressive-

regressive" approach of beginning with the concrete, moving to a theoretical

framework, and returning to the concrete with new insights. The facts of Gorz's life

85
The actual provenance of the progressive - regressive method is more complex: Gorz credited
Sartre, who credited another French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, who credited Marx. See Martin Jay,
54
are immersed in his reflections; as a writer, he was uninterested in them except

insofar as he could find ways to move beyond the "original complex" of his troubled

childhood and youth.

Le Traitre is divided into four chapters: Nous, Eux, Toi, and Je (Us, Them,

You, and /.) Lacking a conventional narrative or clear chronology, the book moves

from an outline of the methods Gorz intended to use (Marxism, psychoanalysis, and a

largely implicit existentialism) to various studies of incidents in his life and their

deeper meanings. He wrote about himself in the third person and frequently

addressed the reader in the second person. In turn, he reserved the first person for the

final chapter, as it was only "if he succeeds in his undertaking, he will have the right

to call the last chapter T and speak there in the first person; he would regain himself

from his phantasms, the subject at least of a situation claimed as his own..."86

In Lettre a D., Gorz most frequently cited Le Traitre, rather than any of his

subsequent works of political and social theory. Just as he had in Le Traitre, Gorz

skipped over many of the details of his and Dorine's life together, focusing instead on

what he had come to believe was a grossly unfair and inaccurate portrayal of Dorine

in his earlier work. Gorz left whole sections of his life's work unexamined, leaving

out his involvement in the conception of labor movement strategy, the controversy

that arose following the publication oiAdieux au proletariat, and indeed, the last

years of his writing in the 1990s and early 2000s. Clearly, Le Traitre still held a

Marxism and Totality, 350.

86
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, trans. Richard Howard and Andre Gorz (London: Verso, 1989), 88.
55
position of primary importance for him.

There are several explanations for the primacy of Le Traitre in the

retrospective gaze of Gorz's thought and writing. By his own admission, it marked

the transition from his status as a "writer" (ecriveur) to an "author" (ecrivain),

someone whose work is published and submitted to public scrutiny.87 Le Traitre was

undoubtedly the most famous single work Gorz ever published, followed by Lettre a

D. itself, establishing Gorz as an intellectual of note in a Paris swarming with would-

be Sartres. Even as the purpose of Le Traitre was a critical self-analysis that allowed

Gorz to move beyond his "infantile" complexes and existential bad faith, it was

written at the juncture in his life in which, as a journalist and philosopher, he became

a public intellectual. In other words, its publication completed a personal

transformation of tremendous importance for Gorz.

In addition to the individual milestone that Le Traitre''s publication

represented, there is also the fact that Gorz only ever wrote these two works of

autobiography and that Lettre a D. was a chance for him to revisit the themes

introduced in Le Traitre. Most importantly, Le Traitre had been the attempt of a

profoundly introverted and self-lacerating individual to somehow join the world of

other people, to form a new and more effective existential project tied to some kind of

solidarity with other people. Lettre a D. was also important as a demonstration of the

possibility of an ethics of reciprocity within Sartrian existentialism. In sum, Gorz's

latter autobiography largely complimented and completed the former, representing a

87
Andre Gorz, Lettre a D., Histoire d'un Amour (Paris: Galilee, 2006), 31 - 33.
56
kind of personal dialectic of transcendence from regarding hell as other people to

recognizing other people (thanks primarily to Dorine) as the key to possible meaning

and happiness.

I will approach Le Traitre and Lettre a D. in three ways. First, I will consider

each as independent works worthy of examination for insights about Gorz's thought

and the evolution of his outlook and character over time. Second, I will consider

them together as part of a shared project of self-discovery and as the record of an

applied ethics: Gorz's ongoing political and social engagement. Third and last, I will

use the record of Gorz's life as described in both works to provide context for his

other books and articles throughout the body of this thesis.

Le Traitre and "Infantile Complexes"

As noted above, in Sartre's regressive-progressive method, the thinker began

with the concrete object of analysis, extrapolated connections to a larger body of

theory, then returned to the concrete with new insights about its place in a broader

context. For Gorz, the object of analysis was his own psyche, the theory was

existential phenomenology and its branches in psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the

broader context was his attempt to "join" the world of other people. Le Traitre was

also an idiosyncratic autobiography that, in fact, does speak to Gorz's experiences of

childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

The core of Le Traitre was Gorz's attempt to understand, and through that

understanding transcend, his profound feelings of inadequacy and alienation. Gorz's

57
chief characteristic, his governing personality trait, was his desire to escape the world

of real people and exist only in a milieu of ideas. The book is full of examples and

anecdotes of his neuroses: he structured his every action to avoid accidentally

meeting people with whom he might have to converse, he lived in abject terror of

waiters and others who professional identity was based on serving him, he was

constantly lost in thought, and everywhere he went he mumbled and whispered,

looking to avoid every human interaction.88

The event that inspired Le Traitre was the failure, a failure he had anticipated

during the ten years it took to write, of the essay that became Fondements pour une

morale. It "failed" in that it was impossible to publish and of no interest to anyone.

Gorz later noted in an interview that "Sartre had not been particularly interested in

Fondements pour une morale, which was finally published more than twenty years

later. This was because it was in a way a continuation of Being and Nothingness..."

The manuscript was enormous, over a thousand pages in its draft form, and without

Sartre as its champion Gorz knew that no publisher would touch such a huge tome

written by a complete unknown.89

Fondements pour une morale had been Gorz's labyrinthine attempt to deduce

from Sartrian existentialism an ethics. The point here is not the content of the essay,

but of its inspiration: Gorz's flight from "real life" into the plane of the abstract.

"(Writing was) A dream of making itself a bomb annihilating everything by its

88
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 5 8 - 7 1 .
89
Andre Gorz, Abschiedvom Proletariat? Eine Diskussion mit und iiber Andre Gorz, reprinted in
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, trans. Hilary Pilkington, 275.
58
explosion, including itself. A universal power of negation incarnated insofar as it

refuses all incarnation...a speech into silence."90 Its completion left Gorz adrift, a

failed would-be philosopher whose life's work had amounted to nothing. Le Traitre

was written in the aftermath of that failure, a project whose purpose was to confront

the psychological roots of his behavior and determine if he could aspire to something,

anything, as an intellectual.

Thus, Gorz turned to his personal history in trying to determine what potential

avenues he had for the future, based on a confrontation with the psychological

complexes instilled by his past. Gorz was born in 1923 in Vienna, the only son in a

family with one older daughter. His mother, Maria, was an Austrian Catholic from a

Bohemian (i.e. Czech) family and his father, Jacob, was an Austrian Jew from a

Moravian family of merchants. Gorz's father ran a branch of his family's dry goods

enterprise, putting Gorz's family squarely in the petit bourgeoisie. Neither of his

parents practiced their familial religions, although his mother insisted that his father

be baptized as a Catholic in an attempt to legitimate their union in the face of

widespread anti-Semitism. Likewise, while he was exposed to Catholic ritual and, in

fact, embraced the church as an adolescent, Gorz was completely cut off from the

practice of Judaism.91

Gorz was brought up in a world of rigid decorum.92 Much of Le Traitre

90
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 202.
91
Ibid., 106-110.
92
Two (very different) sources of background information on the kind of culture Gorz experienced in
his youth are Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981) and Eric
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 217 - 268.
59
describes the myriad forms of politesse he was expected to exhibit on meeting

strangers, speaking on the telephone, conducting himself in public, acting in school,

and so on. Gorz's mother regarded her children as living incarnations of her social

aspirations and insisted in the most intransigent terms that they demonstrate her

success in raising them properly. The daughter of a poor itinerant singer, actor and

theater manager, Gorz's mother used her marriage and her children as props to

achieve a higher class than that of her own childhood, which she regarded as

shameful and repulsive.

Gorz's father is a shadowy presence in Le Traitre, a disciplinarian of

secondary importance compared to Maria and something of a literal-minded

simpleton. Through subterfuge and luck, he survived World War II and the

Holocaust, but Gorz noted that "after the war, in 1951, he was still saying, 'I have

nothing against this Hitler, and if it weren't for his anti-Semitism, I'd probably vote

for him tomorrow. The man restored order, did something for his country.'"93 Gorz

was very clear that his father was bullied and controlled by his wife (i.e. Gorz's

mother), mutely conceding to her requests, up to and including to the legal separation

she sought as their living situation became intolerable in the 1930s.

Simply put, Gorz had a miserable childhood. One of the major purposes of Le

Traitre was for Gorz to work through the degree to which the psychological legacy of

his childhood could be transcended, but there is no question that that legacy was one

of humiliation, failure and alienation. As a child, Gorz was trapped between the

93
Ibid., 110.
60
bourgeois aspirations of his mother, which called on him to be virile, brilliant, candid,

and self-disciplined, and the fact that from his earliest memories he was terrified of

other people and of the field of social requirements into which he was born.

Likewise, he encountered his own mixed heritage not as a shock, but as a

confirmation of how he already thought about himself- as inherently and inescapably

flawed.

One of the great points of originality of Le Traitre was Gorz's insistence that

the facts of his childhood experience could explain much about his personality in the

present, but that there was an irreducible element of choice, of the chosen

confirmation of his misery, that somehow preceded and went beyond his personal

history. He wrote "He was not a victim of the event (i.e. of the circumstances of his

childhood, and particularly of his Jewish heritage.) The event was the occasion for

him to victimize himself."94

There were a host of historical reasons for Gorz's feelings of deep-seated

inferiority. The most important are undoubtedly his Jewish heritage and the rigidity

of bourgeois norms in his childhood milieu. Gorz was an adolescent precisely as

Austria was absorbed by the Third Reich. Having already grown up in a deeply anti-

Semitic culture, Gorz came of age as Austria formally ceased to exist - he was fifteen

in 1938 in the Anschluss (the union of Nazi Germany and Austria.) Despite his

family's best efforts to conceal the Jewishness of Gorz's father, who was baptized

and changed his name in 1930, Gorz himself was mercilessly tormented by his

94
Ibid., 117.
61
classmates for being Jewish. He struggled to be their equal in sports and in early-

adolescent pranks, hoping somehow to demonstrate a nascent virility, but no matter

how well he performed he could be returned to ignominy by being reminded of his

Jewish identity.

At the same time, Gorz's mother insisted on a regimen of activities designed

to confirm her family's social status. As a child, Gorz took piano lessons, studied

French outside of school, and played sports, despite being terrible at anything

involving teamwork. He understood from his earliest years that he had been brought

into the world to fulfill purposes defined by his parents, and particularly by his

mother: he was to please them and their guests and colleagues with his poise and he

was to excel at school. He encountered the world as a bewildering matrix of social

expectations, all of which were outside of his control. He wrote "Continually at fault

in a universe swarming with rules and imperatives none of which was within his

power, he felt illegitimate, and to make a place for himself within legitimacy he

labored long and hard, doomed to failure by his very attitude of submission."96

On a practical level, Gorz was not, in fact, a failure in most of his pursuits, at

least until the final takeover of Nazism after 1938. He did excel in school, although

not to the level his parents demanded (i.e. total perfection.) He exercised relentlessly

and became an excellent swimmer and cyclist. In 1939, shortly before he was sent

into exile in Switzerland, he shocked his classmates and teacher by outdoing all but

Ibid., 94, 113.

Ibid., 131.
62
one of his fellow students in pull-ups in the gymnasium. The incident, however, was

written off as merely a surprising fluke.97 He taught himself to speak in the slang of

the Austrian working class (a class none of his schoolmates were actually from, but

an idiom they all used for its purported virility.) The taunts were always there, but it

is also clear that Gorz was not completely socially rejected, at least through his early

adolescence and the rise of Nazism.

All of it, however, ultimately amounted to nothing. His pursuit of physical

strength was a symptom of the deep-seated feelings of displacement and, particularly,

of weakness that he had inculcated since infancy. "For months he rode off every day,

alone on his bicycle, clocking the time it took him to cover a certain distance,

pedaling as fast as he could, determined to beat his record, to beat the weakness he

sensed within himself, which he somehow identified with his Jewish blood."98 Anti-

Semitic imagery made an enormous impact on Gorz, and he came to understand that

the feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy he had always carried were tied to this

phenomenon of Jewishness, a factor he only became aware of at the age of seven or

eight.99

Gorz wrote "The truth is that the events of the period made him conscious of

an exile from which in fact he had never emerged, obliged him to admit that the

bridges between himself and the others were cut, to assume this separation which he

was making such heroic efforts to overcome. That these efforts were futile precisely

97
Ibid., 98 - 99.
98
Ibid., 94.
99
Ibid., 4 1 - 4 2 .
63
because of their voluntary nature he had always, deep down, suspected" In other

words, Gorz's activities in school and his relentless drive to improve himself were

always doomed to failure, because he lacked something essential that other people

seemed to possess. To Gorz, the poise, the strength, the intelligence, the social class

of others were and only could be characteristics of alterity.

It is tempting to conclude that Gorz was simply traumatized by the anti-

Semitism of the Austria of the 1930s and that he carried that legacy into adulthood.

Gorz himself readily concluded that his adolescent experience was largely defined by

his experience of anti-Semitism, an experience that culminated in 1939 with the

desperate (but successful) effort on the part of his mother to send him to a boarding

school in Switzerland as war loomed. This is not the whole story, however. Gorz

wrote "Rather than as an original motivation, the discovery of his Jewishness through

the derision of others complicated and confirmed a choice of inferiority and

culpability already made, a choice which rendered him receptive to that derision - he

felt it was well founded. So his drama had to be as follows: Derided for his

Jewishness because of his real weaknesses, and derided for his weaknesses because of

his Jewishness, he chose to impute the weaknesses to his Jewishness and thereby to

give them a substratum that was both biological and metaphysical."1 '

Likewise, as he wrote Le Traitre, Gorz realized that the feeling of inferiority

that his Jewishness confirmed were in fact already present before he had any idea that

lUiU., S I .
101
Ibid., 116.
64
such a thing as Jewishness existed, let alone that he himself was half-Jewish. As

early as he could remember, Gorz had felt completely estranged from the world of

other people and sought solace in imagining himself to be something he was not. As

a small child, he identified with persecuted animals in stories and films. He prayed

fervently to God that he be transformed into a foreign child, an African or Chinese

boy. He delighted when people thought that he was the son of his nanny, a

Frenchwoman from Nice of mixed African and French heritage. He wrote "The

correct interpretation of his tendency toward difference is surely this: to exchange the

human world for another in order to protect himself against the constraints and norms

of the people around him, and, thanks to this desertion, to take refuge from various

persecutions and judgments."102

In turn, this "exchange" of the human world for an imagined alternative was

rooted in the expectations of his mother. Put briefly, nothing he did was good enough

for her. He struggled to click his heels and bow on meeting strangers, to speak

clearly when answering the phone, to somehow exhibit the precocious, virile energy

of the boy his mother wanted him to be. "He felt he always had to deserve parental

favor and that he lived in the continued postponement of condemnation and

abandonment. It soon became clear to him that the role of son was perhaps beyond

his ability..."103

Thus, he sought escape through various disciplines and devotions of

1U1U., ILT,

Ibid., 128.
65
transformation. The term ascesis, the severe self-discipline of the monk and the

mystic, reoccurs throughout Le Traitre, describing the vigor with which Gorz threw

himself into any practice or system that might change him into something he was not.

From his childhood fantasies of becoming an animal or a member of a different race,

he went on to become a fervent Catholic, a would-be Nazi, a Frenchman, and a

writer, all in the name of escaping from himself and his world.

The earliest manifestation of his attempts to replace the social order in which

he could never succeed with a higher order of ideas (and ideals) was religious

mysticism. Despite the fact that neither of his parents actually practiced the

Catholicism they were nominally a part of, when he was about ten years old Gorz

tried to immerse himself in prayer and ritual. He favored prayers, like the Our Father,

that could not be imputed to selfishness, and he prayed only for the welfare of others.

At the same time, he punished himself with privation and, at times, self-mutilation for

imagined slights and sins. With this regimen of mystical self-immolation, Gorz did

find some comfort: "He exiled himself from the human world, passing imperceptibly

into the Lord's camp, as seven years before he had passed into that of the animals. He

was seeking in imposed exile a religious signification, and in so doing tried to make a

virtue out of it as if he had chosen it; he felt he was the best because he accepted

being the lowest."104

His "conversion" to Catholic mysticism lasted for several years in his early

adolescence, joined soon by his devotion to the prevailing image of strength in the

104
Ibid., 134-135.
66
Austria of the 1930s: Nazism. In what stands out as perhaps the most surprising

pursuit of his adolescence, Gorz applied himself with his characteristic zeal to

becoming a good Nazi. "From his twelfth or thirteenth year, the beginning of his

simultaneous conversion to Nazism and to a puritanical Catholicism, he had imposed

a rigorous discipline upon himself, which consisted of systematically doing the

opposite of whatever he was spontaneously inclined to do...and offering to God the

pleasures he refused himself, though without feeling exonerated even so."105

Indeed, the first anecdote that Gorz related in Le Traitre about his childhood

in Vienna was of him buying a Swastika pin for his coat as the German troops arrived

in 1938.106 Even as the situation in Austria degenerated and the plight of his father

and his father's business (and hence the family's material fortunes) grew increasingly

desperate, Gorz struggled to find acceptance at school among his "Aryan" classmates.

His teachers were purged and replaced by party members, his tutors broke off their

professional relationship with Gorz and his family and Gorz was subjected to classes

in "racial hygiene" (Rassenkunde), now part of the official curriculum.107

Writing with a curious detachment, Gorz recalled the downward spiral of

conditions in Vienna in 1938. His classmates vandalized Jewish businesses and

synagogues were burned down. His family's apartment was seized by a party official

and Gorz's father relinquished control of his business to a non-Jewish "associate" to

prevent it from being stolen outright. Finally, Gorz's mother sought a legal

105
Ibid., 96.
106
Ibid., 89 - 90.
107
Ibid., 100-101, 113.
67
separation from his father in an effort to protect her children. Gorz and his sister

were a "half-castes of the first class," the baptized children of a converted Jewish

father, the highest rank of "mixed-blood" under the Nuremberg race laws of 1935.109

In the eyes of the state and most of his fellow Austrians, though, Gorz was

irrevocably polluted by his Jewish blood.

All around him, "patriotic" Austrians abandoned the short-lived First Republic

established after the downfall of the Hapsburgs only eighteen years earlier and

embraced Nazism. It was clear to Gorz in hindsight that Nazism was many things to

his fellow Austrians: an ideology of rebirth that promised glory and strength after so

many years of decline and weakness, a system that legitimated the anti-Semitism that

had been growing more powerful since the late nineteenth century, and perhaps most

strongly, simply an excuse to plunder the Jews. "They had come out of their holes

like rats, swastikas in their buttonholes, servile smiles on their lips.. .'It's our turn

now - after the Juden, we're the ones to make a penny now.'"110

In this environment, Gorz's desperate attempts to flee himself through

Catholicism or Nazism reached their logical conclusion by 1939: they failed. Gorz

was abandoned by his few friends and could no longer pretend to be a good Catholic

or a good Nazi in the face of overpowering anti-Semitism. Likewise, Gorz's family

had been reduced from bourgeois respectability to the brink of disaster with

astonishing rapidity.

108
Ibid., 104-105,112.
109
Ibid., 112.
110
Ibid., 92.
68
 In an interesting note, Gorz reflected on what his options were at the time. In

accepting himself as a failure, as a permanent exile from some kind of imagined

holistic humanity, Gorz's "defeat" was fundamentally introspective, despite its

external catalysts. He knew other people of mixed heritage from similar backgrounds

who sought different paths of protest or escape: one became a virulent Nazi and died

on the eastern front fighting the Red Army, another became a cynical black marketer,

another a nihilistic hedonist. For his part, the young Gorz continued his inward

retreat, trying to find a method to escape himself.111

From his philosophically-informed perspective of 1956, however, Gorz noted

the utility of his own approach in the late 1930s: "If I contend that he made the better

choice thereby, it is because the consciousness that continues to reflect on its

contradictions in humiliation and suffering remains better armed to assume its

condition and some day to attempt a liberating synthesis than the consciousness

which claims fulfillment by alienating itself among the fetishes of its time."112 In

other words, the young Gorz's failed escape attempts were less beholden to

existential bad faith than those of his analogues, as he was forced to confront his

reality in a way that they still fled from. This comment is noteworthy in that it

gestures toward a kind of peculiar arrogance Gorz developed and that culminated in

his conversion to existentialism years later. Even if his introspective flight was

doomed, he implied, he was still able to perceive the truth of social and political

111
Ibid., 119-121.
112
Ibid., 121.
69
reality more clearly than those around him.

Exile: Switzerland

Gorz's personal situation, embedded in the plight of his family, became

intolerable by 1939. Gorz's parents had long insisted that they were too "respectable"

to be directly affected by the Nazi regime (a form of "class complicity" per Gorz), but

living in squalor, their livelihood cut off, aware of the existence of Dachau and of the

boxes of ashes that were sent back to the Christian wives of murdered Jewish

husbands, they finally had to concede that they faced disaster. Gorz's mother

liquidated her various "secret" stashes of savings to send him to Switzerland (to "save

the boy"), and enrolled him in a boarding school in Lausanne.113

Gorz loathed Switzerland. His pages describing it, written almost twenty

years later, still drip with contempt for its self-satisfied hoarding, its fussy

parochialism, and its worship of money. Swiss culture to Gorz was the example par

excellence of the spirit-crushing impasse represented by bourgeois culture, of a petty

social hierarchy that had nothing better to do than maintain its picturesque alpine

rituals while serving as the bank of the Third Reich. He wrote "And all this

abundance shriveled between their fingers, useless, good for nothing but making

money, creamy pastries, comfort for four million lives for whom life had no

meaning."114

113
Ibid., 144-145.
114
Ibid., 178.
70
 Switzerland was repugnant to Gorz because it represented a microcosm of the

historical impasse he had experienced throughout his entire life. There were no

options for the Swiss; their would-be rebels and intellectuals wrote bad poetry no one

would read and fervently wished that they were French instead of Swiss. Writing

after the war, Gorz noted the complete lack of options for would-be Swiss thinkers:

"They were all exiles, abstract and contemptuous because their situation offered them

no means of communication with either the world outside or the core of the Swiss

collectivity that was swathed in lifeless traditions, casting each man back into his

solitude within a supercilious conformism."115 In a way, Switzerland was the perfect

setting for Gorz's late adolescence, since like the Swiss, he too had no way of

reaching out to the rest of the world during the war, nor of effecting the dream of

escape from himself.

Thus, Switzerland represented to Gorz the most frustrating and yet banally

commonplace human condition: to suffer from circumstances without being able to

change them. He saw his own impasse, which would finally start to give way after

the war in the flowering of French intellectual life, reflected in a particularly

unattractive form in Swiss culture. While he pitied Swiss intellectuals after the war,

during his school years in Lausanne he simply hated his classmates for their

affectations and the fact that they did not even recognize their own parochialism. "He

loathed these useless objects for the assurance which kept them from suffering from

115
Ibid., 179.
71
their absurdity."116

For his part, Gorz was "the perfect exile" in Switzerland.117 In a society that

valued money and comfort above all things, he owned a single old suit and could

barely afford to eat. He was a half-Jew from Austria with a German passport issued

by the Third Reich, living in Switzerland on a renewable three-month student visa.

He received a small monthly stipend from his parents, who sent all they could afford,

and he was never sure if his father would survive or be deported to the death camps.

His fellow students mocked him for his ignorance of jazz and American cinema, his

inability to play along with their status games, his Austrian accent, and his now

deeply-ingrained shyness.118

Alone in his tiny room, cold and half-starving, Gorz found a new focus for his

existential escape attempts: French. As mentioned above, Gorz had had a beloved

nanny in his childhood from Nice and, when he was still very young, he spoke French

more naturally than he did German. He had continued his studies in school. Despite

being in Lausanne, part of French-speaking Switzerland, his boarding school

conducted classes in German and he had no personal contacts outside of school.

Thus, he was largely limited to the classes in French for practice in conversation.

Much to his delight, he discovered that the school library was well-stocked with the

classics of French literature.

As a half-Jew and former Austrian, living in the heart of insipid neutrality,

116
Ibid., 174.
117
Ibid., 146.
118
Ibid., 146.
72
Switzerland, Gorz chose to try to embody the one thing he had absolutely no claim to:

Frenchness. French thought became for him the ultimate universal philosophy,

available to any who could access and comprehend it. With his customary fanatical

zeal, he apprenticed himself to the French language, reading every French book in the

library and filling notebooks with vocabulary and notes on grammar. He forced

himself to speak French whenever possible and was filled with "jubilation" when he

began to dream in French.119 Here, at last, was a form of otherness that no one could

fault him for, since while he was not French, there was no inherent reason for an

imagined French interlocutor to consider him an inferior so long as Gorz mastered the

French language and French ideas.120

Along with French, chemistry provided a system of possible escape to Gorz.

Two factors led to his studies of chemistry and his eventual degree in the subject.

First, for a brief time in 1939 - 1940, Gorz thought that it might be possible to regard

the world solely in terms of its scientific laws, to erase the human factor by insisting

that every experience was simply a question of chemical reactions in the body and in

the outside environment. The temptation was not especially strong, however. The

scientific world-view was too arid for Gorz, as it did not hold the same kind of

promise of possible redemption that his other programs of escape had; it could only

offer a potential erasure of human will and meaning without offering something

119
Ibid., 153.
120
Ibid., 152-163.
73
better, and Gorz devoted little time considering his study of chemistry in Le traitre.

The second and more important factor was simply that the only degree offered by the

Lausanne Polytechnic that was recognized outside of Switzerland was in chemistry.

Far more important than his formal studies, however, was his apprenticeship

to French language and thought. It was in the school year of 1940 - 1941 that Gorz

devoted himself completely to their mastery, which he described as his latest

"conversion." "The conversion to French was a desperate escape from the Austro-

German/Judeo-Christian contradiction, petrified by exile."122 He experienced the

rapid defeat of France in World War II as the latest in a long string of total failures

and tragedies, but he also felt a powerful kinship with the defeated nation. Like Gorz,

France was revealed as weak and out of place, a land of thinkers and ideas unable to

compete in a world dominated by force and violence.

In 1941, having finished his studies at the boarding school, Gorz "landed" in

Lausanne at the polytechnic university. He still lived month-to-month on his meager

stipend from home, sent against desperate odds by his mother. Every three months he

had to renew his student visa to remain in Switzerland, forced to endure a "Heil

Hitler!" on entering the embassy of the Third Reich, of which he was still a citizen,

for preliminary paperwork. Lausanne was, for Gorz, a sort of Kafkaesque hell in

which he was tracked by the Swiss authorities, sneered at by the embassy officials of

the Reich, and lost in worry about his family as the Nazis enjoyed their great military

121
Ibid., 151. Gorz's dissatisfaction with chemistry speaks to a larger phenomenon that was to be of
great importance in his philosophy: the inability of the natural sciences to inform existential choices.
122
Ibid., 161.
74
victories of 1941 - 1942. He had no friends and lived on almost no food. He noted

simply "This lasted more than a year. Not a single person to talk to." By 1942 he

weighed 117 pounds, contemplated suicide regularly, and used chloroform to

anesthetize himself at night in half-hearted hopes of not awakening.124

In these horrendous conditions, and still in the midst of his immersion in

French literature, Gorz arrived at the conviction that life was, quite literally,

meaningless. Here, it would be easy to slip into a shallow caricature of Gorz at the

time and miss the profundity of his retrospective analysis. Later, having finished

Fondements pour une morale, Gorz was equipped with a framework of analysis that

he applied to his own condition in Le Traitre. Looking back on his life in the middle

of the war years, he was able to salvage lessons, confrontations with truth, that the

conditions he had endured had brought about. Most importantly, being unable to join

the world of others directly, Gorz's attempts at inward escape culminated in his

decision to write.

He discovered in writing the best, most potentially useful and valid means of

escape from his situation. Inspired by his still-new heroes, the great French authors,

he tried to "dismantle (like a bomb) his own intolerable experience" through

writing. He would later conclude that writing was not ultimately any better than

religious mysticism or Nazi barbarism, but that it was still preferable in terms of the

human projects of meaning he could aspire to join. After all, there was no "ultimate"

123
Ibid., 180-182.
124
Ibid., 183.
125
Ibid., 168.
75
recourse in existential philosophy, and in Gorz's case there was not even access to a

contingent project joining his life to that of others. He concluded at the time: "Moral:

The only valid philosophy is the one which demonstrates its own impossibility and

abolishes itself in silence."126 Thus, he embarked on a novel and an essay, the latter

of which was to become Fondements.

At the time, the "poetic" truth of demonstrating in thought and writing that

everything was absurd was an attack on the universe that had condemned him to

nothingness. "The exile's isolation and nullity, reinforced by infantile masochism,

the attitude of persecution he returns to on this occasion as to an old habit, pushing

the experience of his condition to a metaphysical extreme - this radical despair, if you

like, is the meaning of his empirical condition assumes in the light of his original

choice, and his despair, in a sense, is comfortable; the vanquished, the impotent

victim are safe 'at the bottom of the pit', nothing can happen to them, nothing more is

asked of them, they have nothing to do."127 In this position of moral and emotional

safety, he assumed a kind of literary defiance and negated the world in writing,

essentially out of spite.

This was the approach that Gorz adopted at the time. It was not one that he

found desirable, let alone admirable, years later. It may have been his only "positive"

option, since there were no potential solidarities he could have become part of, but

writing from his perspective as a universalistic humanist in 1956, he tied it to the

Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 190.
76
defiant pride taken by oppressed minorities, a reaction he understood but now

rejected. "The bad faith of this attitude is patent. I loathe its touchy, vulnerable

pride, the intense, aggressive expression of Jews or Negroes flaunting their

Jewishness or Negroness as it has been defined by others; their stiff ostentation whose

voulue (deliberate or willed) arrogance reveals the inferiority they pretend not to

suffer from.. .They create a defiant facade, concealing their need for humanity in

order not to have to suffer from the impossibility of satisfying it."128

And yet, as of 1942 - 1943, he in fact envied oppressed groups struggling for

justice, particularly American blacks and the occupied Poles. "No role was assigned

to him, not even that of pariah...He had no historical or social grievance, no

individual 'cause' that might connect with the universal."129 In the midst of his

evident self-pity and his deeply inculcated sense of powerlessness, the idea of running

off to join a resistance group against the Germans was out of the question. He

identified too much with failure itself. "You understand his nihilism now? It was the

image of his situation. For him concrete, historical reality was always the absolute

obstacle separating him from the others.. .Neither Jew nor German, nor Austrian, nor

Swiss, nor French, nor refugee, nor friend, nor enemy, nor exploiter, nor exploited, he

was nothing of all he had to define himself by."130

His material conditions did not improve with the completion of his degree.

He tutored and wrote small unsigned articles for a pittance. He could not find

128
Ibid., 192.
129
Ibid., 196.
130
Ibid., 197.
77
employment anywhere - he was even rejected for an unpaid apprenticeship at a Swiss

chemical concern. Every failure and rejection contributed to what he now took to

be a sort of perverse marker of identity and pride: his status as the ultimate pariah,

looking down on the world of the particular from the lofty realm of nothingness.

Writing was the most fruitful project of escape, defiance and arrogance in that regard,

since it was a "positive" exercise, an act of creation, but in his writing he could

nevertheless demonstrate the vacuity of all particularities.

He began Fondements pour une morale as the war finally ended - an event

that had so little impact on him that he did not even note it in Le Traitre. "It was in

1945, freed from the tedious chemistry courses by obtaining his diploma, that he

began writing a treatise, already begun several times, in which he would make a

systematic interrogation of every human attitude - re-creating and dismantling them,

revealing their bad faith, then throwing them aside."132 The catalog of forms of bad

faith remained in the finished draft of Fondements some ten years later, going into

vastly greater depth than Sartre's fairly lackluster examples in L'Etre et la neant.m

The possibility of a more "authentic" form of escape, however, had not yet emerged.

Sartre, Dorine, and Marx

History, both global and personal, provided those possibilities starting in

131
Ibid., 195.
132
Ibid., 203.
133
Sartre's examples, of the woman under pressure to sleep with a suitor and of the bored waiter, were
and remain unconvincing, not to mention almost humorously parochial and "French."
78
1946. Gorz had discovered existentialism in 1941, buying Sartre's L'Etre et la neant

and Le Mur {Being and Nothingness and The Wall) at random in a bookshop. He had

not heard of Sartre or of existentialism at the time, purchasing the books because he

thought the idea of a philosopher writing fiction was intriguing.134 His conversion to

existentialism, which was "complete" by 1943, was as thorough as his past

conversions had been. Unlike Catholicism, Nazism, or an imagined Frenchness,

however, he would remain an existentialist for the rest of his life. After the years of

stultifying loneliness and hopelessness, the postwar climate and a chance meeting

with Sartre changed Gorz's intellectual trajectory forever.135

Gorz met Sartre on a lecture tour in 1946. He monopolized Sartre's attention

in the reception following the public talk and secured an additional thirty-minute

meeting eight days later at a cafe in Geneva. Gorz was shocked to discover that

Sartre was only interested in the concrete and argued that abstractions without

material bases were of no importance. Gorz pressed Sartre on the ultimate

meaninglessness and contingence of every personal or political choice, something

that is, of course, strictly true in the existential framework. Sartre, however,

diagnosed Gorz with being an essentialist and "despising the concrete," a conclusion

that weighed on Gorz after their meeting.136 He reflected later that there was no way

134
Ibid., 167-168.
135
Gorz would later note that, at the time, he had no knowledge of other schools of philosophy, or even
of individual philosophers, besides that of Sartre. Interview with Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy
Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction, 117. See also Gorz's description of how closely Sartre's
philosophy described his (Gorz's) life at the time in the preface to Fondements: Andre Gorz,
Fondementspour une morale, 1 1 - 1 5 .
136
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 216.
79
that Sartre could have understood the depths of his alienation from the concrete, but

the point was still valid.

More broadly, the flowering of postwar intellectual life in France was

tremendously exciting to Gorz. "Historical conjuncture accorded intellectual

speculation an objective meaning, after having denied it any consequence for six

years..."137 He cited the great works of existentialism by Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty,

Jeanson, and Sartre himself, all published in rapid succession after the liberation from

the Nazis. In a social and political context in which new forms of governance and

social relations seemed entirely possible, the role of the intellectual had never seemed

more important in western Europe, and Gorz wanted to participate in at least a minor

way. "He wanted to enter literature as if it were a convent, to become not the peer (he

did not feel worthy) but the honorable second of the protagonists of French

thought..."138

Reflecting back on this period in an interview a full fifty years later, Gorz

noted "France.. .had to justify that France still existed, after all that it had done and

not done as an occupied country collaborating with the enemy. And when you have

to re-legitimate your existence as a nation, well, thinking takes on a tremendous

importance."139 France was doubly appealing to Gorz at this time, both as the nation

of universalism, a universalism that even a non-entity like himself might become a

137
Ibid., 219.
138
Ibid., 220. Note that "an honorable second (to) the protagonists of French thought" is precisely how
Gorz is described in much of the relevant secondary literature to this day.
139
Interview with Gorz by Jeremy Tatman, in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A
Critical Introduction, 118.
80
part of, and as a social and political context in which his chosen vocation as a thinker

might actually have an impact on real life.

Even as the political context shifted to allow a space for ideas, and his

meeting with Sartre undermined his conviction that the concrete was beneath his

contempt, Gorz's personal life changed as well. He had begun a relationship with a

Swiss woman, "L," whom he regarded as something like a living philosophical

exercise. According to his friends and students, as well as his retrospective notes in

Lettre a D., Gorz always had the tendency to consider every event, action and

personality trait in terms of philosophy. This is to say that he thought of human

psychology primarily in the framework of existential phenomenology, of the inherent

drive for freedom at heart of the cogito (Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") and its

equally inherent resentment at limitations. In all of his later books and many of his

journalistic articles, this tendency was apparent.140 Having found in existentialism a

system that seemed capable of explaining his entire life and his entire subjective

experience since childhood, Gorz relentlessly applied the criteria of that system to his

personal life.

Among the small circle of friends he had finally developed by 1946, Gorz was

well known for lecturing about the bad faith inherent in the actions and goals of those

he knew.141 His erudition and his lack of intentional malice were such that he was

not, apparently, completely insufferable to be around, but he could not help but be
140
In an article about impoverished Spanish peasants in the 1960s, for instance, their resentment
toward the rich was described in existential terms. In the 1990s, he tried to come up with an existential
framework to explain punk rock and skinheads.
141
Ibid., 223.
81
somewhat cold and superior. He consistently rebuffed L's pledges of devotion,

indeed insisting that she was merely occluding her own freedom by devoting herself

to him. When she opted to sleep with someone else, Gorz tried to think of it as a kind

of literary episode with himself as the protagonist, rather than as an event with direct

emotional repercussions for either of them.1

Perhaps more interesting than the details of Gorz's love affair were his later

reflections on the status of women in bourgeois society. To him, L's situation was an

iconic demonstration of the impasse bourgeois women faced. To L, Gorz's distance

and intelligence made him something unattainable but desirable, a kind of projected

image to venerate. At the same time, he refused to treat her as the kind of sexual

"prey" she had been taught to expect. "In remorse and guilt she was living out the

contradiction between her femininity and her humanity - between her social role of

woman-as-prey and her unsatisfied need to accede to the universal as human

transcendence."143 The influence of Beauvoir's Deuxieme Sexe (SecondSex) is clear

in this quote, and indeed Gorz would periodically return to the theme of gender roles

versus the existential drive toward universal humanity inspired by Beauvoir's work.

L, not surprisingly, left Gorz, telling him to "go back to your books and your

nothingness."144 Shortly thereafter he met Dorine. Before considering Dorine and

Gorz's relationship in its early stages, a few notes are in order regarding Gorz's

approach in the latter part of Le Traitre in discussing human relationships more

142
Ibid., 231.
143
Ibid., 234.
144
Ibid., 236.
82
broadly. Simply put, flesh-and-blood women, Dorine included, exist in the pages of

Le Traitre as inconvenient intrusions of concrete reality into the realm of ideas in

which Gorz preferred to live. He credited Dorine with forcing him to finally abandon

his icy allegiance to philosophical principles in favor of real people, and yet in his

descriptions of her and of their relationship, she is a ghostly, two-dimensional

presence. The reader could conclude that Gorz sacrificed his principles - in

confirming his monogamous commitment to Dorine and accepting hers to him -

because it was the right thing to do, in terms of existential authenticity, rather than

because of the depth of his feelings for her.

The major problem with Gorz's portrayal of Dorine, "L," and the small group

of platonic friends he alludes to in the latter chapters of Le Traitre is the deep

ambivalence with which he discussed the moral value of other people. In fact, his

personal distaste for other people, informed by the years of misery and solitude in

Austria and Switzerland, overshadowed his later conviction (arising from his personal

relationship with Dorine and his theoretical relationship with Marxism) that the

formation of concrete projects and solidarities with others was an ethical imperative.

At the time he wrote Le Traitre, this was a goal he still found very distasteful.

One of the most important reasons that Gorz wrote Lettre a D. some fifty

years later was to correct this imbalance. In fact, Dorine was far from the desperate,

friendless caricature she appeared as in Le Traitre. When Gorz met her, on October

23, 1947, she was staying with friends in Lausanne and was already better adapted to

the city than Gorz was after nearly ten years. Fighting through his characteristic
83
shyness, Gorz asked Dorine to go dancing. Despite being warned by some would-be

suitors that Gorz was "an Austrian Jew of no interest," Dorine agreed. Their

relationship proceeded rapidly from there, with her moving into his tiny studio

apartment and, a few months later, their decision to marry.145

In Le Traitre, Gorz cited Dorine as the true catalyst of his existential

conversion from bad faith to the search for authenticity, but he did not really explain

why she was so important except that she forced him to renounce abstract

philosophical principle (against marriage as a "bourgeois" holdover) in favor of a real

human relationship. What he made clear in Lettre a D. is that they quickly formed a

kind of solidarity that made Gorz capable of embarking on the kind of life, as an

intellectual, which he would have never been emotionally capable of before.146

In many ways, Dorine and Gorz were natural compliments. She was already a

convinced internationalist socialist when they met and Gorz was impressed with the

breadth of her literary knowledge. They joined the internationalist peace organization

Citizens of the World together and their eventual appointment to its office staff in

Paris began by selling its paper on the streets of Lausanne.147 She would work

alongside Gorz in many of his journalistic appointments for the next two decades, and

it was their system of processing information together that made them more efficient

and thorough than other journalists.

Emotionally, Dorine was both similar to Gorz and markedly different. She

145
Andre Gorz, Lettre a D., 10 - 22.
146
Ibid., 26.
147
Ibid., 15, 30.
84
had endured a troubled childhood, raised by a former lover of her mother's (who was

referred to as her "godfather") and having essentially no relationship with her father,

a traumatized veteran of World War I. Despite being of "unmixed" English heritage

and having endured less ridicule than Gorz in her upbringing, she was as

contemptuous of the hypocrisy and parochialism of British bourgeois life as he was of

its Austrian and Swiss equivalents. One of their running jokes was that she was "for

export only," English by birth but completely lacking in nationalist sentiment. They

were, in short, both self-understood exiles from the mainstream culture of their

countries of origin.148 Where they differed most strongly was in social aptitude.

Dorine was vivacious, outgoing, charming, and a brilliant conversationalist. Per

Gorz, she rapidly made friends and those friends quickly looked to her as a confidant.

Gorz retreated into their relationship, taking refuge from the outside world to

concentrate on Fondements, while Dorine joined a theater group in Lausanne, taught

English lessons and rapidly mastered French.

In the Spring of 1947, Gorz was asked to write an article on the Exodus affair,

in which a ship of German Jews was denied entry to Palestine by Britain. The article

marked Gorz's beginnings in political journalism. At that point, all of his own

writing had been philosophical in nature, while the only paid work he had done as a

writer was as a translator of "third-rate American novels."149 As he found occasional

work as a freelance contributor to minor journals following the Exodus piece, Gorz

148
Ibid., 16-19.
149
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 219, 240.
85
was struck by their arbitrary approach to financial compensation; he was often paid a

pittance for work equivalent to that of higher-paid journalists, on the excuse that he

was an unknown and that his fellow writers had more financial obligations than he

did.150

The incident may seem trivial, but it catapulted Gorz into his lifelong critique

of "economic rationality" well before he conceived of such a term. The so-called

"laws" of the market seemed utterly absurd to Gorz, who was as much an exile from

quotidian economics as he was from normal human relationships. The most

important contradiction inherent in market economics was, to Gorz, the fact that each

individual confronted the economy as an external set of relationships and

requirements, but that in his unique, chosen actions, he perpetuated the system as a

whole. "Man profits from men as if they were alien things (has nothing to ask of them

or offer to them save money), without realizing that he thereby makes himself the

promoter of a reifying order in which he himself figures only as an alien thing

(demanding or dispensing money.)"151 Within this logic, which reduced other human

beings to line-items on a balance sheet, was contained the potential for a totally

inhuman barbarism. As he put it, "The crematory ovens are within the logic of the

system."152

Likewise, the "public interest" was in no individual's private interest. The

individual confronted every tax, every law, every restraint as an impediment to profit-

150
Ibid., 2 4 0 - 2 4 1 .
151
Ibid., 243.
152
Ibid.
86
making, but it was only because of that system of laws that a semi-stable market

environment could exist. More to the point, the whole system of state oversight in the

economy existed to mediate and reconcile competing private interests, a factor that

was virtually invisible to those interests individually. To Gorz, at the margins of the

economy but used to looking at the world in terms of philosophical categories, the

whole market system was a gigantic enterprise in existential bad faith, concealing its

actual operations within a web of obfuscation.153

Gorz's first taste of full-time employment was as the "secretary of the

secretary" of the Citizens of the World. Gorz was invited by Rene Bovard, the

organization's international secretary, to move to Paris and work as his assistant in

1949.15 There, he and Dorine answered the stacks of correspondence the office

received each day and Gorz wrote for its bulletin. Both received temporary visas

based on their employment status and eked out a living; in addition to their small

salaries, Dorine brought in money by continuing to teach English and lead tour

groups.

According to Arno Munster, a German radio correspondent who met Gorz in

the early 1970s for an interview, Gorz had initially considered seeking a degree in

philosophy from the French university system, having decided that his ultimate aim

was to be a writer.155 This claim was not substantiated by Gorz in any interview or

autobiographical writing. At any rate, whether or not he hoped to pursue further

153
Ibid., 244.
154
Andre Gorz, Lettre a A , 30.
155
Arno Munster, Andre Gorz ou le socialisme difficile, 20.
87
education on his arrival in Paris, he and Dorine were obliged to simply struggle to

make ends meet for several years, first at the Citizens of the World and then as

poorly-paid j ournalists.

As a writer for the Citizens of the World bulletin, Gorz operated as a

"poisonous spider in the middle of its web, decoding the vibrations and rejoicing

when things were going badly."156 While he would later identify this period as the

beginning of his true intellectual life, it is also clear that in his lifestyle little had

changed from the poverty and alienation of his student days. He still regarded the

world as essentially foreign and preferred to deconstruct it using the language of

existential philosophy rather than to propose "positive" changes. He shut himself

away each night to labor until the early morning on Fondements.

That being said, there is an event that occurred in Gorz's life in this period,

somewhere between his discovery of Sartre in 1941 and his work for Citizens of the

World in 1949, that Gorz never addressed directly: his conversion to Marxism.

Indeed, in a book full of "conversions" to various ideologies and systems of thought,

Le Traitre never describes in detail the chain of events that led Gorz to Marxism. By

the time he was writing Le Traitre in 1955 - 1956, Gorz was not only a Marxist but a

kind of philo-communist, someone who flirted with the idea of actually joining the

PCF, a fact that overshadowed his retrospective reconstruction of his earlier life.157 It

seems clear that by 1956 Gorz, like Sartre, regarded Marxism as the "philosophy of

156
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 246.
157
Andre Gorz, Lettre a £>., 58.
88
the age" in which other systems and approaches to thought (including existentialism)

were merely "parasitic."158

But what about the Gorz of a decade earlier? I would emphasize two factors

in explaining Gorz's Marxism: his repulsion to the bourgeois world of his upbringing

and the radicalism of the French intellectual milieu at the time he aspired to join it.

The former informed his politics at an intuitive level even as he formed an intellectual

understanding of political reality, while the latter provided a complex and seductive

field of theories to explain that reality. Gorz wanted desperately to be, if not a French

intellectual in his own right, a participant in the world of western European radicalism

largely informed by French intellectuals, and at the time Marxism was enshrined as

the absolute ideological foundation of political theory on the left.

For his part, Gorz rather modestly put it this way in the same interview

mentioned above: "I read Marx, although not very systematically, because I was

looking for keys to interpret things that were going on. In France at that time we had

got state planning, some top economists in all government positions, and it was

important to first understand economics in order to be able to criticize what was going

on and to understand class relations. I needed Marx just in my journalistic work and

not the other way around."159 This would date Gorz's initial reading of Marx to the

late 1940s and early 1950s, as he embarked on his career as a journalist. It seems

likely that his first systematic reading of Marx occurred later in the 1950s,

158
This was Sartre's position established in Question de methode, the preface to Critique de la Raison
Dialectique.
139
Andre Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction, 124.
89
particularly as he began work on La Morale de I 'histoire and grew closer to the group

around Sartre.

Beyond his practical desire to understand Marxist economic theories, there

was certainly an emotional draw for Gorz in his attraction to Marx's work. It is

difficult to overstate Gorz's antipathy for the world of bourgeois Europe, the world of

his childhood in which the value of each person was predicated entirely on their

social class. Gorz had been raised in an Austria that glorified its lost imperial past,

that worshiped military rank, that rapturously embraced Nazism, and that cultivated

anti-Semitism as a kind of national virtue. As a young adult, he lived in a

Switzerland that played the complacent middleman and banker to the Nazis while

stewing in a flaccid neutrality. He starved for almost a decade while those around

him feasted and he watched as the nation he identified with philosophy and truth,

France, was crushed by fascism.

Of course, in historical hindsight many critics would question whether or not

the term "bourgeois" is even a helpful category of analysis. Whether or not the "logic

of capitalism" was one possible ideological setting for the death camps, capitalism as

such did not invariably lead to the Holocaust. The important thing to emphasize is

that Marxism provided a sophisticated and totalizing vision of an alternative to the

social world that had, in fact, resulted in Nazism, a world that Gorz knew all too

intimately. To Gorz, the dichotomy between bourgeois and socialist was, among

other things, a frame that did clarify his personal experience. There was neither

justice nor meritocracy in the bourgeois world he knew of, only hypocrisy, irrational
90
hatreds, and rank and banal injustices.

There is also the role played by Gorz's mother. The last chapter of Le Traitre,

the chapter in which Gorz finally the claimed the right to speak in the first person,

emphasizes the incredible psychological damage wrought on Gorz and his sister by

his mother. Anti-Semitism had been a cause of Gorz's self-loathing, a social factor

informing his inescapable feelings of inferiority, but he still insisted on the role that

his own choice had played in those feelings. His mother, however, and the

"impossible expectations" she had for her children created an environment even more

pernicious and overwhelming than that of the anti-Semitism of the public sphere.

From his earliest awareness of the social world, Gorz did not correspond to the roles

he was supposed to play according to his mother, and by the time he was an adult

Gorz could clearly the see the degree to which those expectations were born of and

embedded in the corrupt edifice of bourgeois life itself.

The whole project of Le Traitre was Gorz's attempt to come to terms with the

myriad of complexes he carried with him from childhood, in the name of

transcending them and constructing a future project for his life. The most serious

legacy he had to address, the one whose transcendence was the topic of the "I"

chapter, was that of his mother and the social environment she embodied, not the

history of Austrian anti-Semitism or the triumph of Nazism. By confronting the

milieu that had produced his mother, Gorz could write "I no longer believe, as at the

outset of this work, that a man can change radically, can liquidate his original choice.

But I am now convinced that by a careful analysis of his empirical situation, he can
91
discover in his choice potential objective significations that permit him to reach

positive conclusions."1

Those "positive conclusions" had to do with the political project of socialism,

which he embraced by the mid-1940s. Gorz had not read Marx yet in the period

described by Le Traitre, but the choice between the values of socialism and the values

of capitalism was very clear to him as an intellectual. The intellectual, the intellectual

of Sartre's Qu 'est ce que la litterature? {What Is Literature?), was aligned with

"historical negativity," the rejection of the world as it was in favor of possibilities of

what it could and should be. Gorz's allegiance was to those who had nothing and

who suffered the consequences of capitalism's rapacity. He wrote "for me, for us, the

violence of the socialist societies or of those societies attempting to become socialist

in no way diminish the violence which surrounds us nor the necessity of opposing

it."161

Thus, it is very important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "socialism"

in the context of Gorz's thought. Gorz became a Marxist in the early 1950s, reading

Marx while continuing to write Fondements and working as a journalist in Paris, but

he was already a socialist in a broader sense. He was a socialist because of his

feelings of allegiance to those whom the capitalist world oppressed and because he

could so clearly sense the moral vacuity of capitalism. He became convinced in the

need for a system predicated on the needs of humans instead of the laws of the

Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 264.

1
Ibid., 265.
92
market. This "original choice," the original choice of his adulthood, was to inform

his entire life's work.

Of course, that was in the future. In the Spring of 1950, Dorine and Gorz lost

their positions at Citizens of the World due to its increasingly perilous financial state.

Gorz withdrew even further, holing up in their tiny studio apartment and writing.

Dorine sustained them both, working as a part-time model, tour guide, tutor, and

translator. She was incredibly tolerant of Gorz, even as he literally went for days at a

time without saying a word. In hindsight, Gorz noted that he had lapsed into a serious

depression and that he was overcome with shame at not being able to be Dorine's

"equal" in the public sphere.162 Even as he continued his nightly writing sessions, he

anticipated the failure of Fondements and ultimately of his own status as a writer.

This, too, deserves specific mention. Unlike Sartre and Beauvoir, who tended

to meditate on the importance and status of writing and of writers, Gorz did not make

a habit of pondering intellectual labor as such in his own work. What he made clear

in Lettre a D., however, is that he desperately wanted to succeed as a writer by the

late 1940s, and that the fact that he published as an anonymous journalist was cold

recompense for his larger aspirations. Dorine was key in this regard as well: she took

Gorz's ambitions seriously and supported him emotionally and financially for years

when there was not the slightest indication that his, and their, fortunes would ever

change.

Andre Gorz, Lettre a D., 33 - 35.

93
From Ecriveur to Ecrivain

After a brief stint working for the Indian embassy as a clerk for the military

attache, Gorz landed a job at the center-right periodical Paris-Presse in 1951. Just as

they had at the Citizens of the World, Dorine and Gorz worked together, this time

processing the enormous amount of data contained in the various periodicals Paris-

Presse used to fill its own international news pages. Their lingual abilities were

obviously of great importance in this regard: between the two of them they could

process articles in German, English, and French, and Gorz soon learned to read Italian

as well. They burned the leftover stacks of journals to heat their tiny apartment after

work.163

It was at Paris-Presse that Gorz and Dorine perfected their favored working

technique and where Gorz acquired his first pseudonym: Michel Bosquet. Dorine

would read and classify documents, arranging them into dossiers based on content.

Gorz would then re-read and write up their contents into copy for the news pages.164

The editorial staff warned Gorz that his real name, Gerard Horst, was too Germanic

for a French periodical, with the memory of the occupation still fresh, so he came up

with the most French-sounding name he could invent, arriving at Michel Bosquet. It

was to remain his journalistic pseudonym until he retired in 1980.

From 1951 to 1955, Gorz and Dorine worked at Paris-Presse. They had to

Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 3 7 - 3 8 .
94
move out of their rented room to a small two-bedroom apartment on the Rue Saint-

Maur, near the Place de la Republique. Here, in another of Gorz's fairly naive

"discoveries" about economic reality, the couple found that due to the cost of living

in their new neighborhood, they were poorer than they had been, despite having

steady employment. In addition, they were further from the small group of friends

they had established near Saint-Germaine-des-Pres, their former neighborhood.

Dorine in particular struggled with being a thirty-minute metro ride away from her

group of companions and they never really adjusted to the move.165

In 1955, Gorz and Dorine joined the staff of L 'Express. They were part of a

group of journalists hired to cover and support the electoral campaign of Pierre

Mendes France. The paper shifted from a weekly to a daily format and Gorz and

Dorine were assigned to follow Mendes France on the campaign trail. In 1956, they

were also able to move back to their old neighborhood, finding a dilapidated but

affordable apartment on the Rue de Bac, near the historic Bon Marche. When

L'Express became a weekly once again after the election, it gave its employees an

opportunity to write a single article to demonstrate their journalistic and writing

prowess, essentially forcing them to re-apply for their jobs. Dorine organized and

Gorz wrote an exemplary article on the concept of peaceful coexistence, recently

endorsed by Eisenhower, and they kept their positions.166

The Mendes France campaign was the setting for a kind of intervention of

Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 3 9 - 4 5 .
95
Dorine's in Gorz's outlook, one with lasting consequences. During the campaign,

Gorz wrote an article criticizing the patronat (managing class) of Grenobles, whom

Mendes France was trying to win over. Gorz's piece was fairly scathing, despite his

writing for a journal whose explicit goal was to support the campaign. Dorine used

the article as an iconic example of his preference for Marxist theory over practical

politics, and Gorz began having Dorine edit his articles to rein in his excesses. In a

kind of feigned exasperation, he remembered demanding of her "why is it that you're

always right?!"167

Gorz finished Fondements in 1955 as well. He brought it to Sartre in hopes

not only of his critique, but of helping to arrange for its publication. Gorz and Dorine

had maintained a friendly relationship with Sartre since their arrival in Paris, but it

was only in the mid-1950s that they began to frequent the circle surrounding Sartre

and Beauvoir. Despite the growing friendship, and despite the depth of Fondements,

Gorz reported that Sartre merely skimmed the first few pages and left the bulk of the

manuscript unexamined.168 ""And now what are you going to do?" cheerfully asked

Sartre in seeing the enormous binder.. ."169 Sartre or Beauvoir must have looked at

more of it at some point, however, at least enough to lead Beauvoir to write in the

third volume of her memoirs that "ten years after our meeting in Geneva, Gorz, who

was now living in Paris, had brought Sartre a work of philosophy, intelligent, but too

directly inspired by L'Etre et la neant. He later wrote an essay on himself,

167
Ibid., 44.
168
Ibid., 41 - 4 2 .
1
Andre Gorz, Fondements pour une morale, 17.
96
excellent."170

The rejection of Fondements by Sartre was the kernel of Le Traitre. The

opening vignette of the latter is the completion of the former, with his resolution that

now that "The Essay" was complete, he was obliged to put its conclusions into

motion in his own life. All along he had assumed that Fondements was of no interest

to anyone, yet it had been the intellectual justification for his life for ten years. More

than anything, he felt that he needed to write, that writing was the intellectual and

ideological bridge he was capable of building to the material world (complimenting

the emotional and personal bridge provided by Dorine.) To transcend his nocturnal

scribblings, the musings of a would-be philosopher, he knew that he had to be

published, to submit his work to public scrutiny and to join the rank of the creators of

ideas. When his most powerful ally, Sartre, proved completely uninterested, Gorz's

lifelong sense that he was a failure was completely confirmed.

That crisis brought about Le Traitre, Gorz's sustained attempt to finally

confront his entire personal history and psychology. One of the striking things about

its opening chapter, Nous, is that it unfolds in a tortured stream of consciousness, a

rigorous self-interrogation happening in the present tense, written as if Gorz was

recording the parameters of the project all at once. "He had flung himself into his

new work (an autobiography?) without knowing where he was going, after four days

of despair..."1 He felt that he could not advance as an intellectual, as an author,

170
Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses II (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 135.
171
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 59.
97
until he had overcome the complexes that trapped him as a mere "writer."

Gorz spent 1955 and 1956 working on Le Traitre. It was a pivotal time for

him not just in terms of the project of writing, but in his theoretical outlook.

Following Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the USSR,

and informed by Gorz's broad reading in Marxist theory at the time, he moved

increasingly to embrace "official" communism, even considering joining the PCF

(French Communist Party.) "I believed that the report of Khrushchev to the

Twentieth Congress announced a major turning point, that intellectuals were going to

be able to play a decisive role in the communist movement...I began to (think) that all

of the movements of (my) spirit and (my) heart should conform to the requirements of

the Party..."172

It was in this context of a new, more strident, hard-line communism that he

wrote Le Traitre, and it had a major impact on his portrayal of Dorine as a result.

Gorz was "close" to regarding love as a bourgeois throwback, a false emotional

concept that would be swept away with socialism. He felt awkward in having to

acknowledge the pivotal importance of Dorine and of their relationship in helping

him move away from his childhood complexes. He felt embarrassed in placing so

much importance on what was after all a fairly traditional love story: the woman who

arrived like a miracle and, through her love, allowed him to become a better person.

He loved Dorine, but he did not like that he loved her173

172
Andre Gorz, Lettre a. D., 57 - 58.
173
Ibid.
98
 To Gorz at the time he wrote Le Traitre, love was simply too banal an

explanation for his personal transformation. This was, however, just a symptom of

his larger tendency to enshrine in philosophical systems that which was

commonplace. All throughout Le Traitre, after all, Gorz attempted to explain his life

in terms of existential phenomenology. Nothing could stand by itself; he broke down

the categories of his childhood environment, of Nazism, of Swiss culture, of

education, and of the economy he encountered as an adult in terms of the forms of

bad faith, the different paths of flight from reality, that each phenomenon represented.

It was entirely in accordance with his outlook as a whole that he had to frame his love

for Dorine in terms of the same system, but in doing so he had to acknowledge that

the "bad faith" of his devotion to her was his own. In Lettre a D., he wrote that he

regretted deeply dedicating Le Traitre to Dorine on its opening page, but failing to

dedicate it to her in its argument, its logic, and its prose.174

Gorz finished Le Traitre at the end of 1956. Eighteen months later, it was

published by Editions du Seuil, which was presided over by another Sartrian, Francis

Jeanson. Within twenty-four hours of Gorz's submission of the manuscript, Jeanson

had decided to publish it.175 The story of his lifelong rejection of the world of other

people, in ultimately compelled him to join that world as a published author, and a

"public intellectual" at that.

At least, that is the story Gorz related, albeit briefly, in Lettre a D. regarding

Ibid., 59.
Ibid., 46.
99
Le Traitress publication. Jeanson's biographer Marie-Pierre Ulloa claimed instead

that Jeanson insisted on its publication against the wishes of the other editors at Seuil,

out of his (Jeanson's) loyalty to Sartre: "Jeanson counter-attacked: he was

collaborating with Seuil precisely to make it more open to existentialism. In the end,

Flamand (the chief editor) beat his breast and accepted Jeanson's argument: he would

publish Le Traitre.. Jeanson knew how to play his role as defender of Sartrean

though..."17 It is not clear if Gorz knew how close Le Traitre came to suffering the

fate of Fondementspour une Morale, but regardless, his status as one of Sartre's

circle was strong enough by the mid-1950s to come to his rescue.

Le Traitre established Gorz as an author of note. Part of the book's initial

reputation was due to the glowing forward by Sartre, a rambling approbation that

saluted Gorz for joining the forces aligned against the "vampires" of capitalism. For

his part, while the success of the book vindicated his now decades-long efforts to

enter the public sphere as an author, Gorz deliberately avoided the reviews. At the

end of his life, he insisted that the importance of being a writer for him had always

been the process of working through ideas in the written form, of the writing itself,

not the finished work. He loathed the term "my book" and rarely returned to his

finished efforts.

Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Francis Jeanson: A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the
Algerian War, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 86 - 87.
177
Andre Gorz, Lettre a £>., 49 - 50. Fondements was a notable exception, although it took him
decades and many other books and articles before he looked at the old manuscript again.
100
(Auto-)Biography: Conclusion

The story of Gorz's life from his childhood until he entered the public stage as

a writer is inherently interesting as a historical account of European bourgeois

culture, the effects of anti-Semitism, and the French philosophical milieu in the

postwar period. It is also an essential background to Gorz's thought, in explaining

many of the reasons that he would remain both a self-understood existentialist and a

fierce critic of capitalism for the rest of his life. Sartre's account of human

consciousness both described Gorz's situation, trapped in a world of inaccessible

values and subjected to the withering gaze of other people, and offered him at least a

glimmer of hope in pursuing an authentic project of creation through writing. The

critique of capitalism, inspired almost completely by Marxism, was a weapon Gorz

could wield against the bourgeois world he had every reason to hate.

The development of Gorz's thought, considered in the rest of this thesis, never

abandoned these two main sources. Like Sartre himself, Gorz struggled to account

for a philosophically adequate account of and justification for forms of solidarity,

using the language of what had been initially a radically atomistic school of thought

(i.e. existentialism.) He remained loyal, however, to Sartre's basic description of the

vertiginous, terrifying freedom confronting consciousness. Likewise, Gorz's

increasingly innovative analyses of capitalism went well beyond the Marxism of

Marx himself, in considering ecology, medicine, and education as well as the

enormous changes in the social composition of labor in "late" capitalism from those
101
of Marx's day. Gorz would always be committed to the project of political economic

critique itself, and even in his later abandonment of "the proletariat" as the potential

revolutionary subject, he acted as a loyal reviser of Marxist theory, not a disabused

opponent of it.178

Finally, we should note one other element of Gorz's personality brought about

by his youth and young adulthood: his complete willingness to entertain the most

negative view of things and to welcome failure and destruction as confirmation of the

accuracy of his outlook. Gorz would always employ the language of "crisis" to

describe politics and economics, and part of the reason he was sometimes dismissed

as a Utopian was that his proposed alternatives to quotidian life were often completely

antithetical to the world as it was. He sometimes wrote as if he welcomed crisis,

because it revealed the sickness of the system to which he was radically opposed.179

178
See Chapter 5.
179
For example, see Chapter 4's description of the economic downturn of the early 1970s.
102
 Chapter 3: The Red Years

Marxism and Labor Theory

By 1959, following the success of Le Traitre, Gorz felt vindicated. He knew

that future efforts to have his work considered by publishers would be much easier -

he could apply himself to philosophy and expect to find an audience for his efforts.

He now joined the Sartrians as a peer, as another writer of note, and in 1958 he

embarked on his next project, working on a book about issues that had arisen from his

study of Marxism. The result was La Morale de I'histoire {The Ethics of History),

Gorz's major work of Marxist theory. Following Dorine's intervention a few years

earlier, Gorz was now deeply skeptical of forms of Marxism, in particular the official

Marxism of the Soviet Union and the PCF, that posited the existence of ironclad laws

of history, the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and the subsequent triumph of the

proletariat. For Gorz, not only was there a dearth of evidence that capitalism was

moving "inevitably" toward its collapse in the midst of the postwar economic boom,

but the very idea of history moving toward a pre-determined end was antithetical to

the idea of contingency so central to existentialism.

At the same time, Gorz certainly considered himself a Marxist, and to prepare

to write La Morale de I'histoire, he re-read Marx's major works. Like so many other

Marxist intellectuals, Gorz was forced to confront the breadth, the ambiguity, the
103
complexity, and the heterogeneity of Marx's writing and try to identify the core

arguments that bound it together. In particular, Gorz tried to answer two questions:

"why is it that the development of one's own freedom is rendered impossible by the

actual situation, and what determines this? Furthermore, how can one class be

preordained to emancipate itself and all other spheres of society, as is suggested in

Marx's earlier works?"180

While Gorz was drafting La Morale de I'histoire, Sartre was working on his

Critique de la raison dialectique. They exchanged drafts and many of Sartre's ideas

informed Gorz's approach to the question of alienation, the concept that Gorz came to

believe was central in determining how history could both entrap and potentially

liberate whole classes of human beings.181 Together, the two works can be read as

the essential interventions of existential philosophy in Marxist theory of the 1950s

and 1960s, ones whose major purpose was to preserve and champion the role of

individual choice in understanding the potential for political and social liberation.

As is clear from his approach in Fondements pour une morale and Le Traitre,

Gorz saw his philosophical project largely in terms of "founding" or "accounting for"

(the phrase he used most often in French was "rendre compte") a methodology that

could accurately and sufficiently describe consciousness in the world. In Fondements

pour une morale, his subject was the human subject itself, and in Le Traitre it was his

own subjectivity. His task in La Morale de I 'histoire was to apply the same approach

180
Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 277 (this quote is drawn from the interview Gorz conducted in 1989 that
was reprinted at the end of the Verso edition of The Traitor.)
181
See Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy, 87 - 88.
104
and method to Marxism, to determine what, if anything, made Marxism the best or

most accurate body of ideas by which to arrive at political positions. As noted above,

La Morale de I 'histoire shared much in common with Sartre's Critique, although

Gorz's work was both clearer and more accessible than Sartre's somewhat

impenetrable essay. It was also improved by a certain analytical distance; Gorz may

have already been a committed Marxist when he wrote La Morale de I'histoire, but

he was interested in exploring the bases of that commitment and of what "Marxism"

actually meant, both philosophically and in terms of practical politics.182

La Morale de I'histoire is a document of the emerging New Left, the

intellectual movement in western Europe and the United States dissatisfied with both

Soviet communism and western capitalism that began in the late 1950s.183 Gorz

framed his concerns explicitly in terms of the challenges facing Marxists in the

democratic countries of Western Europe following Khrushchev's "secret speech"

before the Twentieth Party Congress, in which he acknowledged the bloodshed of the

Gorz's sympathetic, insightful summary of the major themes of Sartre's work was Andre Gorz,
"Sartre and Marx," New Left Review.
183
The term "New Left" refers specifically to political radicals, most of whom were not affiliated with
the official communist parties of their respective countries, who broke with the USSR after the Soviet
invasion of Hungary in 1956. The New Left was a diffuse movement spanning western Europe and the
United States and is best known for the major role its thinkers (most famously Herbert Marcuse)
played in inspiring the student movement of the late 1960s. In addition to the journal New Left Review,
probably the most important and vital publication in this mode still in print, see Paul Blackledge, Perry
Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (London: Merlin, 2004), Lin Chun, The British New Left
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), Van Goss, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-
1975 : a Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's,2005), Arthur Hirsh, The
French New Left: an Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End Press, 1981), Arthur
Marwick, The Sixties : Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c.
1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Dimitrios Roussopoulos, ed., The New Left: Legacy
and Continuity (New York: Black Rose Books, 2007). A recent article by the prominent member of
the British New Left, Stuart Hall, summarizes the inception of the movement in England and, to a
lesser extent, in France: Stuart Hall, "Life and Times of the First New Left," New Left Review 61
(January - February 2010): 177 - 196.
105
Stalinist era, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year. It was the latter

event, in October of 1956, that spelled the final break between Sartre and the PCF

with the publication of his Le Fantome de Staline {The Phantom of Stalin, or perhaps

"Stalin's Ghost") For Gorz as well, the pressing issue for Marxists in the capitalist

countries of the West was how to envisage an effective leftist political agenda without

becoming beholden to the Stalinist organization of the official communist parties,

particularly the PCF.

The period after the end of World War II until the Soviet invasion of Hungary

was one in which independent leftists like Sartre and his circle never truly abandoned

their efforts to ally themselves with the PCF, nor did they explicitly reject Stalinism

in the Soviet Union. Sartre's most notorious period of "fellow traveling" was

between 1952 and 1956, a period bookmarked by his pro-PCF article "Les

Communistes et la paix" (The Communists and Peace) and his reversal and

repudiation of the PCF in "Ze Fantome de Staline.'" Here, Sartre's motivation was

essentially his attempt to be a political pragmatist. His one attempt to participate in

an independent socialist organization in 1947, the Rassemblement Democratique

Revolutionnaire {Democratic Revolutionary Party), failed abysmally.186 Likewise,

the hope he and many other leftist intellectuals shared immediately after the war that

the PCF might welcome their efforts to provide a moral and strategic compass for the

party proved to be hopelessly naive. As the political situation in the Fourth Republic
184
Reprinted as Jean-Paul Sartre, "Le Fantome de Staline," Situations VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
185
Hence, it is the easiest and most common target for later attacks on their fellow-traveling. In
addition to his Past Imperfect, see Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left, 169 - 238.
186
For details, see Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, 93 - 108.
106
fell into the abyss of colonial war in Indochina and, subsequently, Algeria, Sartre

tried to lend his authority as a public intellectual to the one party that could possibly

represent the hope for a revolutionary transformation of French society, namely the

PCF.187

After 1956, even that far-flung hope was proven bankrupt. As we have seen,

Gorz's even shorter (and much less public) flirtation with "official" communism

ended at the same time as Sartre's. The two friends and writers were thus positioned

to craft complimentary critiques of Marxism at a time in which the future of Marxist

theory and politics was uncertain in Western Europe. The heart of Gorz's argument in

La Morale de Vhistoire was the rejection of the whole idea that history could possibly

be "structured" or "predisposed" to proceed according to a single path of

development. Gorz highlighted the fact that in order for a more just society to come

about, choices had to be made to combat the forms of alienation endemic to

capitalism. In turn, the very idea of choice, of the autonomy of political praxis,

contradicted the official communist doctrine that history itself would bring about

communism in the long run.

La Morale de l'histoire

In La Morale de I 'histoire Gorz sought to define and explain what the Marxist

method of investigation really was, and what if anything made it the preferred

187
See the discussion surrounding Sartre's politics in Sartre by Himself, 94 - 97.
107
approach for social and political explication. This task was very similar to that

undertaken by Sartre in 1957 in his Existentialisme et Marxisme, later renamed

Question de methode and published as the preface to the Critique de la raison

dialectique.xu Sartre had claimed that Marxism was the defining philosophical

framework of the modern era (the "unsurpassable horizon"), and that existentialism

had to be understood as nothing more than a "parasitic" philosophy that could be

useful only when it served to clarify issues that arose within a Marxist framework.189

Of course, Sartre was curiously circumspect about what he meant by

"Marxism." He once quipped that "it is not my fault if reality is Marxist," but for all

his subtlety, there was something simplistic about his take on Marxism itself, at least

in terms of his understanding of Marx's mature work.190 While he shifted his hopes

in world revolution to the anti-colonial movements of the Third World by the 1960s,

Sartre still never considered in any great depth the distinction between "proletariat"

and "bourgeoisie." Likewise, he argued that Marxism was the defining philosophy of

the modern era because it alone addressed the problem of "scarcity" that underlay

political and social conflict.191 Even some sympathetic readers, however, noted that

See Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Kopf, 1963).
189
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Question de methode,"in Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard,
1985), 14. The word in French is "indepassable."
190
The saying was originally Che Guevara's. Apparently, Sartre became quite fond of using it in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Ecrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 407,
originally from the interview "L'Alibi," Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 November 1964, 1 - 6 . On
Sartre's understanding of Marx's writing itself, see Perry Anderson's discussion of Sartre's tendency
to focus squarely on philosophical issues rather than political ones per se: Perry Anderson,
Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1987), 50 - 67,
191
Two helpful guides to Sartre's mature Marxist theory, that contained in the Critique, are Fredric
Jameson's introduction to the Verso edition of the same and the older volume Wilfrid Desan. See
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, foreword Fredric
108
the concept of scarcity was too broad and vague, since in Sartre's analysis scarcity

stood for a lack of any necessary or desirable product of human labor. One critic

noted "This, though, leads to the position where any conceivable problem can always

be defined as scarcity of something. Thus it provides no more than a pseudo-

explanation, it fails to advance discussion and becomes a substitute for analysis."192

One stark example of Sartre's outlook, albeit a literary one, was a vignette

from Beauvoir's Les Mandarins, her famous novel based on the interactions of the

elite Parisian intellectual circles immediately after the end of the war. Her character

Dubreuilh, who represented Sartre, confronts the novel's protagonist Henri (Camus)

about his refusal to commit his paper to Dubreuilh's new political movement. "You

can't possibly believe that the class struggle is outmoded, can you?...Then don't come

telling me about public opinion. On one side, you have the proletariat which wants

reforms, and on the other, the bourgeoisie which doesn't."193 While fictional, this

statement still gestures at the strangely literal and un-nuanced attitude of the Sartrian

circle regarding class composition in the postwar period.194

For Gorz, historical circumstances themselves called for a reassessment of

Marxist theory and politics. He wrote "The socialist government of France attacks

Egypt to perpetuate a colonial regime in Algeria. Hungarian workers and

Jameson (London: Verso, 2004), Wilfrid Desan, The Marxism ofJean-Paul Sartre (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1965).
192
Willie Thompson, "On Andre Gorz's 'Sartre and Marx,'" New Left Review 40, November -
December 1966,92.
193
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. Leonard M. Friedman (New York: World Publishing
Company, 1956), 123.
194
For his part, Tony Judt described Beauvoir's novel as a testament to her "willful myopia." Judt,
Past Imperfect, 131
109
intellectuals rise up against a police state and the homeland of socialism launches its

army against them, to the applause of the PCF...I have come to traverse the works of

Marx; and the need that I had to ground the communist movement - or proletarian

praxis, which amounts to the same thing - on something besides the claim of

historical necessity, takes a particular depth in the light of these events."195 Gorz had

made various claims about the uniqueness of the Marxist method in his earlier works,

but in the post-'56 environment, he sought to clarify what that method actually was

and what about it, if anything, made it the best option for understanding the meaning

of events in history, tested against the actual events that had taken place in the recent

past.

In the heyday of liberal triumphalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

scholars often attacked the Sartrians for their rejection of moralism, contrasting the

supposedly timeless and universal moral standards of someone like Camus with the

shifting allegiances of a Sartre or Beauvoir.196 In La Morale de I 'histoire, Gorz

discussed why it was that moralism was not an acceptable paradigm or stance from

which to render ethical judgment: it attempted to place the would-be analyst outside

of history, appealing to values that were predicated on timeless ideas, but which were

actually embedded in local circumstances. In the case of ethical judgments about the

195
Andre Gorz, La Morale de I'histoire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959), 7. Gorz referred here to the
French invasion of Egypt in the midst of the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Britain, France, and Israel
attacked Egypt after the latter nationalized the Suez Canal. The three attacking powers were forced to
withdraw by the United States, definitively proving that the US was capable of dominating its allies in
their international affairs. See William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder:
Westview Press, 2004), 308-313.
196
The essential example is, once again, Judt. See Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum,
Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
110
decisions of world leaders in the midst of the Cold War, for instance, the bourgeois

analyst was categorically unable to judge the Soviet Union, because he or she did not

profess the same goals as those who shared in the belief of the communist project:

universal liberation from material want and universal access to self-exploration and

growth (tpanouissemeni).

The problem, as Gorz understood it, was that the same conundrum applied

equally to Marxists. From a purely moral stance, which is to say one that was based

on ideals or values that tried to detach themselves from local circumstance, the

Marxist could not really condemn capitalism for pursuing its declared aims, namely

the protection of private property and the individual pursuit of wealth. This led to the

bifurcation of values that had frustrated the Sartrians as a group since the start of the

Cold War: they wanted to critique the communist movement (and, more to the point,

the communist parties of Europe) because the Sartrians shared the same fundamental

values. Their attacks on the "bourgeois" parties and nations, however, were

sometimes fairly shallow because they did not have access to a moral starting-point

besides the claim that capitalism exploited workers and spawned imperial wars.

The way out of this impasse, according to Gorz, was provided by Marx. Gorz

wrote "One of the fundamental affirmations of Marxism, that one especially finds in

the German Ideology, is that communism is not an ideal, but a real movement which

The term epanouissement (blossoming, flowering, self-expansion) was used very frequently by
members of the French New Left. It captured both the transcendental direction of the radicalism of the
time and some of its vagueness. While I am not aware of a sustained discussion of the term itself,
Julian Bourg at least touches on it in Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 7.
Ill
suppresses the current state of circumstances." Moralism was flawed because it

was predicated on different conditions than the object of critique; for instance, what

right did someone in the west have to attack the actions of the Soviet government,

when the Soviet Union was beset with dangers to its own security and to the success

of the communist movement itself? Gorz claimed that moral critique had to arise out

of the desire for changed conditions, not just a "sterile" moral ideal, and that the

analyst must try to determine ways to change the material conditions that brought

about things like colonial war in North Africa and Soviet intervention in Eastern

Europe.

Political pragmatism was one basis for ethical analysis for Gorz, in that the

ethical dimension of critique and decision-making had to, for him, be grounded in the

actual historical conflicts taking place in the present. Speaking of the French premier

Guy Mollet, the socialist leader who began the hard-line tactics in Algeria that would

quickly escalate to outright war, "If we critique such a politician, it is not first of all in

the name of pure timeless values of which we would be the guardian angels, but

because his politics make us suspicious and threatens us as workers and

intellectuals... our critique is thus historical, it inscribes itself in the struggle currently

taking place."199 Likewise, "we are here, Mollet is there, the entire difference is that,

our ends and his, equal but differently conditioned, are irreconcilable, we don't have

to understand his reasons but insofar as their understanding would permit us to know

198
Andre Gorz, La Morale de I'histoire, 14.
199
Ibid., 15. On Mollet, see Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (New York: Norton, 1995), 408
-410.
112
how to make ours prevail."

But if Marxism was just a way to critique from a historical, circumstantial

base, and a politically pragmatic approach was fundamentally tactical and strategic

rather than moralistic, why choose to align oneself with communism rather than

capitalism? Gorz rejected the approach of Marxists, most obviously the theoreticians

of the PCF, who invoked pragmatism to justify the barbarism of Soviet policy, noting

that "it will not do for you to justify each of its (the USSR's) acts as the expression of

inhuman necessities, because the object of communism is precisely to free mankind

from the reign of these necessities; if communism is irremediably mired in them, it

has lost its meaning."201 Likewise, he noted that "The terrorist explications of

Stalinist thought tend to confound themselves with pure determinism, that is to say

with an pre-Marxist ideology."202

Gorz's most coherent answer about why the communist movement was

ethically preferable to capitalism was related to his argument that one of the defining

characteristics of communism itself was to liberate humankind from "inhuman

necessities." Capitalism's goal, the pursuit of profit over every other consideration,

and the limitless expansion of markets that the pursuit of profit entailed, were outside

of the control or direction of any actual human agent. Communism, however, was an

explicitly humanistic philosophy that insisted on the necessity of human choice and

direction in economic and material life. In other words, if capitalism always fell back

200
Andre Gorz, La Morale de I 'histoire, 16.
201
Ibid., 21.
202
Ibid., 23.
113
on empiricism to claim that communism was an unachievable Utopia, Gorz countered

that the communist movement's whole reason to be was its insistence that empirical

reality be remade to serve human ends.203 His position was that the realm of the

ethical began with choice, and the mute reality of economic "laws" did not change the

fact that those laws could be harnessed to human projects. Communism was thus a

movement of choice, where capitalism was thoughtless and existentially inhuman.

To Gorz, Marxism suggested the possibility of a truly humanistic morality.

Here, he introduced what he believed to be the central concept that differentiated

Marxism from bourgeois moralism: alienation. He wrote "It is due only to the

concept of alienation that it is possible to seize a reality as its own critique of fact, as

the prior negation of (its own) work."204 As we know, Marxism asserted that workers

were alienated from both their tools and the results of their labor, and existentialism

argued that the human consciousness was permanently and irrevocably alienated from

the world around it and from its vocation to be a limitless freedom. Gorz's concern

was to elucidate precisely how alienation operated in social reality, and if it could

somehow be mitigated by the communist movement.

The fundamental Marxist argument regarding alienation, per Gorz, was that a

contradiction existed between work as a human vocation and the results of that work,

which were both unintended and unwanted by the worker. Originally, during Marx's

lifetime, industrial workers experienced impoverishment and a dearth of political

203
Ibid., 22.
204
Ibid., 45.
114
power in stark contrast to the both the wealth created and the technological marvels

wrought by their labor. Despite the mitigation of the degree of deprivation of the

European working class in the century that separated Gorz from Marx, however, he

still insisted that capitalism still alienated labor from its results in the same manner

that it had in the mid-nineteenth century.

Gorz's most evocative example was that of O.S. (Ouvrier Specialise): so-

called "specialized" positions within French factories in which workers repeated the

same task as quickly as humanly possible for the entire duration of their shifts. O.S.

was the product of scientific management techniques, a subject Gorz would critique

numerous times in both his journalism and books throughout his life. In O.S., the

initiative, creativity and intelligence of the worker was reduced to next to nothing and

his or her body was subjected to the maddening stress of repeating the same

movements for nine hours at a stretch. Even if wages were higher in both absolute

and relative terms compared with their nineteenth-century equivalents, the twentieth-

century "specialist" still experienced the same manner of alienation: his or her

humanity was suppressed and his or her body was exploited for the profit of the

firm.205

To Gorz, one of the aspects of alienation within capitalism was the fact that

the choices afforded to workers were impossibly limiting. Gorz wrote "In appearance

and subjectively, indeed, you always have choice: you can refuse the salary and the

job that you're offered, you can refuse to obey the supervisor, you can also refuse the

205
Ibid., 5 2 - 5 3 .
115
entire world and kill yourself. But practically, choice never presents itself to you as

an alternative.. .practically, by the sole fact that you're alive, you are the prey (la

proie) of needs which can only be satisfied with the means at your disposal, and those

means, marked by the activity of others, derive as much from objective requirements

that you come by from others."206

In other words, the means to live were always constructed socially, and to

choose anything short of suicide was to enter into the realm of socially-constructed

and socially-limited options, shortages, privileges, and requirements. Practically, one

could not choose to exit society short of renouncing life itself. This was a radical

application of an existential principle to the social world; in Sartrian existentialism,

the physical universe was always encountered by the limitless freedom of

consciousness as a set of restrictions and obstacles. In that sense, the pour-soi was

always "alienated," removed or separated, from its aspirations to exist in a state of

total freedom. In Gorz's definition of alienation within Marxism, the free human

agent encountered society in a similar manner, as a set of restrictions to be overcome.

Gorz wrote "If we must define alienation, we would say in the first

approximation that it is an objectivation objectified in such a manner that it is found

negated in its own finality to the profit of a foreign finality."207 In other words, the

goals of the individual were subsumed under foreign goals - in capitalism, the profit

of the firm, or in social life, norms of behavior. Ultimately, alienation was itself a

[bid., 50.
Ibid., 53.
116
social phenomenon: "alienation cannot therefore exist but in a world inhabited by

other subjects," since it was the matrix of foreign decisions that trapped every

individual in patterns of behavior that had to be obeyed and restricted the field of

personal freedom.208

Gorz illustrated alienation with examples from the social world in which the

individual was forced to abandon their subjectivity. Citing Beauvoir's Deuxieme

Sexe, Gorz discussed the fact that certain individuals were always "alienated" in

Europe, North America, and colonized nations, including women, ethnic minorities,

and colonized peoples. Whereas Sartre (and in her early essays like La morale de

I 'ambiguite, Beauvoir) had claimed that the individual could always choose to rebel,

Gorz insisted that the pressures faced by subalterns were so powerful as to make

rebellion a practical impossibility.

In a more parochial register, and by way of example, Gorz described the

scenario of a new employee working at the French postal service. "Observe the new

employee of the P.T.T. at your post office: on arriving, it's a person who sees his

clients and who exchanges words with them. After a month, he doesn't see them

anymore; he has become an employee like the others, who handles the stamp with the

same professional gestures and exchanges the same conventional, stereotyped words

with the clients. His actions, ceaselessly repeated, have become an ensemble of

Ibid., 6 0 - 6 1 . Note that this argument had its origins in Fondements pour une morale, wherein
Gorz had first considered the field of the social, especially in terms of inherited traditions, as a form of
alienation. Of course, his readers had no way of knowing that in 1959 since Fondements existed only
as a manuscript in a box in a closet.
117
gestures, their individuality erased ..."

Ultimately, all social gestures tended toward alienation. Everything from

classroom exercises to standing in the queue to buy tickets at the Metro forced the

individual into rote gestures, social rituals with an assumed meaning. The influence

of Sartre is clear here. Gorz used Sartre's concept of the "practico-inerte," the world

of objects in which individuals and their freely-chosen composite form of "groupes-

en-fusion" were forced to live and struggle, ideas that were still in manuscript form at

this point. In fact, Gorz's example of waiting in line for tickets was an exact parallel

with Sartre's famous description of mere "seriality," of individuals waiting in line for

the bus without sharing any common project.210

Likewise, Gorz used the idea of the groupe-en-fusion itself. Sartre argued that

collective action arose foremost from shared circumstances. If a group faced the

same threat and had the same aspirations, they could unite in their task, bound by a

genuine commitment and in a spirit of existential freedom. According to Gorz, the

potential to eliminate alienation existed only if two criteria were fulfilled: first, the

existence of "generosity" - that the Other has "the intention to take my (or the)

freedom as the goal" - and the existence of a similar set of historical and material

circumstances with the other - "our situations must be homologous."21'

Thus, efforts by "psycho-sociologists" to improve conditions in the factory

setting, an aspect of scientific management that Gorz would return to throughout his

209
Ibid., 79.
210
Ibid., 70.
21
'ibid., 6 4 - 6 5 .
118
career, were doomed because they could not eliminate "the antagonism of the

respective interests, the reality of capitalist exploitation and the alienation of workers

from their tools."212 Freedom of thought, of action, of the direction of the enterprise

could never be the goal of the capitalist toward his workers, nor could their situations

be remotely "homologous." Instead, however well-intentioned management might

be, the owners and the workers were permanently alienated from one another.

As an aside, while he would later trenchantly criticize the structuralist and

post-structuralist theories that erased the human subject as the source of meaningful

language, Gorz still acknowledged in La Morale de I 'histoire that since language was

produced and regimented socially, it too played a role in alienation. "Language of a

certain "one" speaks itself through our mouth, we slide along its objective slope, we

are spoken by it in the moment where we are served by it toward our own ends.'"' J It

was precisely because language was shaped by regional dialects, by class distinctions,

by points of origin that it intruded on the potentially limitless possibilities of thought

and action.

There was a bit of give-and-take present in Gorz's analysis of the social

origins of alienation; factors like language are clearly more properly classified as

inherent elements of all human societies and forms of economic organization, not just

capitalism. The crux of the specifically Marxist analysis of alienation was the

contradiction between human choice in the legal and political spheres on the one hand

212
Ibid., 70.
213
Ibid., 80.
119
and in the world of economic life on the other (which Marx had referred to as

"formal" versus "real" freedoms.) Gorz wrote "The Marxist theory of economic and

social alienation is centered on this fundamental contradiction: everything takes place

as if individuals were the products of a condition and of a socio-economic process

which occurs outside of them and in the manner of a natural process; but in reality

individuals are the producers of their own condition and of the socio-economic

process (itself.)"214 Likewise, "the singular contradiction of the bourgeoisie is indeed

that it had believed that it suppressed all social status in favor of the abstract equality

of individuals, (yet) that individuals discovered themselves opposed to one another

and unequal as they were before."215

So what hope for autonomy, in a world in which the structures of everyday

life were composed of the sedimentation of unintended consequences? Gorz wrote

"The world is full of these autonomized (autonomises) machines; cadavers of former

enterprises, dead stars thrown from their orbits, which survive in the projects that they

engendered and that their inert requirements impose on new generations. Once built,

industry imposes on man its requirements and makes them to its measurements."216

Just as his discussion of language led away from a strictly Marxist analysis of

alienation, Gorz implied here that bureaucratized forms of organization, endemic to

modernity, could not help but accumulate and entrap everyone over time.

Indeed, capitalists themselves had little control over this process of

214
Ibid., 84.
215
Ibid., 91.
216
Ibid., 100-101.
120
petrificaction. Gorz noted that the massive growth of the state apparatus in the mid-

twentieth century was a result of the need for some kind of governing body that could

manage the dead weight and inertia of industry, on the one hand, and the

requirements of social interest groups on the other. So-called "free enterprise" was

dying, since even genuinely original projects launched by capitalists could not

compete against the existing mammoths. The result of this entrapment would be the

continued growth of the "class of statist technocrats," since the opportunities for

individual initiative would grow smaller and smaller over time.217

According to Gorz, the terror the bourgeoisie felt when faced with "socialism"

was born out of its intuitive recognition of this process, of the truncation of the field

of possibilities for individual initiative within capitalism. In socialism, the

bourgeoisie saw not the attempt to halt and reverse the ossification of enterprise and

the expansion of bureaucratic society, but its culmination Gorz was forced to admit

that the social and political status of the USSR and its satellites did little to discourage

this outlook, but he still insisted that at its core, the socialist movement was at least in

part the battle against the kind of bureaucratic modernity that limited the scope of

individual choices.218

Of course, this was the crux of the problem in 1959. Gorz and his fellow

independent French Marxists believed that socialism could and should be a project of

liberation, but its manifestations to date in the East had proved at least as stifling as

217
Ibid., 100-103.
218
Ibid., 104.
121
their capitalistic counterparts. La Morale de I'histoire is noteworthy in that it is both

Gorz's first work of political theory and the last time he would evaluate Marx's

writings per se until Adieux au proletariat some twenty-two years later. He would

use Marx in all of his subsequent books and many of his articles, but he did not return

to an in-depth discussion of Marx's work itself for decades.

Even if the socialist project had lapsed into what Sartre referred as seriality in

the USSR, Gorz still believed that there was still a positive project intrinsic to

Marxism that could be rescued - the "moral vocation of the proletariat."219 Gorz

claimed that Marx's observations about the proletariat's historical role or destiny

were, strictly speaking, value-neutral. Marx had merely pointed out that in certain

specific ways objective forces propelled the proletariat into conflict with the

bourgeoisie. For Gorz's contemporary reader of Marx, however, even if the

inevitability of class conflict was accepted as a given, why should anyone, indeed

why did Marx, identify with the role of the proletariat? "In the name of what did

Marx judge the class goals of the proletariat superior to those of every other class,

past or present?"220

The answer had everything to do with a theme that would return throughout

Gorz's writing: that of "needs" (besoins.) In Marx's writings, the proletariat's

heightened moral status was due to the fact that its needs were precisely equivalent to

those of its self-preservation: a living wage and the possibility of a modicum of

9
Ibid., 145.
10
Ibid., 150.
122
leisure time. Those demands were, however, in contradiction to the objective

requirements of capital, and the forces of capital had thus erected an entire social

apparatus to hold them in check. "All of the social, juridical and financial institutions

are present to prove that the satisfaction of the needs of the proletariat are impossible.

In rebelling nevertheless, the working class demonstrates, against the necessities and

impossibilities that erase them, the irreducibility of human needs, its autonomy, their

liberty."221

But whereas the needs of the proletariat, to the means of life and the

possibility of personal liberty, were those of human beings, the needs of capital were

those that Gorz had described above, of the ever-growing power of bureaucracy and

industry engulfing and devouring human initiative. If a given capitalist was correct in

arguing that raising the wages of his employees was "impossible" because it would

make his enterprise less competitive and therefore vulnerable, the workers had to

recognize that their protests were aimed not only at their own personal situation, but

at the logic of the system that made that impossibility accurate. "The necessity of the

revolutionary negation is therefore to the contrary of the necessity as law and

requirement of things: it is not founded in the inertia of matter, but in praxis insofar as

(it is) free activity that knows itself as such; it is not the anti-human finality of an

inexorable process, but its own finality of human existence rising up against the law

of things." Revolutionary praxis was thus "the refusal to submit to the inhuman law

'ibid., 156.
123
of instruments."

Ultimately, the Marxist moral identification with the proletariat was due to the

"autonomy" of praxis in this formulation: whereas capitalism had only its economic

"laws," independent of human choice, the proletariat's own needs were equivalent to

their consciously-chosen goals: "practical necessity coincides here with moral

requirement and gives to the proletariat an absolute moral superiority over every

other thing"223 This, at least, was Gorz's explanation for Marx's moral identification

with the proletariat, an identification that was sometimes disguised by his treatment

of capitalism's inevitable crises or possible outright collapse.

Gorz's very definition of socialism and its ends was in opposition to not just to

capitalism as an economic system of private enterprise and reinvestment, but the

whole swath of bureaucratic modernity. He wrote "In addition, under pain of being a

failure, the communist revolution cannot, must not come to build a communist

system, in the place of a capitalist system; because to say system says alienation of the

free praxis to the inhuman rigidity and inertia of structures and processes."224 Gorz's

status as a "utopian" was thus clear insofar as he envisaged the possibility of the end

of the systemic character of modern life, not just the dissolution of its economic

order.

He did not belabor the point at this stage, however, but instead insisted that it

222
Ibid., 166.
223
Ibid., 168. Italics in original.
224
Ibid., 176. One intellectual interlocutor missing from this discussion was Max Weber - there is no
indication that Gorz was familiar with Weber's works at this point, although he used them extensively
in the 1980s. See the interview with Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A
Critical Introduction, 122.
124
was socialism's promise of the liberation of human life and potential that should be

not only its defining characteristic, but the focus of its appeal to the working class.

Gorz mocked those who continued to claim that the absolute immiseration of workers

was the driving force between their adherence to socialism, noting that capitalism had

unquestionably mitigated the circumstances of life for most of the working class in

the rich nations of the west. "Communism, founded on the mere need to live, must

re-found itself on the human requirements, less frustrated but just as real: it must

present itself as the requirement of freedom and no longer as the practical expression

of necessity."225

As a philosopher, Gorz had thus defined Marxism in terms of its relationship

to morality. As a political thinker and journalist, however, he was still forced to try to

account for the historical socialist movement's failures. The problem, of course, was

that Marxists in the west had to hold some position regarding the USSR, and their

practical options were hopelessly limited: mocking leftist idealists who refused to

think in terms of practical politics, Gorz wrote "we thus become those strange "men

of the left" who are only the enemies o/the left and, to the applause of a right which

is very real, refuse to pardon the communist for not "dying of hunger while

contemplating the heavens.""226 Likewise, the other option was to join the PCF in

justifying every action of the USSR in terms of "necessity," regardless of the moral

truculence of those decisions or their remoteness from communist theory.

Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 185.
125
 Gorz's conclusion was admirably realistic, if disheartening: the rejection of

both capitalism and Stalinism was theoretically possible, but it was not politically

possible in postwar Europe. Intellectuals had no means to effect real change, only

"attitudes." This paralleled Sartre's 1952 lament that "how could one publicly

condemn slavery in the East without abandoning, among us, those exploited by

exploitation? But could we accept to work with the Party if it would enchain France

and cover her with barbed wire? What could be done? Hit...on the right and on the

left, upon two giants who did not feel our blows?...the only privilege of the Party is

that it has still the right to our severity."227 Or, as Gorz put it, "History has disjointed

that which Marx had united; Marxism is broken in two and that break is installed in

us; we are condemned to live it."228 Simply put, without a "renaissance of the spirit

of Marxist contestation within the USSR," the very idea of a socialist revolution in

the countries of western Europe was a practical impossibility.229

In an argument that anticipated the emerging themes of the New Left, Gorz

noted that the countries and regions that could be inspired by the example of the

Russian revolution were those of the Third World, and that anti-colonial wars and

independence movements presaged a possible shift from the traditional model of

revolutionary transformation within nations to one that took place on the global scale,

spearheaded by the global south. "For the moment, with the division of labor no

longer at the national level, but (at the) global, the class struggle in the heart of the
7
Sartre quoted in Alain D. Ranwez, Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Temps Modernes: A Literary History
1945-1952 (Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), 48.
228
Andre Gorz, La Morale de I'histoire, 184.
229
Ibid., 190.
126
capitalist societies has been replaced as the motor of history by the conflict between

privileged peoples and "proletarian peoples.""230 As the source of the West's wealth

in the form of raw materials and markets for finished goods, the third world's

potential move to embrace socialism and break from the capitalist economy of the

global north would fundamentally threaten western political stability and economic

prosperity.

Likewise, there was the possibility that the USSR could re-assume its mantle

as the vanguard of global socialism if it protected the (leftist) wars of independence

from the machinations of the west, particularly the United States. "The capitalist

nations do not possess the military means to crush anti-colonial revolutions, and if

they did possess them they would not be disposed to use them at the risk of a suicidal

war against the USSR."231 In that scenario, the third world would be abandoning the

increasingly untenable capitalist world while joining an increasingly prosperous

socialist one.

Gorz was deliberately circumspect about these proposals for a possible Soviet

- Third World alliance. Just as there was nothing inevitable about attempts to remake

society from within by the working class, the present system of capitalist exploitation

could survive despite the independence of former colonies. Where Gorz's analytical

strengths really lay was in the critique of contemporary capitalism rather than in

230
Ibid., 208.
231
Ibid., 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 .
232
Gorz remained a clear-sighted analyst of the issue of a potentially global revolution throughout the
1960s. Perhaps his most important article in this regard was his piece on the Sino - Soviet conflict,
published in Les Temps Modernes in 1963. See below.
127
outlining possible global revolutionary strategy. Thus, while he continued to evaluate

practical political options for the western European Left, he focused more on the

impasses of capitalism than on the paths to socialism.

In the historical conjuncture in which he wrote, Gorz noted two major

possibilities: revolution or reformism. The former was, at least in France, practically

impossible since the proletariat was not a demographic majority, the PCF was not a

truly revolutionary party, and there remained the vast numbers of conservative and

even reactionary peasants and small shopkeepers who would never accept a radical

political solution. Reformism, however, was always undermined by "Malthusian

arrangements and feudalisms," the claims by capitalists that reforms asked too much

and undermined (local, regional, or national) capitalist efficiency.233

The answer of the French state and of a significant portion of the patronat to

the question of the national political-economic framework was what Gorz, and the

rest of the Sartrians, called "neocapitalism." Simply put, neocapitalism was the

system in which the state intervened actively in the economy to insure that major

crises were avoided and that the system as a whole ran smoothly. It represented the

rejection of laissez-faire economics in favor of dirigisme in the economic sphere.

While neocapitalism included the demands of the working class in its calculations, it

was inevitably beholden to the demands of the patronat and its whole reason to be

was the ongoing success of a nation's capitalistic economy, not the standard of living

of its workers.

233
Ibid., 221.
128
 Gorz confronted the ideology that underlay neocapitalism. He noted that

neocapitalism claimed to resolve, or at least soften, the conflict between management

and workers. It claimed to bring about, or at least encourage, nearly universal

national abundance. Finally, it claimed to support the economic and social

environment in which the working class could escape from poverty and achieve

material comfort, so-called embourgeoisement. In short, neocapitalism not only

managed the complexity of industry and regulated the exchanges of industry and

finance, but it sought to soften the reality of class conflict, explicitly in the name of

the efficiency of capitalist industry itself.234

Citing the American sociologist David Riesman's landmark The Lonely

Crowd, Gorz argued that the kind of society perpetuated by neocapitalism was

fundamentally and permanently alienating, albeit in a different sense than in his

earlier discussion. His central point was that neocapitalism forced the members of a

society to satisfy their needs according to the needs of capital, not of their inherent

humanity. The physical and existential requirements of life were, in neocapitalism,

totally embedded in the economic framework, a framework that was essentially

impossible to escape. The net effect was to undermine the happiness and truncate the

existential possibilities of each individual.

Gorz saw this system as a perverse inversion of the potential logical and

humane society that economic development had brought about. Society should cater

to the needs of its citizens. Instead, "everything changes if this proposition is

234
Ibid., 222-233.
129
inversed: if the need, instead of founding the social demand and the project to change

society, is founded by existing society in view of its own perpetuation; if men do not

project a society according to their needs, but if society makes men according to its

needs; if the needs are not the autonomous reasons of things as they exist, but if

things are the heteronomous reasons of needs as they are required; put briefly if the

need, instead of being the right of (human) existence over society, becomes, as social

need, the right of society over existence."235

Ultimately, Gorz was analyzing and attacking consumer culture as a panacea

for a more genuine, a more "authentic," social environment. As he had convincingly

argued before, all needs were social in that they could only be satisfied through the

economic matrix of society. In neocapitalism and its consumer culture, however,

"genuine" needs were confounded with the symbolism of capitalism in the name of

the never-ending growth of commerce. For instance, a car was transportation, but a

Cadillac was an elaborate, ostentatious symbol of wealth and status. Simply put,

"Industry orients needs: first, by the fact that it throws (jeter) articles into the market

and creates the purchasing power necessary for their acquisition; and second by the

publicity that persuades the public that the individual defines himself by what he

consumes."237

235
Ibid., 235 - 236. Italics in original. Note that this was the first use of the autonomous /
heteronomous distinction in Gorz's writing. It would become absolutely central to his work in the
1980s. The provenance of the concepts are Kantian: for Kant, autonomy obeyed reason and moral
duty, while heteronomy obeyed mere subjective desire. Gorz reworked the terms in an existential
context.
236
Ibid., 237.
237
Ibid., 238.
130
 These are familiar themes. Like most critics of consumerism, Gorz employed

in part a moral attack on consumer culture's inherent waste, its disposable splendor

against the backdrop of personal alienation and unhappiness, and at times a

demographic and economic argument regarding its inability to satisfy the "real" needs

of the majority. Taking the US as the most obvious and advanced example of

consumerism run rampant, Gorz noted that only one-fifth of Americans actually had

the income to live the media image of the "American" lifestyle. The sitcom family in

its large private home, its two cars, its model of happy hierarchical domesticity did

exist, but only among the minority. In turn, that image was exported as the default,

the norm, and the implicit argument was that to be unable to live according to that

norm made one somehow subhuman.

Likewise, as of his writing, 20% of Americans consumed over half of the

value of the national product. What Gorz saw as the most pernicious element of this

structure was the fact that the working class was sold the idea of opulence in large

part to blunt their demand for real improvements: "a vast enterprise of mystification

exercises itself over the workers to demonstrate to them that they are complicit and in

solidarity with the rich..." Meanwhile, again in the United States, 40% of the

population was actually regressing in terms of its real buying power.238

Gorz offered three conclusions about the results of consumer society within

the framework of state-run neocapitalism. "First, capitalism, left to itself, is not

capable of the creation of abundance except by producing over-consumption and

238
Ibid., 249-252.
131
waste at the summit, pauperization at the base of society, and the subordination of the

existence of work to the existence of luxury." Second, the system perpetuated itself

by generalizing waste and "conformist terror and snobbism." Finally, private capital

could only function under the auspices of neocapitalism, but that the tensions between

its ideology and its actual functionality always threatened to pull it apart. "The

welfare state in the spirit of its theorists, can only be a rationalized capitalism and

master of its own functions, it is inconceivable that it remains that, frozen in its

contradictions; its own praxis will push it finally to move beyond capitalism itself."239

Here, several familiar themes in Gorz's thought are evident. His own horror at

waste, his bitter hatred of the ostentation and status games of bourgeois society, his

heartfelt sympathy for those who capitalist society left behind, all of it led him to

penetrate the supposed opulence of the postwar period and see instead the vacuity of

consumerism. The elite sold their lifestyle as the image of the norm and set up a

hierarchy of products that the working class tried to acquire in a vain effort to ascend

to that level. Gorz was repulsed by the bad faith of this whole enterprise, when the

wealth actually existed that might instead address the "real" needs of everyone in a

society like that of the United States or France, instead of leaving so many behind.

That being noted, Gorz's critique was uneven. He struggled in La Morale de

I'histoire to pin down exactly what he meant by "needs." He certainly acknowledged

the importance of biological needs, but his arguments centered instead on socially-

conditioned needs, those things needed for a reasonable standard of social dignity and

239
Ibid., 258.
132
comfort. In turn, those needs were very difficult for him to define with any great

specificity. Following the work of Riesman, as well as that of C. Wright Mills, Gorz

demonstrated that there was widespread dissatisfaction among all classes of workers

in American society, white and blue collar alike, that consumerism promised

happiness but could not deliver. The alternative, however, was harder to pin down

than the problem.240

In the last pages of La Morale de Vhistoire, Gorz addressed this as the paradox

of socialism as a historical phenomenon: it envisaged a society structured according

to the needs of humans, but achieving that society was a process that revealed those

needs even as it tried to address them. It was not a finished blueprint, but an

aspiration that was nevertheless forced to contend with political realities like the Cold

War and the seductive power of consumer capitalism. Again, it was clear that

capitalism failed according to the criteria of its champions: it did not make people

happy and it did not create a society of widespread abundance. The difficulty lay in

forging real political projects toward something better.

In his wry conclusion, Gorz wrote "Miserable, you tell me perhaps; you write

an entire book to demonstrate the ethical value of the Marxist requirement and found

on it your position for socialism, and you finally tell us that you don't know if

communism will make men happy and suppress all alienations."2 ' But here, Gorz

insisted that one could not take the conclusion as the given, that a politics that tried to
240
Gorz used American society as his model not only because it was the subject of Reisman's and
Mill's investigations, but because it represented the most advanced and undiluted form of
consumerism, a stage France had not yet reached.
241
Ibid., 278.
133
refuse the present in the name of the future led inevitably to terror, as it had in the

Soviet Union (however "necessary" that terror had been in building the Soviet

industrial base.)

Starting from "the appropriation of the world and of history," Gorz wrote

"This appropriation will necessarily be an infinite enterprise. We cannot know how

and in what measure it will succeed, and can only guess if it will ever be achieved.

This is not a reason for us not to desire it, to not place our hopes with the only class

that, by its praxis, is the one that can proceed."242 In the end, Gorz rejected

revolutionary fatalism and insisted that socialism was as much a process as a goal,

one predicated on the socially-conditioned needs of individuals instead of the

inhuman needs of industry.

We should note, however, that Gorz was a long way from orthodox Marxism.

For a book that sought to determine what made Marxism the most accurate and useful

framework of analysis, La Morale de I'histoire was more successful as an indictment

of (neo-) capitalist society and consumerism for perpetuating different varieties of

alienation. Gorz followed Marx in arguing that the worker and the owner could never

be truly reconciled because of the very structure of capitalist enterprise: their goals

would never be the same and the demands of the worker would always clash with the

ends of the capitalist (namely profit.) He went beyond Marx, however, in arguing

that no society had succeeded in escaping from the larger problem of bureaucratic

modernity, of the inability of individuals to satisfy their existential needs within the

242
Ibid., 279.
134
all-encompassing economic and social system. Again, without citing Weber, Gorz

had arrived at a variation on Weber's conclusion that modernity was itself an "iron

cage."

Against that conclusion, however, Gorz posited the possibility of a solution

and a liberation through socialism. Just as he had sympathized with socialism before

he was a Marxist, Gorz's political vision remained much broader than one informed

only by Marx's critique of capitalism. For Gorz, socialism was the potential

movement of existential freedom, the antithesis of both the logic of capitalism and the

degeneration into seriality and bureaucracy. Capitalism could only be oppressive and

alienating, and thus socialism's primary task was to overcome and dismantle the

capitalist system. But Gorz's socialism actually extended beyond that oppositional

stance to what he described as an ongoing and never-ending project of existential

revival, of a permanent revolution that refused both capitalist alienation and Stalinist

violence to individuals.

And yet, for all its grandiosity, Gorz's vision of socialism was tempered by his

stark awareness of the practical obstacles to its realization.243 The socialist of western

Europe could look to third-world revolutions and independence movements and hope

that they might ignite a new and more effective global socialist movement, but Gorz

knew all too well that the entire foreign policy of the United States was directed to

preventing just that from happening. Likewise, despite its manifest abuses, socialists

243
Compare this, again, to Judt's work. Gorz was all too aware of the fact that revolution was
impractical and that history had no telos. He was a much more ingenuous variety of Marxist scholar
than Judt's easier targets. See especially Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left, 169 - 190.
135
could not simply reject the USSR as irrelevant to "real" socialism, because it still

represented the core of any future expansion of socialism to Europe itself. And, no

matter what, Gorz remained committed to the existential vision of the irreducibility of

the individual consciousness. Any socialist movement had to not only safeguard the

dignity of the individual, but had to champion that dignity as its very raison d'etre.

That was socialism, and for all of its liberal smokescreens, capitalism could never

protect that dignity in a manner Gorz saw as satisfactory.

It would have been easy for Gorz to continue framing his arguments in this

mode, extending a philosophical critique of capitalist modernity while gesturing

vaguely at concrete political projects. Instead, Gorz entered into his most productive

and important period of political journalism, a vocation that tied his work directly to

the changing political realities of the French labor movement and the larger question

of radical politics as they were enacted on the streets and in the ballot box. Whereas

Sartre labored over his enormous study of Flaubert, Gorz focused his energy on the

possibility of moving France toward socialism.244

Les Temps Modernes

In May of 1961, Gorz joined the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, after

Marcel Peju, its secretary, was fired. Beauvoir recounted that Gorz was always the

244
Sartre's political interventions grew largely symbolic after the end of the Algerian War. Gorz, a
generation younger, did much to maintain the political focus at Les Temps Modernes. See Annie
Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 451 - 457.
136
first to show up for the bi-monthly meetings at her apartment. He told her "I can't

help but be on time."245 Gorz was an asset to the journal thanks to the breadth of his

knowledge, his command of the philosophical framework that inspired its political

positions, and his ten years of experience as a professional journalist. Gorz was fluent

in the jargon of economists and political analysts and kept himself appraised of

developments in global politics.

While Les Temps Modernes is better known for its powerhouse editorial board

at its inception in 1947, including at the time Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-

Ponty, it was still one of the most important leftist journals in France during the

1960s. It was a direct inspiration for leftists in France and abroad - Perry Anderson

noted in 2000 that Les Temps Modernes had been one of the models on which New

Left Review was founded.246 Furthermore, the political events and cultural shifts

occurring in France in the 1960s, including the birth of the Fifth Republic, the

aftermath of the Algerian War, the rise of the New Left, and the early student

movement, provided ample material for the Sartrians to consider in terms of their

philosophy and politics. Finally, the journal remained one of the most important

forums for independent discussion and criticism outside of the purview of the official

political parties in France. Prestigious thinkers still flocked to contribute articles -

writers and political leaders from Frantz Fanon to Primo Levi to Fidel Castro

Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses II, 590.

Perry Anderson, 'Renewals,' New Left Review 1, (January - February 2000): 5 - 24.
137
published articles in Les Temps Modernes in the 1960s.

It was during the period in which Gorz joined Les Temps Modernes that he

moved away from the abstractions present in La Morale de I 'histoire toward a more

grounded approach to socialist political strategy and labor movement organization.

He no longer critiqued Marx, or any other thinker, except to extract and employ

concepts that might be of practical use to the labor movement. His philosophical

training also faded into the background of his writing. It is clear that the hybrid

existential Marxism that he and Sartre both worked to codify in the late 1950s

remained his intellectual base and his inspiration, but he no longer wrote directly of

the groupe-en-fusion or of seriality. Instead, the entire battery of concepts he had

developed going all the way back to Fondements pour une morale became largely

implicit in his considerations of concrete issues facing the labor movement and of

what he and the Sartrians still considered "the class struggle," in so many words.

This shift in approach coincided with Gorz's role at Les Temps Modernes as

one of its most active contributors. He quickly became one of the leading editors on

the review and was able to exercise considerable influence in selecting the articles to

be published and the themes special issues would consider. At a time in which both

Sartre and Beauvoir increasingly despaired of the political future of France, in the

wake of De Gaulle's return to power and the revolting practices of the French Army

247
There are two synthetic reviews of the journal: Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre
and Les Temps Modernes, trans. Ricahrd C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1988), which focuses on Les Temps Modernes'' literary criticism, and Howard Davies, Sartre and 'Les
Temps Modernes,' which manages to sum up most of the journal's major themes from its inception to
the 1980s.
138
in Algeria, Gorz remained steadfast in his search for positive political possibilities for

France and for western Europe in general.248

Gorz also carried out "nuts and bolts" analyses of major political events, a

task for which he was better suited than the suite of litterateurs who occupied the rest

of the board. One iconic example was his article on the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962,

in which Gorz drew attention to the huge campaign of lies carried on by the United

States after the failure of the operation. Here, he simply cross-referenced all of the

relevant coverage from American periodicals and then framed his critique in terms of

the mendacious, imperialistic nature of the American campaign for "freedom" against

Castro's government.249

In September of 1962, Gorz wrote the introduction to the theme issue on

"Facts and Problems of the Worker's Struggle." The article is important in that he

was able to refine points he had made three years earlier in La Morale de I 'histoire

about the concepts of "needs" and "poverty." It also marks a major shift in his tone to

the politics of class struggle. Writing for Les Temps Modernes, Gorz had a better

idea of who his audience was and adapted his writing to the harsher, more polemical

atmosphere of political debate in France in the 1960s. From the calm, at times

introspective approach in La Morale de I'histoire, Gorz's writing of the 1960s shifted

to become much more aggressive and confrontational, exposing and dismantling the

248
See Howard Davies, Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes,' 172 - 213 for a broad account of Les
Temps Modernes from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, the period during which Gorz was active on
the editorial board.
249
Andre Gorz, "Les Etats-Unis et Cuba," Les Temps Modernes 181 (May 1961): 1627 - 1632.
139
arguments that sustained neocapitalism's ideological apparatus.

In his 1962 article, Gorz argued that, despite the so-called "opulence" of the

postwar period, French workers were still dehumanized and alienated by a system

that posited the lifestyle of the rich (the "dominant classes") as the norm. That norm

served the ongoing demand of capital for further expansion, not the "real" needs of

the worker. In turn, the worker was deprived not just of material comfort, but of

social recognition as an equal member of society. He wrote "The essence of poverty

is to have to suffer as inaccessible, as refused, the possibilities and the wealth that

society has instituted as its dominant reality, as its norm: it is to be deprived of the

very title of human within that society..."250 According to Gorz, in a sense the French

worker was "poorer" than the Chinese peasant, who was both closer to the norm of

his society and who, at least nominally, lived in a society in which the standard of

value of a human is not how close to the ideal of material comfort he or she was.

Hence the problem with quantitative struggles within the labor movement: in

searching for a more "just slice of the cake," battles over higher wages did not contest

the ideological structure that underpinned poverty in this qualitative sense.

That being said, Gorz insisted that most French workers also remain

impoverished in a practical sense: "One will see that the great majority of workers

lack that which is necessary for the satisfaction of vital needs (besoins vitaux) in an

industrial and urban civilization (that is to say in a society where food, water, air,

250
Andre Gorz, "Avant-propos, donnees et problemes de la lutte ouvriere," Les Temps Modernes 196,
(September 1962): 389.
140
living space, sunlight, nightly rest are salable; in contrast to pre-industrial

communities, neither fruit, nor bathing, nor walks, nor silence are free and available

to all."251 Here, Gorz built on his critique of needs, one he would repeat and refine

for many years: "vital needs" were not limited to a minimum of daily caloric intake,

but included the ability to access the essential elements of physical, emotional and

spiritually comfort. The most interesting and suggestive element of this initial list

was the "need" for silence and for the implied privacy and repose it offered. This was

certainly something lacking in the living conditions of the vast majority of French

workers of the early 1960s, crowded into the new high-rises in the banlieue of Paris

or the working slums of provincial cities.252

The other problem with the wage battles that were the focus of the labor

movement's strategy was that they amounted to nothing more than a kind of cost-of-

living adjustment. As buying power grew, so did the default price of foodstuffs,

housing, and the other essential elements of life "Put another way, in the same

moment wherein a relative abundance permits the manifestation of creative needs

(besoins createurs), the passage from the needs of the natural sphere to (those of) the

human sphere, capitalism seeks to harness, to deflect, to submit to its own immediate

interests the margin of choice and of initiative left for the first time to

individuals.. ,"253 Gorz argued that without a defense of that margin of creative

251
Ibid., 391.
252
See Charles Hauss, Politics in Gaullist France: Coping with Chaos (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1991), 116-125.
253
Andre Gorz, "Donnees et problemes," 395.
141
space, of freedom from the laws of the market in the name of some form of

autonomous human practice, capitalism would always find a way to reabsorb those

temporary margins.

The rest of the September 1962 issue was a series of detailed studies on the

actual conditions of working-class life across Europe, several of which were penned

by "independent" Italian Marxists like Vittorio Foa and Lucio Magri.254 Having

picked up Italian early in his journalistic career, Gorz became an avid reader of

developments in Marxist theory and labor movement strategy coming out of Italy.

His own La Morale de Vhistoire was barely noticed in France, but it was rapidly

translated into Italian and Spanish and became standard reading for leftist

intellectuals in southern Europe, especially Italy.255 This Italian connection led Gorz

to become the champion of Italian Marxist theory at Les Temps Modernes, and he

arranged to have articles translated into French.

One other early Les Temps Modernes article penned by Gorz deserves special

mention: his analysis of the Sino - Soviet split. It is another testament to the

realism of Gorz's political outlook, one cognizant of the incredible difficulty of

effecting socialist politics in the western Europe in the midst of the Cold War. Per

Gorz, the importance of the debate for Europeans ("we are not judges, but part [of the

254
See Vittorio Foa, "Les luttes ouvrieres dans le developpement capitaliste," Les Temps Modernes
196 (September 1962) and Lucio Magri, "Le modele de developpement capitaliste et le probleme de
l'alternative proletarienne," in ibid.
255
See Andre Gorz, "A Discussion with Andre Gorz," in The Traitor, 211.
256
Andre Gorz, "Le Debat sino-sovietique: introduction," Les Temps Modernes 204 (May 1963): 1923
- 1942. For background, see the remarkable recent work Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet split: Cold
War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)
142
debate]") was that a peaceful non-aligned socialism was the only possible

socialism for the future of Europe in the foreseeable future. Likewise, the European

working class had too much to lose to embrace either a potential war or a risk of

falling to the level of Latin American or Chinese peasants. For a long time, the Cold

War had overshadowed the ability of European leftists to effect a politics; reactionary

politicians were able to use it to rally part of the working class to right-wing thinking,

while waiting for war was a poor substitute for effecting politics in the present on the

Left.

The Sino - Soviet debate was also of great importance in terms of the question

of whether the Soviet or the Chinese model represented the better hope for socialism

everywhere else in the world. The official stance from the Soviet side, citing an

editorial in Pravda and another in Nouvelle Revue Internationale, was that the first

duty of the socialist camp was to build up its economy, thereby outstripping

capitalism and inspiring imitation across the world. Small-scale revolutionary wars in

the meantime were not actually a "net gain" for global socialism, since they sapped

the resources of the major powers that support them. The better option would be for

the USSR to concentrate on its own economic growth, then twenty years down the

road to outmatch the capitalist world outright and attract the developing world to its

banner. Gorz gave this idea credit for being "Marxist" insofar as Marxist

development was supposedly impossible until the means of production were

Ibid., 1923.
143
sufficiently mature.

The Chinese position was that the support of third-world uprisings was key to

the spread of a truly global revolutionary effort. The Chinese, however, clung to

outdated theses, albeit ones inspired by its own "heroic" efforts to build socialism in

the midst of impoverishment and isolation. China had launched a vigorous rhetorical

campaign against Yugoslavia and other "revisionists" in trying to demonstrate that

socialism did not have to be rich, but could still be exemplary and inspire revolutions

in the rest of the world. The Chinese clung to Stalinist ideas about imminent

catastrophe in the West and a kind of monolithic global imperialism, ones that Gorz

noted "we (simply) know these to be false."259 The Soviet argument, then, was

simply more realistic.

The problem for western socialists was that there was still no way of knowing

how the working class was supposed to actually seize power, nor if the peaceful way

to do it even exists or, instead, if it was the only conceivable way that it could work

(which "is not at all the same thing.")260 The "rich" model of socialism had to be the

way in the west, "rich" in the sense of offering more to life than trinkets and

corporations. But, the problem was that it was all too easy to slip into making the

political struggle local, based on the pursuit of minor ameliorations, thereby

abandoning the Third World to exploitation. There was no other conceivable politics:

the rich socialists of the west in essence ask the poor nations to continue waiting and

258
Ibid., 1928-1930.
259
Ibid., 1933.
260
Ibid., 1936.
144
abandon leftist revolutions to be massacred by the US and its toadies. "Everything

will be poisoned for a long time."261

"This is why the Chinese arguments, as specious and aberrant as they are at

times, make (both) our own guilt and a real historical contradiction apparent to us."262

Gorz concluded that "There are in fact two battles: the battle of peaceful coexistence

and of the rich communist model, and the battle for the emancipation and the socialist

development of proletarian peoples. Neither of these battles can be subordinated to

the other...for us, who are neither Cuban, nor Indonesian, nor Chinese, only one

politics is possible, but it cannot claim to be that of Truth."263 As he had in the

conclusion of La Morale de Vhistoire, Gorz acknowledged that the more radical

hopes for an actual revolutionary struggle in the west were simply impossible. His

focus for the remainder of the decade would be on the possibilities of socialist

transformation within a hegemonic western capitalism.

Les Temps Modernes continued to devote considerable space to empirical

studies of class composition in western Europe in the early to mid-1960s. Inspired by

this approach, and writing in the more polemical, combative mode as mentioned

above, Gorz began to formulate practical strategies for the labor movement. He went

beyond the insistence that struggles had to be based on qualitative principles, that is

to say something more than mere wage increases, by proposing models for how that

might actually be achieved. Fully cognizant of the impasses at which the European,

261
Ibid., 1938.
262
Ibid.
263
Ibid., 1 9 4 1 - 1942.
145
and especially the French, radical left found itself in the context of the Cold War and

frustrated by the disingenuous revolutionary waiting-game of the official communist

parties, Gorz worked to elaborate strategies of "radical reforms" that might arrive at a

revolutionary result, even if their tactics were not revolutionary in the sense of an

armed seizure of state power. In a discursive context that was still very much trapped

in the opposition between the dream of armed revolutionary takeover and contempt

for "reformism" as a bourgeois smokescreen, Gorz's theoretical interventions of the

1960s are all the more interesting for his refusal to accept those terms of debate.

To Gorz, the goal of a new, post-capitalist society was the important thing, not

how it was reached. Socialist militants were right to be skeptical of reformism, but

not because the pursuit of reforms was itself inherently anti-revolutionary. The key

factor was how reforms were achieved. When the labor movement accepted reforms

that were handed down by the state and conceded to by the patronat, it relinquished

control of the process and the reforms themselves were inevitably re-absorbed by

capitalism. If, however, it could seize concessions from the patronat, reforms

themselves could be the rungs of the ladder leading toward a revolutionary

transformation of state and society.

The Labor Movement and Revolutionary Reforms

The backdrop for Gorz's labor theory of the mid-to-late 1960s was the

changing face of the French labor movement itself. The largest and most important
146
union was the Confederation Generale du Travail (General Labor Confederation, or

CGT), a confederation of various trade-specific unions grouped under its national

aegis. The CGT was officially tied to the PCF; its leadership followed PCF directives

regarding strikes and overall strategy. As the PCF's affiliated union confederation, it

was not surprising that it shared the same peculiar stance toward radical politics.

Nominally a revolutionary organization of the working class, the CGT was in fact

entirely concerned with routine wage increases for workers and rarely even bothered

with revolutionary rhetoric.

The French labor historian George Ross wrote "In the relations of work, the

C.G.T. organized itself during the 1960s in a characteristic mode of action which

corresponded essentially with "purely defensive unionism." At every level.. .(it)

deployed union strategy which included as much as seemed possible: strikes had the

overall goal of obtaining material gains and augmentations of salaries. In this form of

defensive unionism, the CGT.. .did not assume responsibility toward larger economic

implications.. ."264 Indeed, after the student and worker of uprising of May of 1968,

the CGT found itself in the peculiar position of trying to reign in other unions and

workers' groups that it considered to be dangerously radical.265

The other major French union of the 1960s was the Confederation Frangais

Democratique du Travail (French Democratic Labor Confederation or CFDT.) The

CFDT was, unlike the CGT, not officially affiliated with any political party. It was
264
George Ross, "La C.G.T.: crise economique et changement politique," in Mark Kesselman and Guy
Groux, eds., 1968 - 1982: Le Mouvement ouvrier francais: crise economique et changement politique
(Paris: Les Editions Ouvrieres, 1984), 67 - 68.
265
Ibid., 71.
147
born out of a split in the Confederation Frangais des Travailleurs Chretiens (French

Confederation of Christian Workers or CFTC) at a CFTC congress in November of

1964/°° There, a majority of the union's leaders agreed on the necessity of a new

focus and a new set of strategies against the backdrop of a changing labor force and

massive and ongoing social changes, including the growth of consumer society, rapid

technological advance, and the inadequacy of purely quantitative demands for

increased salaries to address the needs of workers. "Unionism would be confronted

with a double challenge, to adapt itself to the evolutions in course and to react against

new alienations." The new union concluded that "The other French union

organizations are incapable of responding to the problems of the future."267 The new

union also voted to secularize; while most of its members (and leadership) remained

practicing Catholics, it fought for changes in the workplace and improved conditions

in the name of a broader humanistic concern for the experiences of workers, one not

explicitly based on a Christian focus on human welfare.268

Generally speaking, the strategies of both unions before May of '68 revolved

around higher wages, although the CFDT did fight for a greater voice for workers in

factory decision-making, better safety standards, and so on with more focus than did

the CGT. The two organizations signed an accord in 1966 to formally aid one

266
See Renee Mouriaux, "La C.F.D.T.: de l'union des forces populaires a la reussite du changement
Social," in Mark Kesselman and Guy Groux, eds., 1968 - 1982: Le Mouvement ouvrierfrangais, 93.
267
Ibid., 94.
268
On the CFDT, see also Michelle Durand and Yvette Harff, La Qualite de la vie: mouvement
ecologique - mouvement ouvrier (Paris: Mouton, 1977), 81 - 98, and Leo Figueres, Une Longue
marche: regards sur le mouvement ouvrier etpopulaire en France de la revolution a nos jours (Pantin:
Le Temps des Cerises, 2007), 180 - 182.
148
another and to respond to calls for strikes. The CFDT, however, also organized

manifestations around issues not directly related to the workplace, including the

American war in Vietnam and women's rights, both issues that the CGT was hesitant

to embrace.269 Nevertheless, even the more radical and more innovative CFDT fell

short of pursuing genuinely "revolutionary" goals.

One of the explanations for the strength of reformism among the major organs

of the French labor movement in the 1960s is the relative prosperity of the French

working class. During the 1960s, France enjoyed the greatest economic gains of the

postwar era, with an annual growth rate of 4.9% in the nation's gross domestic

product. That being noted, the social context of the labor movement, and of the

growth of radical sentiment that exploded in May of 1968, was more complex than a

rapidly growing GDP might indicate at first glance. Even though productivity and

overall wealth did increase, it did so in part by increasing the cadence of work in

industrial settings and in liquidating smaller businesses in favor of the growth of large

corporations. Thus, the actual experience of work for many people was one of

increasingly burdensome work environments and great trepidation about the future.271

It was in this context that Gorz published his first book-length contribution to

the field of union strategy Strategic ouvriere et neocapitalisme (translated in English

Serge Berstein, The Republic ofde Gaulle, 1958-1969, trans. Peter Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 105 - 106.
271
See Leo Figueres, Une Longue marche, 173 - 180, Serge Berstein, The Republic ofde Gaulle, 115
- 122, and Gorz's numerous arguments on this issue, detailed below. For a kind of cultural-historical
critique of the rise of consumer culture in France in the 1960s, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean
Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
149
as Strategy for Labor), published in 1964. In it, Gorz not only advanced his analysis

of unionism in consumer society, but he engaged with and rejected some of the

ideological positions that he believed were undermining the radical Left's efficacy.

Among these positions were the belief, which he had already considered in La Morale

de Vhistoire five years earlier, that absolute scarcity and the immiseration of the

working class were the bases on which socialism should build its program of change.

Another was the idea that an armed insurrection was even possible in France in the

1960s.

Gorz dismissed the idea that absolute immiseration could be the basis for

leftist politics outright, arguing instead that a critique of capitalism had to be based on

a nuanced understanding of the "needs" that it engendered. "This is why I do not

focus on misery as the base for the contestation of capitalism. I will search instead to

determine what new needs capitalist development has brought into being; in which

measure these new needs, as much as one can explain them, are comparable in their

urgency to former needs; in what measure they imply, them also, a radical critique of

capitalism, that is to say of reasons of their permanent lack of satisfaction."272 Just as

he had been in La Morale de VHistoire, Gorz was interested in redefining the very

idea of "needs" and in exploring how capitalism systematically failed to satisfy them.

Gorz was also quick to qualify the whole ideological apparatus surrounding

"revolution versus reform." Simply put, this was a valid contrast only in a social

context in which an insurrection could possibly meet with success. Just as he was

272
Andre Gorz, Strategie ouvriere et neocapitalisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), 10.
150
disdainful of the argument that immiseration was still "absolute" for a majority of the

population, Gorz dismissed as absurd the idea that the left could overthrow the French

state outright. In the absence of that possibility, he emphasized the fact that some

kind of "revolutionary reforms" were the only possible option for the radical left.

And, in turn, for a reform to be potentially revolutionary, not only did it have to be

"seized" from below by the relentless and intransigent pressure of the workers, but it

had to contest the very logic of capitalism. "Autonomous power is a first step toward

the subordination of requirements of production to human requirements, with, in the

final perspective, the conquest of power of self-management."273

The notion of self-management {autogestion) was one of the keystones of the

theory of the independent left in France in the 1960s. Gorz became not only one of

its most important and vocal proponents, but one of its best analysts as well. The

theory of autogestion spoke directly to his conception of socialism itself, as not only

the rejection of the capitalist system, but of the antidote and antithesis of bureaucratic

modernity and seriality. In autogestion, workers would exercise direct control over

the methods and organization of the workplace, including the pace of work, the tasks

each worker performed, and the methods employed. Ultimately, autogestion

envisaged full worker control over the ends of manufacturing as well, up to and

including the idea that workers should determine what products were produced in a

given factory.274

Surprisingly, there is no intellectual history of the concept of autogestion. The closest thing might
151
 Despite his innovations in theory, Gorz remained loyal to certain traditional

Marxist conceptions: the proletariat remained the potential revolutionary subject in

his analyses, and the goal was still the seizure of the means of production. He wrote

"Instead of opposing in the manner of a dichotomy the present to the future as Evil to

Good, the present impotence to future power, it has to do with making the future

present and power already sensible by means of actions which reflect to the workers

their positive force: their capacity to measure themselves against the power of capital

and to impose their will on it."275 Only by an intellectual intervention could the

working class become the agents of revolutionary change; as he had been saying all

along, there was nothing inevitable about such a transformation. The workers had to

be made aware of their own ability to overtake and control the system, not just their

ability to bargain with management.

In turn, unions were the most important institutional players in the field of

potentially revolutionary reforms, precisely because they were not accountable to the

wider public. Gorz insisted that "politics" as the field of contestation was inherently

watered down within a consumer culture. Political parties deemphasized real,

meaningful political differences in the quest for votes and were cautious in adopting

positions that were not already accepted within mainstream culture. Thus, per Gorz,

labor unions served a vitally important role in not being accountable to the national

electorate. Only unions "escape from the imperatives of mass democracy, which, far

be the French sociologist Yvon Bourdet's work on the subject, written in the midst of the "red years"
themselves. See Yvon Bourdet, Pour I'autogestion (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974).
275
Andre Gorz, Strategie ouvriere et neocapitalisme, 16.
152
from weakening them, strengthens them as long as they pose problems in their real

specificity." Unions had to be the political bodies that could work from the lived

experiences of workers, not marketing campaigns meant to win votes, if they were to

retain their political efficacy. This argument led Gorz to conclude that, even if they

were affiliated with political parties (as the major unions were in France), unions

must never be controlled outright by parties, or they would lose their very raison

d'etre.

Gorz argued that the practical issues that arose in the implementation of

radical demands were ultimately less important than the goals those demands

gestured toward. This position was, obviously, somewhat puzzling at times. Much of

its meaning, however, was in the idea that logistics changed according to

circumstances, and that it was not possible to devise universally applicable pragmatic

programs, but it was possible to outline broad theoretical goals, albeit ones grounded

in socio-political context. In the case of unions, Gorz explicitly described the tension

between logistics (the "Plan") and motivation as being the theater of political action

itself: "The permanent role of the union is to explain real needs and to weigh in favor

of their satisfaction: the role of the Plan... is to organize the means of that satisfaction.

The tension between the needs and the means of their satisfaction is the motor itself

of planning, which is to say of democracy. The tension between the union and the

Plan must be accepted as a permanent given."277

276
Ibid., 18.
277
Ibid., 21.
153
 Thus, his initial sketch of labor-movement strategy was of an ongoing

ascension to greater and greater working-class power and autonomy, seized by means

of direct confrontation with the patronat. This movement would be carried out in the

name of not only increased financial benefits for the workers, but for worker control

for its own sake, ultimately in the name of a new set of values that would overcome

and subjugate the values of capital. Finally, the movement would accept the

permanent tension of choice and debate in arriving at local, contingent strategies.

To Gorz, the need for working-class autonomy was the result of his own

philosophical reflections on the nature of the existential drive toward freedom and

authenticity. The practical issues complicated the situation considerably. One of the

great ironies in the history of leftist political and social theory is that the postwar

period was a great flowering of intellectual anti-capitalist writing, precisely in the

midst of the trente glorieuses that saw an unprecedented increase in the standards of

living for the majority of the western-European working class. However significant

the divide between the elite and the majority, however barbaric the suppression of

leftist anti-colonial revolts by capitalist nations, however dire the threat of nuclear

annihilation in the Cold War, the fact remained that the traditional constituency of the

European socialist parties experienced a noticeable improvement in their lot in life

over the course of a few decades.278

278
For further background of economic change, and economic policy, in the Fifth Republic, see
William Gallois, "Against Capitalism? French Theory and the Economy After 1945," in After the
Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of France, ed. Julian Bourg (New
York: Lexington Books, 2004), 49-62, Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Charles Hauss, Politics in Gaullist France: Coping
154
 Gorz's responses to this fact were varied; fundamentally, he sought to expose

the pernicious logic of capitalism (what he would come to identify as "economic

rationality" by the 1980s) and to prove that, even if the standards of living of many

workers was improving, the system as a whole remained utterly unjust and

permanently exploitive. It is instructive in this regard to consider some of Gorz's

journalism that dealt with specific political and economic changes and events.

Somewhat like Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Gorz analyzed

political events with an eye to their larger implications for potential radical

breakthroughs, just as he underlined the class identity of the actors involved. But,

also like Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Gorz was forced to grapple with

capitalism's incredible adaptability and its ability to absorb and quash sites of

resistance.

An example in this mode is Gorz's "Le Mouvement ouvrier face au marche

commun" ("The Labor Movement Faced with the Common Market.") In fact, the

emergence of the European Common Market in 1957 was an early indication of a

broader threat to labor strategy, as Gorz immediately recognized, the French labor

movement worked within the national context, fighting for concessions that were

ultimately recognized by the state and codified in law. The Common Market

disrupted these parameters by allowing capital the option of seeking out more

accommodating national labor markets, an obvious problem for the notoriously

with Chaos (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991), Andrea Boltho, ed., The European Economy:
Growth and Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), George Ross and Jane Jenson, "France:
Triumph and Tragedy," in Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds., Mapping the West European
Left (London: Verso, 1994), 158 - 188.
155
combative French labor movement. At the same time, the Common Market

weakened the states of its members by forcing each to sacrifice some of their

autonomy and abide by the rules that superseded their respective prerogatives.279

As was usual for the writers associated with Les Temps Modernes at the time,

Gorz saw in the United States the very avatar of capitalism, busy both fighting

colonial insurrections in the Third World and economically colonizing the First.

"The free circulation of capital - and especially the concentration of American capital

in a small number of branches - renders ineffective one of the arms of statist

dirigisme: the selective orientation of credit and of selective fiscality. For better or

worse the French state, for example, must tolerate the creation, by Anglo-Saxon

capital, of companies of which the dimensions do not have meaning but at the level of

the entire Common Market, and of which the implementation is at odds with the

geographic, economic and social French Plan."280

From Gorz's perspective, the real purpose of the Common Market was quite

straightforward: the elimination through obsolescence of smaller, less competitive

businesses and industries in the face of larger, modernized enterprises along the

American model. In this regard, even as it wreaked havoc on underdeveloped regions

and pushed small companies out of business, the Common Market had already

created an economic and political space for the growth of multinationals. "A premier

avowed objective of the Common Market has been in part realized: no longer handled

279
On the Common Market itself, the precursor to the European Union, see Anthony J.C. Kerr, The
Common Market and How It Works (New York: Pergamon Press, 1977).
280
Andre Gorz, Strategie ouvriere et neocapitalisme, 127 - 128.
156
by monopolies, more-or-less marginal enterprises, of the pre-capitalist or familial

type, were in large part eliminated."281 Thus, even as large companies grew, the

actual lived experience of millions of workers and (former) small business-owners

was of hardship.

The Common Market reflected a shift in strategy on the part of the

bourgeoisie. The hegemony of American corporations internationally and the dollar

as currency had hamstrung European industry's aspirations to greater growth. The

Common Market was the example par excellence of European capital's response:

"supranational dirigisme," which would supersede national dirigisme and put Europe

on a more equal footing with the United States. It was also an explicit rejection of

neoliberalism, a term that Gorz was already employing as of 1964, since it envisaged

consistent intervention in the economy by the state.

Gorz's primary interest was, of course, what opportunities and threats the

Common Market might represent to the labor movement. The most important factor

was precisely "supranational dirigisme" since the existence of a Plan that all of the

member nations were obliged to abide by provided a context and a target for working-

class agitation. The policy advocated by both the PCF and the CGT called for an

outright rejection of the Common Market and the maintenance of protectionist

policies by the French state. Gorz, however, rejected that view as unrealistic, since

the very purpose of the Common Market was to undermine national controls and

regulations. The best possible strategy was to intervene at the same supranational

281
Ibid., 132.
157
level at which the Market operated, through an equally international coordination of

the socialist parties, trade unions, and leftist movements. "Instead of an impossible

frontal struggle against the existence of the Common Market and economic

integration, it is a strategy of partial and articulated struggles that would be suitable,

in my opinion, to define, in view of objectives having for a synthetic horizon a

democratic response to the Europe of cartels and trusts."282

Part of this "articulated struggle" would remain at the national level,

particularly in the "reconversion" of those whose jobs had been lost thanks to the

effects of the Common Market. Within this process, acknowledged as a necessity by

parties across the political spectrum, "reconversion thus offers to the working class

the occasion of an active insertion in the processes of transformation. The elaboration

of regional objectives rejecting the strategy of monopolies and of technocracies, is the

starting point of a politics of "alternatives" and of democratic planning moving in the

direction of socialism."

In fact, the contested political space opened by domestic reactions to Common

Market integration was an opportunity for the left to fight for the alteration of

political priorities within the nation: "The interest of planning resides on the other

hand in the fact that it permits a large public debate over the finalities and the order of

priorities of the economy, and therefore that it permits to the working class to present

alternatives solutions, a different model of development - to display the political

282
Ibid., 158.
283
Ibid., 161.
158
character, and not the material (character), of the impossibilities and impasses of

capitalism."284

Le Nouvel Observateur

Gorz's piece on the Common Market was originally published in Les Temps

Modernes in 1963, then reprinted a year later as the second half of Strategic ouvriere

et neocapitalisme. 1964 saw not only the publication of the latter, but the inception

of the news journal Le Nouvel Observateur. While he continued his membership on

the board of Les Temps Modernes, Gorz shifted his energy to launching the new

magazine along with two colleagues, Jean Daniel and Claude Perdriel.285 All three

had resigned from their positions at L 'Express in 1963 as it shifted away from its

former position on the center-left toward a more rightist outlook.286

In fact, the creation of Le Nouvel Observateur was a peculiar and interesting

episode within modern French journalism. Gorz's former journal, L 'Express, was

owned and controlled by the French journalist and public intellectual Jean-Jacques

Servan-Schreiber (usually referred to by his initials J.J. - S.S.) Originally, it was

created to support the political career of Pierre Mendes-France, with whom J.J. - S.S.

shared the conviction that France should abandon its colonial possessions. After the

284
Ibid., 165.
285
Gorz had worked with Daniel closely at L 'Express. Perdriel was the financier of the enterprise - he
remains the major stockholder of Le Nouvel Observateur and was worth over 150 million Euro as of
2009. See Challenges.fr, "Les Plus Grandes Fortunes: Claude Perdriel et sa Famille,"
<http://www.challenges.fr/classernents/fortune.php?cible=2009>.
2 6
Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy, 5.
159
end of the Algerian War in 1962, however, J.J. - S.S. decided to recreate the journal

as a news magazine with a decidedly pro-American, pro-Atlantic Alliance stance, a

move that alienated practically all of his leftist employees, including Gorz.287

Simultaneously, another left-leaning journal, France Observateur, was facing

great financial difficulties. Jean Daniel, Gorz's colleague at L 'Express, joined forces

with Claude Perdriel, at 35 already a successful businessman who happened to have

an interest in the press and leftist political convictions. Along with a handful of

investors, they purchased France Observateur and re-launched it under Daniel's

editorial direction as Le Nouvel Observateur. In turn, Daniel brought with him the

core group of journalists from L 'Express, at one stroke saving France Observateur

from bankruptcy and inheriting its still-considerable readership. Writing in the late

1970s, Daniel noted that his goal at the time had been to create a veritable "anti-

Express," an unabashedly leftist news magazine that tried to reach as wide an

audience as possible.288

Among his colleagues, both those with whom he had worked at L 'Express and

the team of the former France Observateur, Gorz cut a strange figure. Here is the

(uncharitable) description of Gorz by Lucien Rioux, his colleague at Le Nouvel

Observateur from its inception until Gorz's retirement in 1983:

"Of the team that Jean Daniel brought with him, Michel Bosquet is certainly
the strangest. Tall, thin, phlegmatic, ageless, sickly, with the allure of a
clergyman with his clothes, always the same, in neutral colors, he is infinitely

287
The most detailed description of the pre-history and subsequent creation of Le Nouvel Observateur
was penned by Gorz's colleague Lucien Rioux: see Lucien Rioux, L 'observateur des bons et des
mauvais jours (Paris: Hachette, 1982), esp. 131 - 169.
288
Jean Daniel, L 'ere des ruptures (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1979), 21..
160
 more robust than the impression he gives. His appearance deceives, his
intelligence surprises. With an astonishingly agile mind, he is capable of
building on any event, real or dreamed, a seductive theory. Atheist, Marxist,
Freudian, Sartrian by formation, he has, vis-a-vis society, the guilt of a
Christian who has sinned. From the time of his difficult adolescence where,
a poor refugee in Switzerland, he saw the Swiss living all too well, he
maintained a hatred for every form of consumption. For him, it seems, every
pleasure, every happiness must be compensated by suffering...the French
have consumed too much, they must pay."289

There are a few kernels of truth in Rioux's description, although it should be

clear that Gorz's psychological motivations were quite a bit more complicated than

some kind of latent Christian guilt complex. More to the point is Rioux's impression

of Gorz, which accords with that of Gorz's other colleagues: Gorz was a mysterious

presence in their midst, a powerful intellect they found somewhat intimidating,

possessed by a man they found almost impossible to understand on a personal level.

Here is Jean Daniels' comparable assessment, written in the late 1970s:

"(Gorz is) one of the most fascinating (people) that I spent time with. I have
seen him every day for twenty years, 1 have had a thousand occasions with
him for personal exchanges, but that has happened so infrequently that his
countenance seems to me to be inscrutable. Something tells me that he will
matter in the history of ideas and that a few pages of mine will refer to him.
But of what am I sure about the man himself? First that he forms with his
companion Dorine one of the most intimately associated couples, the most
obsessionally attentive and the most richly complementary that I've
seen...then that this intellectual, who is only interested in the handling of
concepts.. .is at the same time the most practical man, the most precise
calculator of that which is. Finally I know few ideologues as closed in a
system (of thought) who are at the same time as able to revise and modify
(that system.)"290

Le Nouvel Observateur was (and remains) more of a news magazine in its

289
Lucien Rioux, L 'observateur des bons et des mauvais jours, 167 - 168.
290
Jean Daniel, L 'ere des ruptures, 50. Yet another example is Jacques Julliard's posthumous tribute
to Gorz, "La mort choisi."
161
format and approach than Les Temps Modernes. The latter had always been aimed

explicitly at an intellectual audience, combining reviews of literature, art, cinema, and

theater with philosophical critiques and political analyses. For its part, Le Nouvel

Observateur was focused squarely on conventional journalism, albeit from an equally

leftist perspective. As one of its founders and directors, Gorz was able to use the

journal as a platform for the kind of journalism he had honed over the last decade:

newsy, easily-read articles packed with polemical vigor that demonstrated the rank

injustice of institutions within everyday capitalist society.

Two factors made Le Nouvel Observateur an excellent platform for Gorz's

critiques and political interventions. First, it broke with the pretenses of objectivity

and anonymity that were still prevalent in much French journalism of the 1960s; its

contributing writers made arguments and expressed opinions rather than issuing

anonymous descriptions of events (as they had at L 'Express.) Gorz was thus able to

assume his own journalistic identity as the journal's most intransigent resident critic

of the capitalist system. Second, Le Nouvel Observateur was from its inception able

to achieve a remarkable breadth of coverage. It covered everything of conceivable

interest to a leftist audience, including cinema, labor union strategy, major

contemporary intellectuals and their work, literature, and, of course, politics. Also,

whereas the other journals of the left were tied to specific political parties

(L 'Humanite as the organ of the PCF, for instance), Le Nouvel Observateur could

debate issues facing the left from a wide variety of perspectives, since its only

political fidelity was to a broad and inclusive conception of left-wing politics as such.
162
 Le Nouvel Observateur remained Gorz's major focus in the mid-1960s. He

wrote 112 articles from its inception in November of 1964 to the end of March of

1968, with 63% of its issues featuring at least one article by him.291 Along with his

fellow editors, Gorz also oversaw the direction of the journal as a whole. Those he

did author were concise analyses of the major events of the day: strikes, elections,

political scandals, and so on. It is striking how distinct Gorz's writing styles were

from one another. An acknowledged writer of importance thanks to the dense literary

thickets of Le Traitre, by the 1960s Gorz had mastered several genres of French

prose. His articles in Le Nouvel Observateur were punchy and accessible and usually

lacked an explicit theoretical framework, favoring instead a grounded indignation at

the injustice of labor exploitation, cronyism between the state and the patronat, and

so on. His Les Temps Modernes articles and his book-length analyses of labor

movement strategy were embedded in Marxist rhetoric, themselves part of the

cultural and intellectual intervention Gorz believed necessary in socialist politics. He

was still capable of the dense philosophical reasoning and writing like that of

Fondements pour une morale, but he was now clearly focused on reaching out to as

large an audience as possible. Thus, his writing of the 1960s decisively moved away

from complexity toward clarity.

A detailed study of all of the articles Gorz wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur

during the 1960s and 1970s would be prohibitively long and cumbersome. Instead,

291
This period, from November 1964 to March 1968, is covered in this chapter. For Gorz's writing of
the 1970s, including his work in Le Nouvel Observateur, see chapter 4.
163
this thesis will adopt a thematic approach to his journalism, noting particularly iconic

articles while identifying the major areas in which Gorz focused his attention.

Published as a weekly from its inception in November of 1964, Gorz had ample space

in which to perform regular interventions in the political debates then occurring in the

Fifth Republic.

In general, Gorz used his journalism as a platform for a kind of applied radical

political theory. As noted above, his articles in Les Temps Modernes were often

expressly theoretical, using political events (such as the French miner's strike of

April, 1963 or the Sino - Soviet split) as catalysts for theoretical discussions. How

could a strike be radicalized and gesture at a larger qualitative social transformation,

for instance, or how did the global balance of power between the communist and

capitalist camps dictate the options available for socialist intellectuals in France? In

Le Nouvel Observateur, however, the relationship between theory and event was

inverted: theory was implicit, while Gorz openly attacked the social structures of

capitalism in accessible, engaging prose.

This is another way of saying that Michel Bosquet (again, Gorz's journalistic

pseudonym) was a different writer than Andre Gorz; Bosquet's writing was pithy,

evocative, visual, and at times polemical in a way that Gorz's writing rarely was. In a

sense, Bosquet and Gorz were variations of the same technique: Bosquet's journalism

was underpinned by a specific kind of leftist philosophy and certain arguments about

292
Note the bibliography, in which all of Gorz's articles for Le Nouvel Observateur, written as Michel
Bosquet, are listed in chronological order.
164
social justice, while Gorz's theoretical writings drew on a wealth of examples from

his contemporary social and political reality. Thus, the differences between the two

styles were a question of both emphasis and tone. For the reader, it can be a

surprising and pleasurable experience to go from Gorz's measured paragraphs linking

together arguments and presenting evidence to Bosquet's acerbic stories of the

conspiracies of the patronat or the manifest corruption of big business. If one did not

already know that they were the same person, it would be difficult to guess.

Several of Gorz's (here writing as Bosquet) contributions to Le Nouvel

Observateur were collected in a volume, Critique du capitalisme quotidien, published

in 1973. They were bound by a common purpose, albeit one that was broad enough

to encompass a broad swath of Gorz's journalism, from investigative reports to

extrapolations from official government documents and studies. "Parting from the

everyday, (the articles) demonstrate behind the facts and events a system of which

they analyze the logic, the contradictions and the impasses. Their goal is to

demonstrate how this system functions, to demonstrate its faults and to contest its

foundations in the name of the needs and possibilities that this society ignores."

The "prologue" for the volume was Gorz's brief article, written in 1965, on

the report of the American anthropologist Peter Murch regarding the inhabitants of

the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. Briefly, following a volcanic eruption,

the roughly 250 islanders, who had been living in subsistence conditions, were

293
Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz), Crtique du Capitalisme Quotidien (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1973), 5.
Italics in original.
165
relocated by the British government to the UK. There, they lived for two years and

were given considerable financial support in an effort to help them integrate as British

citizens. After the volcanic activity on Tristan da Cunha subsided, however, all but

six chose to return, despite the prospect of a return to poverty.

Gorz summarized the conclusions that Murch had reached regarding the

islanders' motivations: "(British people) worked all day to be able to pay for the

evening of televised or cinematic diversion, the evasion in the individual pavilion

with its miniscule "priest's garden"; they worked all week to be able to pay for the

Sunday of motorized evasion toward the beaches or the bar with its beer, whiskey and

rock; they worked all year to be able to pay for three weeks of evasion in the Canaries

in Sicily, in the Cyclades, on the Coste del Sol or in Jamaica."294 The islanders, for

their part, looked forward to their return to Tristan da Cunha not only as a retreat

from the life of labor and consumerist diversions, but because they had saved so

much in two years in the UK that they could survive years of poor harvests and

conditions if necessary.

This was one of the major themes of Gorz's journalism: the inadequacy of

consumer society to provide lasting or meaningful happiness for the majority of its

members. His examples were no longer drawn from the work of sociological studies

(as they had been in La Morale de 1 'histoire), but instead were based on his own

investigations. Other examples included his "Pas Seulement pour des sous" ("Not

only for Pennies") and "Consumme et tais-toi!..." ("Consume and Be Quiet! "), which

294
Ibid., 14.
166
dealt in different ways with the cultural struggle that had become integral to the labor

movement. The former was directly related to Gorz's larger labor strategy, arguing

that workers in France were increasingly aware that their struggles had to be for

reduced working hours and better conditions, not just wage increases. The latter was

an expose on business leaders in Sweden who tried to dilute the class consciousness

of Swedish workers by claiming that they were fundamentally integrated into

Swedish society in a way workers abroad were not.295

The majority of Gorz's writing for Le Nouvel Observateur in its first years

was in the sphere of political economy. Broadly, the major theme that bound together

most of his reporting was the ways in which the capitalist economy of France failed

to provide for the needs of working people despite its explosive growth. He wrote

several articles having to do with the thousands of unemployed workers who could

not find work for a decent wage, others on the poor quality of housing for workers

and the profit motive that squeezed them out of their former neighborhoods, and the
• 9 Oft
rising price of basic goods against the relative stagnation of wages.

Michel Bosquet, "Pas seulement pour des sous," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 December 1964, 6 - 8 ,
Michel Bosquet, "Consume et tais-toi!..." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 June 1966, 14 - 16.
296
See Michel Bosquet, "Logement: la loi du marche," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 December 1965, 10
- 1 1 , Michel Bosquet, "Les Chomeurs de la relance," Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 August 1966, 10 -
11, Michel Bosquet, "L'lllusion du "planisme,"" Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 November 1966, 9 - 10,
Michel Bosquet, "Les Chomeurs de l'expansion," Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 November 1966, 5,
Michel Bosquet, "L'Economie malade de chomage," Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 December 1966, 12,
Michel Bosquet, "Riches et pauvres en Europe," Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 November 1967, 21,
Michel Bosquet, "45.000 Chomeurs," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 December 1967, 1 3 - 1 4 , Michel
Bosquet, "Europe: la bataille du lait," Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 March 1968, 1 6 - 1 7 . Also note the
three articles Gorz co-wrote based on empirical data gathered by I.F.O.P., a major French polling
corporation, for February and March, 1967, issues of Le Nouvel Observateur. Michel Bosquet, Claude
Krief, Jacques Mornand, "A Qui profite le Gaullisme, une grande enquete de FI.F.O.P.," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 15 February 1967, 15-20, Michel Bosquet, Serge Mallet, Katia Kaupp, "Cinq Francais
167
 In his "La Loi du Marche" ("The Law of the Market"), concerning the French

state's plan to dramatically increase the rent of subsidized housing for the poor, he

wrote "Simply put, because France is a market economy, there is no reason for H.LM.

and the S.C.I.C. [rent-controlled housing and housing boards, respectively] to persist

in "social obligations" (faire du social). In the market, everything has its price,

regulated by the law of supply and demand. In the housing market, where demand is

much greater than supply, the price of the market is such that the small number of

new lodgings will find an equal number of renters. In short, the rents of subsidized

housing, in violation of the law of the market, must be raised."297 Thus, as of the

mid-1960s, the Gaullist state's priority was the dissolution of those institutions like

rent control that contradicted market economics and the profit of private enterprise.

Gorz concluded the article by citing the example of a socialist rent-control experiment

in Austria in 1934 that was subsequently attacked and dismantled by the Austrian

army; his point was that the very idea of socially-regulated prices was antithetical to

capitalism and would come under attack in the end.

Gorz's conclusion in this article was symptomatic: many of his articles ended

by reminding his readers that capitalism had systemic features that worked against

economic and social reforms. In other words, as long as capitalism persisted, even

the best-intentioned reforms would be put on the defensive. Wealth disparities would

sur dix ont peur de chomage, avec une grande enquete de 1'I.F.O.P.," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22
February 1967, 1 7 - 2 4 , Michel Bosquet and Jacques Mornand, "Une Republique de mal-loges, avec
une enquete exclusive de 1'I.F.O.P.," Le Nouvel Observateur, March 1, 1967, 1 9 - 2 5 . In turn, these
had to do with the corporations profiting directly from Gaullist regulations, widespread fear among
French workers about the precariousness of their positions, and poor housing among the working class.
297
Michel Bosquet, "Logement: la loi du Marche," 10.
168
always tend to grow in the absence of a major structural transformation, for instance,

just as chronic unemployment would plague society even against the backdrop of

growth in the gross national product.298 Whereas Gorz wrote openly in Les Temps

Modernes and his books of the 1960s about the need for, and possible approaches to,

revolutionary transformation, the concept of revolution was latent and implicit in his

articles published in Le Nouvel Observateur.

As noted above, Gorz's Strategie ouvriere et neocapitalisme had a major

impact outside of France, particularly in Italy. Gorz not only worked to include

Italian Marxist theory in Les Temps Modernes, but he became Le Nouvel

Observateur's primary writer on Italian topics. He followed Italian politics closely

and penned several articles about the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the prospects

of leftist politics in Italy more generally.299 Gorz was intensely interested in the

internal debates of the PCI because it was the most democratic and open of the

communist parties of Western Europe, particularly in contrast to the resolutely

monolithic PCF. Italian communists tended to enunciate the major issues "of evident

importance for every European workers' movement" with clarity and directness.300

The case of Italian leftist theory is an interesting one. Unlike the PCF, the

PCI retained some degree of autonomy from Moscow after World War II, and its

298
Michel Bosquet, "Riches et pauvres en Europe," and Michel Bosquet, "45,000 Chomeurs."
299
See Michel Bosquet, "Les Heritiers de Toghatti," Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 July 21 1 9 6 5 , 2 - 3 ,
Michel Bosquet, "Italie: le congres du "mea culpa,"" Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 November 1965, 19,
Michel Bosquet, "Italie: le grand debat," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 November 1965, 14 - 15, Michel
Bosquet, "Italie: une operation en bourse, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 December 1965, 1 6 - 1 7 , Michel
Bosquet, "Italie: les sirenes centristes," Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 January 1966, 14 - 15.
300
Michel Bosquet, "Italie: Le grand debat."
169
leadership allowed a much more open field of debate and discussion about political

strategy and theory. By the mid-1960s, intellectuals who would have been

regarded as too independent and critical of the party leadership in France were instead

full party members in Italy. The PCI thus represented a counterpoint to the scission

in France between the official political party of communism, dogmatic and

uncreative, and independent intellectuals, gifted in theoretical innovation but cut off

from practical politics.

To Gorz, the most important of the issues of "evident importance" discussed

within the PCI was, again, the question of immediate reforms versus longer-term

revolutionary potential. Italian communists on the PCI's left wing, such as Pietro

Ingrao, argued that workers would not fight for incremental reforms in wages,

housing, and so on, without a larger vision of a potential societal transformation.

Ingrao claimed that ""It does not suffice.. .(to rely on) an indifferent power from the

base" that the parties would use in a paternalistic manner "according to their own

enlightened vision. To believe that one can use the state as it is is an illusion. It is

not from on high, but from below" - by the struggle for democratic power at the base:

in the factories, neighborhoods, the countryside - that one constructs popular power

and a democratic state."302 Per Gorz, Ingrao's attitude was the result of a veritable

"Gramscian teaching."

In other words, the far-left of the official Italian communist party was

301
See Perry Anderson, "An Invertebrate Left," London Review of Books, March 12, 2009, 12 - 18.
302
Michel Bosquet, "Italie: le grande debat,"15.
170
comprised of thinkers very much like Gorz himself. Ingrao's point was of a kind with

Gorz's writing of the same period, such as that of Strategie ouvriere et

neocapitalisme: small, local goals had to be tied together by a larger, synthetic vision.

The contrast between limited goals and revolutionary aspirations was a false one, as

they could and should be joined together in a flexible, but still revolutionary, leftist

politics. Ingrao himself was viciously attacked by the PCI's leader, Giorgio

Amendola, for his "factionalism," and Gorz wrote that the fate of the PCI as the one

site of genuine debate in an official communist party was thus in danger.

By the 1970s, the vast majority of Gorz's articles for Le Nouvel Observateur

were economic analyses centered on France. During the 1960s, however, Gorz wrote

on more diverse topics, including ones on foreign subjects including Latin America

and South Asia.303 One topic of particular interest is Gorz's attention to the Cuban

Revolution. As noted above, Gorz had written about Cuba for Les Temps Modernes

in 1962, during his first months working with Sartre and his circle. At the end of

1967 and beginning of 1968, Gorz returned to the topic. To him, as for so many other

European radicals, Cuba was the most exemplary and inspiring site of revolutionary

transformation on Earth.304 He wrote "you discover that Cuba is not a society, a state

303
See Michel Bosquet, "La Plan manque du Pakistan," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September 1965, 2
- 3, Michel Bosquet, "La Plus Grande Poudriere d'Amerique Latine," Le Nouvel Observateur, 9
March 1966, 14 - 17, Michel Bosquet, "L'Inde ne meurt pas seulement de faim," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 6 April 6 1966, 1 2 - 1 3 , Michel Bosquet, "La "Gorille" de Buenos Aires," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 6 July 1966, 11.
304
See Michel Bosquet, "Deux documents exclusifs: L'assassin de "Che" Guevara par Michel Bosquet
et Ce que je demande a mes amis par Regis Debray," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 November 1967, 6 - 9 ,
Michel Bosquet, "Castro ouvre un nouveau front," Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 January 1968, 2 0 - 2 1 ,
Michel Bosquet, "Au Pays du "Mort Glorieuses,"" Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 February 1968, 1 8 - 2 0 ,
171
like we understood, but a people in continual fusion, without a recognizable mold, an

economic, cultural and political construction where everything is in flux, where the

maximum mobility is the goal and the law, in brief, a revolution in course.305

Gorz's enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution was tied directly to the

personality of Fidel Castro. Castro emerged from Gorz's descriptions as a "free

lion," a man of the people who personally addressed the problems of Cuba at every

turn. Under Castro, Cuban culture was being reshaped by "Convincing through

goodness.. .it begins by providing that which cannot be bought: education, health,

lodging, the "dignity of workers."" Schools would produce "integrated men,"

possessing both technical mastery and a humanistic background. Everything in Cuba

was predicated on the "immense reserves of productivity and the moral resources of

the country," in short, on "believing in human beings."306 While Gorz was notably

breathless in his enthusiasm for Cuba, at least in the first few years of its revolution,

he still admitted that "one will know in three years" if the Cuban social and economic

experiments were bearing fruit. As of the late 1960s, however, the important thing to

Gorz was that there was one place on the planet where a socialist revolution had not

yet degenerated into bureaucratic serialitity.

A year earlier, in November of 1967, Gorz wrote a special article on the death

of Che Guevara, accompanied by a testament by the French insurgent and former

companion of Guevara's, Regis Debray. Drawing from the testimony of the Bolivian

Michel Bosquet, "Fidel Castro est-il un fou?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February 1968, 1 4 - 1 6 .
305
Michel Bosquet, "Fidel Castro est-il un fous," 14.
306
Ibid., 1 5 - 1 6 .
172
army officers and soldiers who captured Guevara, Guevara's diary, and official press

releases by the Bolivian government, Gorz argued in his article that Guevara's death

was an outright assassination. Since Bolivia did not have the death penalty, he

pointed out, Guevara could not have been legally executed. Furthermore, his trial

would have been a public relations nightmare for both the right-wing Bolivian

government and its American masters, since Guevara was already the most famous

revolutionary in the world and the trial would have been a media circus. Gorz

convincingly demonstrated that, based on the testimony of the soldiers, Guevara had

been shot in cold blood at some point in the 24 hours after his capture on orders from

the top of the Bolivian army command.307

This piece is interesting both in its demonstration of Gorz's unequivocal

support for the Cuban regime (it concluded with his comparison of Guevara to Jesus

Christ!) and in the transparency of Gorz's journalistic method. Just as he had almost

two decades earlier at Paris - Presse, Gorz continued to combine information from

various foreign sources to craft his own articles. In the Guevara piece, he used the

work of an Italian journalist, Franco Pierini, who had interviewed the soldiers

involved, dispatches from the Associated Press, Fidel Castro's speeches and reading

of Che's diary on Cuban television, and articles from the American press to reach his

conclusions. The article was quite seamless, and even if the comparison to Christ was

hyperbolic, it is obvious in historical hindsight that Guevara did indeed take on a

messianic character after his death.

307
Michel Bosquet, "Deux documents excluifs."
173
 While most of his writing in Le Nouvel Observateur was thus of a kind with

his books and public lectures, many of his articles anticipated themes outside of labor

theory and political critique that would later become central to his intellectual

identity. Gorz had not yet discovered ecology, but some of his other major concerns

were anticipated by early articles, particularly on the issues of education and

medicine. He wrote a number of articles attacking the anti-democratic effects of the

rigorous French examination system, and several others on the profit motive at work

in French medicine, undermining its ability to treat patients.

In 1967, Gorz launched a frontal assault on the centerpiece of the French

system of examinations: the baccalaureat (the "bac") Then as now, the bac was the

culmination of secondary education, consisting of a day-long exam whose success or

failure would determine each student's right to attend a French university. At the

time he was writing, the majority of students failed and were forced to spend another

year studying and preparing, or to abandon hope of entering the university

altogether.308 According to Gorz, this was not an unhappy accident; "according to

[De Gaulle's prime minister] Georges Pompidou and his ministers, the nation needs

leaders who command, specialists who execute and non-specialists who obey. The

educational system must therefore differentiate, select, and form

hierarchies... pushing their respective contingent of children into each of these three

categories, and therefore assigning them [the children], well before the growth of

308
In a later article, Gorz cited the following statistics: as of 1967, one in eight French adolescents who
took it passed the bac, and only one in six went on to university at all. Michel Bosquet, "Response a
Laurent Schwarz," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 November 1967, 26.
174
their mental faculties, into their place (and their level) in the social pyramid."

In turn, those destined to ascend to the higher levels of that pyramid were

almost all the children of privilege, who already possessed the cultural prerequisites

to succeed. "This initial (and social) inequality before culture is not compensated for

by the school: the school supposes the same cultural capital among all children; it

dispenses with any systematic effort to teach the aptitudes that it requires."310 The

result was a system that, statistically, made it forty times more likely that a student

from an elite background would succeed at the bac than one from the working

class.31' Thus, "the important thing, for the moment, is to assure the dozens of

thousands of adolescents who are going to fail the exams that they are not guilty of

failure, but more often the victims of a system: the school defends itself, like a

citadel, against those who do not possess the bourgeois "pre-culture" on which

success at the exams is predicated.312

The background to Gorz's attack on the bac as of 1967 was the massive

demographic shift taking place in France, along with the rest of the western world, as

of the 1960s. The children of the postwar baby boom were of college age by the mid-

1960s, and yet they found the university system sorely outdated in terms of both their

needs and their numbers.313 Gorz was well aware of this fact; he mocked the

309
"Enseignment: La France malade du bac," Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 May 31 1967, 20.
310
Ibid. Note that Gorz cited an article of Pierre Bourdieu, "L'Ecole conservatrice," Revue Francois
de Sociologie, July - September 1966, in making his arguments. Bourdieu would go on to become the
most famous French sociologist of education and social status of all time.
311
Michel Bosquet, "La France malade du bac," 2 0 - 2 1 .
312
Ibid., 21.
313
See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, and Tony Judt, Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945 (New
175
defenders of the existing system who wanted to "protect the university against

invasion by students" and emphasized the implicit reasoning behind this concern: to

make sure that the genuine democratic promise of universal education was held in

check through the structure of exams.314 Instead, Gorz called for a new imagining of

the educational system itself, one that encouraged a broad education that

encompassed both a technical and a humanistic background in the name of "elevating

the general level of the ensemble of citizens."

Gorz's article touched off a debate in the journal between Gorz himself and

Laurent Schwarz, a professor of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique (one of the

elite Grandes Ecoles.) Schwarz addressed "the left" more generally, arguing that it

was impractical to attack an institution as venerable as the bac and to decry the state's

educational policies outright rather than trying to reform or modify them in the name

of greater inclusivity. More to the point, Schwarz starkly defended the necessity of

exams as such; he wrote "one does not fight [American technical dominance] by

letting French scientific research fall to the level of an underdeveloped country."316

The excellence of the system, per Schwarz, still necessitated a hierarchy of difficult

exams that weeded out less qualified candidates.

To Gorz, not only was Schwarz incapable of seeing beyond the existing

system of which he was an elite representative, he (Schwarz) failed to ask the key

York: Penguin Books, 2005), esp. 390-421.

314
Michel Bosquet, "La France malade du bac," 19.
3,5
Ibid., 21.
316
Laurent Schwarz, "Les Vrais Reactionnaires de l'universite," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 November
1967, 32.
176
question: if many students failed the bac or, having passed it, proved to be poor
17
students in their university studies, how could that pattern be reversed? Gorz cited

the overarching tendency of French education to bombard students with facts to be

memorized, rather than exercises that encouraged independent thought, as well as the

notorious inaccessibility of French university professors, for rendering most students

lost and alone in a hostile system and damned most to failure.318 Per Gorz, the

demographic expansion of the French educational system in the 1960s should be an

opportunity to remake the system itself, not to limit it to the children of existing

elites.

This debate is most interesting for two things: first, it introduced Gorz's

concern with education and its complicity with forms of social hierarchy. This was a

theme he would return to repeatedly in his work of the 1970s and beyond. Second, it

was one of the relatively few places in which Gorz addressed his own lack of

academic credentials. He wrote:

"I have no quality to respond to you except that of citizen; I have no

diplomas but the bac (classic) [i.e. Gorz's license in chemistry, equivalent to
a B.A.] and the title of engineer; 1 am neither a student nor a parent of a
student; my status as a journalist does not serve me here because your theses
in Le Nouvel Observateur have more partisans than adversaries.
However, I do not regard this absence of titles as a handicap. In the
same way that they say that war is too important to be left to soldiers,
education is too important to be left to academics of the highest level.
According to whether you opt for an education which forms elites or, instead,
forms people capable of bettering themselves (s 'epanouir), you opt for one
kind of society or another."319

317
Michel Bosquet, "Reponse a Laurent Schwarz," 27.
315
Ibid., 2 7 - 2 8 .
319
Ibid., 26.
177
Clearly, despite his sensitivity to his own lack of an academic background, Gorz was

not intimidated by the prospect of trading words with a mandarin like Schwarz.

That being noted, Gorz still chose to bring in academic support for his anti-

examination stance. The last major article on education preceding the explosion of

May of '68 was a roundtable hosted by Gorz on the question of whether or not exams

could be eliminated entirely. The question was a bit of a straw man, since the

roundtable's members were all openly critical of the examination system as it existed;

the Belgian Minister - Secretary of Education, Michel Toussaint, and two French

professors, Francois Bresson and Maurice Duverger, all declared their hostility to the

French system's emphasis on rote memorization and the "magisterial" (magistral)

stance of professors in France vis-a-vis their students.320

The practical issues were evident to all of the participants: the French

examination system rewarded the memorization of information to be used in an exam,

then discarded by the student, "to retain material for a limited time, not to assimilate,

to know it," in Toussaint's words.321 French students were cut off from their teachers

and had no redress if they were unable to keep up with the brutal pace of the exams or

the vast quantity of the material to be mastered. In short, the exams failed to educate

students, but instead merely conditioned them to obey directives and process, then

forget material as rapidly as possible.

Toussaint's proposed solution, one Gorz was entirely amenable to, was an

320
Michel Bosquet, "Faut-il supprimer les examens?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 January 1968, 20 -
22.
321
Ibid., 20.
178
ongoing system of evaluations, a "balance sheet" (bilari) that would more accurately

assess the student's understanding of material. Gorz repeatedly insisted that

education had to emphasize the "expansion (epanouissement) of creative faculties" as

its primary goal, the creation of a rounded individual with both a broad foundation of

knowledge and an agile intellect, in breaking with the existing system's focus on

obedience and hierarchy. The important points to emphasize here are that, first, Gorz

had no trouble finding highly-placed academics sympathetic to his positions, and

second, that he was a partisan of a radically different concept of education than

existed in France at the time.

By issue 151, only three years after its inception, Le Nouvel Observateur

advertised that it was the "already the French weekly journal most frequently cited

abroad, the most influential among intellectuals and technical workers, the best

informed of journals of opinion and the most engaged of organs of information."

Among other features it promised for the future, it guaranteed "new collaborations

carried out by the most prestigious personalities in all disciplines," all in part to

justify the new price of 2.5 Francs per issue, up from 2.322 While the journal did not

supply an abundance of empirical data to support its claims, it had still clearly

succeeded in becoming one of the leading leftist news magazines in France in a

remarkably short period of time. Along with further articles by its founders and

collaborators, "prestigious personalities" did indeed appear quite frequently by 1967,

including both Sartre and Beauvoir, the normalien insurgent Regis Debray, and the

322
Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 October 1967, 12.
179
newly-famous Michel Foucault.323

Thus, the weekly Parisian news magazine Gorz had co-founded with two

friends and colleagues a few years earlier rapidly became one of the major leftist

journals in France. His articles reached thousands of readers every week and in his

capacity as a journalist he made the acquaintance of state, union, and academic

leaders from all over western Europe. By 1965 he was being invited to speak at

conferences in France and abroad, joining a labor movement strategy workshop in

Sweden in 1965, a colloquium organized by the Gramsci Institute later that year, and

a major lecture series in Mexico City in 1966.324

Gorz also began a more in-depth consideration of American culture. Many of

his early articles fit neatly into a typical European leftist anti-Americanism, but a

transformation occurred in his attitudes toward America from the mid-1960s to the

early 1970s.325 In 1964, Dorine and Gorz took a trip to New York City, joining the

tradition of pilgrimage that most of the other Sartrians had taken at some point to

323
See Jean-Paul Sartre, "II n'y a plus de dialogue," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 April 1965, 2 - 3 , Jean-
Paul Sartre, "Refusons le chantage," Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 June 1965, 1 0 - 1 1 , Jean-Paul Sartre,
"Achever la gauche, ou la guerir," Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 June 1965, 1 0 - 1 1 , Simone de
Beauvoir, "lis n'etaient pas des laches," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 April 1966, 1 4 - 1 7 , Jean-Paul
Sartre, "Sartre a de Gaulle," Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 April 1967, 5 - 7 , Michel Foucault, "Les Mots
et les images," Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 October 1967, 4 9 - 5 1 , Francois Maspero, "Regis Debray:
je reviens de Bolivie," Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 June 1967, 22 - 24, Regis Debray, "Ce que je
demande
324
a mes amis."
See below.
325
On European leftist anti-Americanism, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect, 187 - 204. A few examples
of Gorz's anti-American articles include Michel Bosquet, "Une Europe Americaine," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 26 November 1964, 6 - 7 , Michel Bosquet, "Les Americains lachent Tschombe," Le
Nouvel Observateur, 22 March 1967, 1 8 - 1 9 , Michel Bosquet, "Un Enjeu de trente milliards des
Dollars," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 March 1967, 1 8 - 1 9 .
180
witness the evil empire of capitalism in person. Dorine and Gorz were not

impressed. "We hated American civilization with its wastes, its smog, its fries in

ketchup with Coca-Cola, the brutality of the infernal cadences of its urban life..."327

Nevertheless, the trip was the first of several for Dorine and Gorz to North America,

and their attitudes changed somewhat as the student and countercultural movement of

the late 1960s began to blossom.328

Difficult Socialism

In 1966, Gorz participated in the series of lectures at the Escuela Nacional de

Ciencias Politicas y Sociales de Mexico {National University of Political and Social

Sciences of Mexico), where he made the acquaintance of Herbert Marcuse, one of the

other speakers. There, he spoke extensively on the changing face of capitalism and

the concomitant innovations that were necessary in the labor movement. His lectures,

along with several other talks and articles, were swiftly compiled and published as Le

Socialisme Difficile. Here, Gorz returned to his considerations of neocapitalism and

of consumer society, extending his earlier arguments and weighing the possible role

that new categories of political actors, in particular white-collar workers, technicians,

and increasingly radicalized students, might play in the socialist movement.

326
The most memorable of which was, of course, Beauvoir's trip in the immediate aftermath of World
War II, which she described in her Amerique au Jour le Jour {America Day to Day.)
327
Andre Gorz, Lettre a £>., 61 - 62.
328
See in particular the series of vignettes Gorz published in Le Nouvel Observateur titled "La
Nouvelle Revolution Americaine a commence" ("A New American Revolution Has Begun"),
considered in Chapter 4.
181
 He began with another analysis of neocapitalism and of its attendant

technocratic apparatus. Proponents of this system, such as the political theorist

Seymour Lipset, argued that the technocratic state, answerable in some ways to

representative institutions but also insulated from them, was preferable to mass-

democracy since it freed the individual to pursue his or her own goals in leisure rather

than concerning them with the quotidian demands of government. Here, individuals

could define for themselves local, limited goals and enjoy the fruits of the opulent

society. Decisions made by highly-trained technocrats were also more efficient and

rational, a counterbalance to the possibility of the "tyranny of the majority" that had

worried theorists of democracy since the eighteenth century.

Not surprisingly, Gorz was not amenable to any of these arguments. He cited

his fellow speaker Marcuse's demonstration, in The One-Dimensional Man, that the

pseudo-liberation of the individual within consumer society did not and could not

result in any kind of collective liberation, but instead trapped him or her in a pattern

of dependence on possessions as a source of identity. Furthermore, the logic of

capitalism had nothing to do with the qualities that enriched life itself: "political

economy in general.. .and capitalist logic in particular, which is the micro-economic

search for maximum efficiency, are incapable, on the basis of their own rationality, to

put an end to the reign of scarcity... use value, free time, the development of human

faculties, cultural creation, the finality of existence, the richness of rapports between

Andre Gorz, Le Socialisme Difficile (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 1 4 - 1 5 .

182
humans are extra-economic categories."

The problem with the European labor movement was, in part, the fact that its

continued to struggle for incremental improvements in its lot without having a

broader ideological program or vision of where the struggle might lead to. "The

European labor movement battles against the effects of capitalist development, but

has not elevated the level of the struggle to the demand for a different type of

development." Likewise, even though the official rhetoric of the European

communist parties and their allies retained its revolutionary character, there was no

link between ameliorated working and living conditions and "revolution" in so many

words: "it is not evident that the need to live better requires a revolutionary upset."331

While Gorz was not usually given to prophetic statements, nor claims as to

apocalyptic conjunctures in the labor struggle, he did note that even as its old

techniques lacked a larger synthetic vision of change, the labor movement's existing

strategies were under increasing attack by the state and the patronat. The need for a

new approach was even more pressing as the momentum of the postwar labor

movement stalled and the promise of further gains stagnated. That said, Gorz

admitted that "it is evidently impossible to find to this question (of how to pursue new

goals within the labor movement) an empirical response. The response can only be

found in action: in theoretical deepening, then in practical verification by the

"Ibid., 1 6 - 1 7 .
'ibid., 21.
183
struggle." This was, unfortunately, a common refrain among the Sartrians at the

time. Theory was supposed to arrive at new practical goals, but it usually just led to

more theory.

What was genuinely innovative in Gorz's 1966 lectures were Gorz's

considerations of new forms of labor and their role in leftist politics. Even as he

urged the labor movement to adopt what were really cultural and ideological goals

alongside their traditional demands for structural changes, Gorz called attention to the

role to be played by relatively skilled, higher-paid workers, many of whom were

keenly resentful of their condition in the workplace, what he called "the specific

intolerability of the working condition."333 The most important contradiction present

in the working lives of skilled workers, especially technicians, was between "passive

obedience and technical initiative," that is to say, between the "despotic" hierarchy of

the workplace that nevertheless required the creativity and intelligence of the skilled

work to be invested in goals outside of his or her control.

These local conditions spoke to what was really a global problem: workers

were increasingly called on to exercise their intellect in the workplace, as technical

demands grew. At the same time, in an environment of constant precariousness,

workers knew themselves to have no control over the social context of work itself.

Even in Sweden, with the nominal "worker's party" in control of the government, the

actual experience of workers was the same: management assigned tasks and

Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 28.
184
companies generated profit for shareholders. The point was that as long as the

labor movement failed to address the need for control of the entire social context of

work, struggles for increased wages amounted to nothing.

Gorz was not alone in considering the issue of where educated technical

workers fit in within theories of class composition and class-based politics. The

sociologist Serge Mallet had introduced this problematic within leftist discourse all

across western Europe with his The New Working Class of 1963.335 Mallet was a bit

more sanguine than Gorz about the prospect of rallying technicians to socialism - like

Gorz, he noted that there was a major gap between the creativity and control

technicians exercised in the workplace in their limited spheres of production and their

total lack of control in the larger political context of factory organization. Unlike

Gorz, Mallet was optimistic that this contradiction would lend itself to socialist

politics; Gorz remained more cautious.336

For both technical and "traditional" workers, Gorz insisted that the most

important issue remained a kind of cultural and intellectual intervention. Through

incrementally-increased demands on management, the labor movement could

inculcate what amounted to a revolutionary spirit among the workers, one that

See Jonas Pontusson, "Sweden: After the Golden Age," in Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller,
Mapping the West European Left, 23 - 54.
335
Mallet had also worked at France Observateur, which he left when it was re-launched as Le Nouvel
Observateur. Gorz performed the same function within Le Nouvel Observateur as had Mallet at
France Observateur: the hybrid philosopher -journalist, making Mallet somewhat redundant to the
new journal. That being noted, Mallet admired Gorz personally. See Jean Daniel, LEre des ruptures,
20-21.
336
Serge Mallet, The New Working Class, trans. Andree and Bob Shepherd (Nottingham: Bertrand
Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books, 1975). See also Steve Wright, Storming Heaven:
Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 101 —
102.
185
demanded control over the total life experience of each, rather than simply greater

access to consumer goods, "worker's control over the technical division of work

leads inexorably to worker control over the firm, to the very organization of the

branch, that is to say to the question of the very social division of labor." Gorz did

not actually use the phrase "autogestion" in this lecture, but that was precisely what

he was talking about.

Gorz was increasingly sensitive to the kinds of arguments Marcuse had

advanced in his One-Dimensional Man; in particular, Gorz now recognized in

consumer culture one of the most insidious ploys capitalism had yet devised to re-

absorb concessions won by the labor movement. Citing Mills's White Collars once

again, Gorz argued that consumerism operated as a phony panacea for "mutilated"

workers, a source of material comforts that temporarily and incompletely comforted

workers who felt their own lack of control in their work and their lives every day.

This led the labor movement to seek higher wages in the name of greater access to

consumer comforts, a tactic which, lacking in the larger perspective outlined above,

was easily managed and overtaken by capital.

Again, emptied of control over the conditions of their own lives, workers

experienced so-called democracy as a "farce." "If we define liberty as the power of

social individuals over the social conditions of their existence, then capitalist

Andre Gorz, Le Socialisme Difficile, 35.

Ibid., 3 6 - 3 7 .
186
democracy must appear to us empty of content." In fact, representative

democracies held genuinely democratic sentiments in check by the substitution of

political parties for what might instead be real representatives of the demands made

by social actors (in this case, workers who recognized the need for changed social

conditions.) In lieu of "society," a group of individuals engaged in debate over the

norms and structures that governed them, the nominally-democratic state was in fact

colonized by parties that offered no substantively different standpoints.

Gorz's first lecture in Mexico was essentially polemical rather than analytical,

emphasizing the farcical nature of the modern, technocratic, bureaucratic,

neocapitalist democracy and reiterating the point that workers were and always would

be alienated within capitalism. It should be emphasized that Gorz's strident rejection

of democratic government as it was then constituted in Europe and North America

was a common theme among the Sartrians, one that makes a great deal of sense given

the abysmal performance of the Fourth Republic's government and the despair felt by

many on the left in the face of the Algerian War and De Gaulle's return to power.

The Fifth Republic was much more efficient than its anemic predecessor, but it was

also the brainchild of a popular demagogue.340

Thus, from the perspective of the Sartrians, the importance of the cultural

dimension of leftist militancy: only among radicals was there a desire for and a spirit

of "genuine" democracy. A year earlier, speaking at a colloquium organized by the

339
Ibid., 39.
340
This is one of the central arguments of Serge Bernstein, The Republic ofDe Gaulle. See also
Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 396 - 422.
187
Gramsci Institute in 1965, Gorz addressed the increase in student militancy and the

possibilities of an alliance between radical students and workers. Central to his

analysis were the contradictions within the matrix of capitalism and the state that had

both inadvertently encouraged student militancy and provided possible avenues for

collective action. This analysis returned to two of Gorz's main arguments of the

1960s: the necessity of embracing alternative forms of rationality than that of

economic reason and the importance of "seizing" concessions rather than having

them handed down from above.

Per Gorz, capitalism had engendered various problems within its own

educational system since 1945. Politicians and the patronat alike recognized the

necessity of advanced education for both competent workers and competitive

industry, but individual capitalists were critical of the amount of taxes earmarked for

education. For their part, educated workers increasingly resented the contrast

between the breadth of their knowledge from the schools and universities and the

harsh forms of discipline within the workplace, as well as the unimaginative and

literal goals of the companies they worked for (i.e. profit maximization.) The skilled

worker was expected to apply creative intelligence in designing products and

increasing efficiency, but was still monitored by petty management in a prison-like

system of surveillance.341

Capitalists and politicians on the right were left with a conundrum: they

recognized the need for skilled workers but there was no way to create them that

341
Ibid., 4 7 - 4 8 .
188
followed the precepts of their own ideology of favoring the already-privileged and

allowing market forces to solve all problems. "For the most part, the short-term

interests of the capitalist sector find themselves in contradiction with its interests in

the long term. The problem of financing, in the first place, is strictly speaking

unsolvable outside of a program that undermines the "spontaneous" tendencies of

private accumulation."342 The Fouchet reform in French education in 1966

consisted of an attempt to rationalize the French school system, particularly in terms

of the creation of colleges d'enseignement secondaire meant to bridge the gap

between traditional primary and secondary schools. More importantly from the

perspective of Gorz, the Fouchet reform insisted on specialized tracks that focused on

preparatory teaching for specific disciplines and allowed very little crossover in

instruction.343 Students were increasingly to be directed at vocations from an early

age and to receive training appropriate to those tasks; the idea of a well-rounded

education was deemed archaic.

Gorz was extremely hostile to the program of the Fouchet reform in its

explicit demand for more technical education for the sake of future skilled workers

and its neglect of the humanities. Gorz saw in the plan's priorities an outright attack

on the values inspiring the emerging student movement. He believed that the

proponents of the plan were concerned with the danger of having too many educated

students, particularly ones whose background in philosophy, literature, and history

342
Ibid., 50.
343
See Corbett Moon Staff and Anne Corbett, Education in France (New York: Routledge, 1996), 255.
189
might cause them to apprehend the contradictions within European capitalism and to

take action against the system as a whole. The Fouchet's program of specialization

was designed to both limit the number of potential revolutionaries among the youth

and to funnel more intelligent young people toward specialized, limited, and easily-

managed job positions within private industry and the state.

According to Gorz, the specifics of the program, in particular its insistence on

specialization, was fundamentally an ideological position, not a practical or structural

one: "it is not true that modern technology requires specialists: it requires on the

contrary a polyvalent educational formation, consisting, not in the acquisition of a

fragmented knowledge (savoirparcellaire)...but in the initiation - more exactly: in

the faculty of self-initiation - in methods of research and of scientific and technical

invention."344 Attempts to contain students within a specific discipline without

exposing them to dangerous thoughts were doomed: "past a certain level of

formation, it is impossible to impose limits on the need for autonomy: one cannot

teach knowledge at the same time as ignorance without the taught becoming aware of

the mutilation that has been imposed on them."345

Once in the workplace, the skilled worker, trained by the system he or she is

supposed to serve, was forced to confront his or her mastery of the techniques of

production in contrast with the truncation of his or her possibilities of self-control and

choice. That contradiction, an updated and nuanced version of the position of the

344
Andre Gorz, Le Socialisme Difficile, 59.
345
Ibid., 61.
190
worker in the factory described by Marx over a hundred years earlier, had to be

highlighted and made explicit by leftist theory: "This is to say all the importance of

the political and cultural work of the party of the working class in making this

contradiction explicit and for joining to the working class the neo-proletariat of

scientific and technical workers, (and) students and teachers."346

This quote marks the emergence of the term "neo-proletariat" in Gorz's

writing, a term that was to grow in importance over the next two decades as he

watched the disintegration of the actual proletariat as the vessel of revolutionary

hope. Clearly, he was already aware of the fact that the most promising sites of

radical contestation against the capitalist system were happening in areas that

traditional Marxism dismissed as "bourgeois" (or perhaps just as part of the "labor

aristocracy"): college students and elite, skilled workers. Gorz wrote in hopes of a

synthesis of students, skilled workers, and the traditional working class, not just

"alliances." Quoting Perry Anderson, who was writing for New Left Review, Gorz

insisted that the critique of capitalism itself could create that synthesis, but only if the

constituent struggles and issues of students, workers, and intellectuals were

articulated as part of one larger project.

The most important article in Le Socialisme Difficile was the eponymous first

essay that began the second section of the volume. It was another of the lectures

Gorz had given at the conference at the National School of Political and Social

Science in Mexico in February 1966. It remains an invaluable document describing

346
Ibid., 66.
191
the predicament facing leftists in the late 1960s, analyzed with Gorz's characteristic

perspicacity. In it, Gorz tried to evaluate the meaning of the Soviet Union's history

vis-a-vis the theory of communism and to establish whether anti-colonial struggles

might serve as a model for a new revolutionary tactics within the advanced industrial

nations.

Gorz began with Marx. Marx had posited three conditions for the possibility

of communism: lasting victory over scarcity, the polyvalence of skills and abilities

among workers, and the end of work as an imposed condition brought about by

exterior conditions.347 The absence of the first condition, the end of scarcity, had

fatally undermined the Soviet experiment in communism, forcing it to focus social

energy on the creation of the material bases of a possible future, not in attempting to

make communism a lived reality in the present. For this reason, among others, Gorz

argued that the theory of communism, its very possibility, could not be evaluated in

terms of Soviet history: local conditions had made Soviet communism impossible,

and the inertia of the decisions made following the Bolshevik revolution carried on to

the present.348 It is clear that Gorz's basic attitude toward Soviet history had not

changed since La Morale de I 'histoire six years earlier.

The issue at hand to Gorz's contemporary partisans of leftist theory was more

pressing than the applicability of Soviet history to their conditions, however.

Seriality still haunted the theory of direct democracy. Any small, directly-democratic

347
Ibid., 115-116.
348
Ibid., 117-118.
192
group, like the actual Russian Soviets in the immediate period after 1917, necessarily

lost self-control once their actions had to be coordinated on a larger scale. Thus,

Gorz warned "In my opinion, we must not maintain illusions over the possibility of

safeguarding the sovereignty and democracy of producers grouped in the phase of the

construction of the bases of socialism. We must instead recognize the dialectical

necessity of centralization; and it is only in recognizing this necessity that we can,

from the beginning, put in place institutional safeguards which limit and control the

processes of centralization and which protect the revolution against bureaucratism,

terror and despotism."349

Referring to historical socialism in the USSR, Gorz noted that "The society of

socialist accumulation thus reproduces the divorce between the concrete individual

and the social individual, between the individual interest and the general interest. But

it sought to interiorize this divorce in soliciting the individual to suppress himself, in

the general interest, his individual needs."350 In capitalism, of course, the same thing

happened, but it was imposed not by the demands of the state but by class divisions.

Meanwhile, the "real existing" socialist states had inherited the ethic that had arisen

during the period of radical scarcity, an ethic that totally precluded the question of

"collective needs of the workers." There was, in short, neither the institutions nor the

recognized ethical need to address the individual experience within the USSR of the

Ibid., 119-120.
Ibid., 120.
193
1960s."1

This absence of reflexivity within the Russian Communist Party had led to a

completely skewed set of priorities; instead of advancing "an innovation qualitatively

superior compared to the capitalist model," the USSR slavishly and clumsily tried to

catch up with the material comfort of the West, something that it could not

accomplish through five-year plans and production quotas dictated from on high.352

There was no avant-garde distinct from the party in Soviet Russia, and thus (with the

"ban on factionalism" going all the way back to the tenth Party Congress) no

discursive space for debate.353 More to the point, the cultural implications of

communism, of the greater efficiency in shared facilities of work, transport, and life

over the narrowly individualized and isolating lifestyle of the capitalist west, were all

but absence in the nominally-communist nations.354

Meanwhile, in the west, workers were so powerless in the workplace and felt

so unimportant vis-a-vis the (nominally democratic) state that they sought refuge in

the private sphere of consumerism. In a prophetic passage, Gorz argued that "A

society which introduces the week of 32 or 24 hours without altering the rapports of

production and of work, and of which the individuals, after their work, disperse to

their suburbs to watch television, cultivate their garden, play bridge or come together

in groups of "hooligans" or in associations of collectors without advancing toward a

351
Ibid., 123-124.
352
Ibid., 126.
353
See Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46 - 47.
354
Andre Gorz, he Socialisme Difficile, 130.
194
superior form of civilization, (would) simply produce a larger level of the sub-

proletarian civilization of the great American cities."355 This was precisely the

position that Gorz would refine in his work of the 1980s, after he had abandoned the

hope for a full-scale revolution in the Marxist sense. As of 1966, however, Gorz still

rejected the idea that life should be divided between the "free" time of leisure and the

unfree time of work. In this bifurcation, that of consumer society, leisure would

always be the lesser reflection of work, existing in the spaces between work's

obligations and enthralled to the demands made on the worker's time made by

management. As a result, "there cannot be emancipation of the social individual in

their free time but if there is the emancipation of the principle social activity:

work."" 0 This was impossible in both the western world of consumer society and in

the Soviet "socialism of shortage."357

Gorz went on to consider the potential role of communist parties in a potential

new form of socialist movement. Against the Leninist model of the vanguard party,

Gorz insisted that it was the confluence of direction and administration in the Soviet

Union that fatally crippled the democratic ideal that should be central to socialism. In

other words, the party could direct or it could administer government, but by banning

"factionalism," it in fact banned political discussion. The pitiful inefficiency and

corruption of the Soviet government was the result of this truncation of political life,

in which the connections between economic and social reality on the one hand and

355
Ibid., 134.
355
Ibid., 135.
357
Ibid., 136.
195
state administration on the other were hobbled by the ideological apparatus of the

party.

The communist party could play a useful role, both in the east and potentially

in the west, but only if it was but one autonomous body among others. "This

autonomous presence of the party, directive but not directly directing (directrice mais

non pas directement dirigeante), becomes all the more necessary as the power of

decision-making tends to decentralize and the (relevant) data concerning problems

tends to become more technical." In other words, the Soviet model of decisions

handed down from on-high, informed more by an ossified ideological apparatus and

bureaucratic inertia than on the apprehension of reality, was even more flawed as

technology advanced.358

Thanks to the advance of technology and its promise of even greater

abundance and to political events in the developing world, the socialists of the west

had at least new models for the development of their own societies and governments.

"For the majority of the socialist countries, the alternative was not between a process

of socialistic and authoritarian accumulation, and a process of capitalistic and

democratic accumulation; the alternative was, and is again for two-thirds of

humanity, between reactionary dictatorship, without useful industrial development, of

the Guatemalan, Brazilian, Turkish or South Korean type, and the popular and
"ICQ
progressive dictatorship of the Cuban, Chinese, or North-Vietnamese type." That

358
Ibid., 150.
359
Ibid., 152.
196
was the reality of Gorz's contemporary political world, and the Soviet model was thus

all but useless in determining paths of progress for the affluent nations of the West.

This latter point begs analysis. Gorz's understanding of and positions

regarding the relationship between the advanced industrial nations and the so-called

Third World were complex and are difficult to summarize. While he was always

sensitive to the plight of the poor in the Third World, and while he interrogated the

implications of the anti-colonial movements and revolutionary uprisings of the

postwar period, he remained interested primarily in what the implications of Third

World political economy were for the First World. In other words, he was always

focused on alternatives to capitalism in Europe and, to a lesser extend, the United

States, and he rarely focused on events and changes in the Third World for their own

sake. This was true throughout his life; some of his final observations in the early

2000s had to do with the likelihood of alternative paths of development in places like

Brazil that might be usable by Europeans.

That being noted, Gorz was still a keen observer and analyst of the

relationships between state policy and capitalist development in the First World and

events and changes in the Third. In his third and final lecture at the 1966 conference

at the National School of Political and Social Science in Mexico City, Gorz defended

a "shocking" thesis regarding colonialism: "Colonialism is not an external practice of

monopoly capitalism. It is foremost an internal practice. Its victims are not firstly

the exploited, oppressed, dismembered nations. They are foremost populations which

360
See Andre Gorz, Ecologica (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2008), 123 - 159.
197
live in the metropoles, in the dominant nations." He argued that the exploitation of

the workers of the Third World served to undermine the efficacy of the labor

movement in the First. Moreover, the colonial model of exploitation and extraction

was applicable within the nations of the First World in terms of the use of outlying

regions by the centers of urban power.

Like the other Sartrians, Gorz was deeply invested in one of the great hopes of

the New Left as a movement: that of the possible alliance between the working class

and emerging counterculture in the First World and the oppressed and exploited

masses in the Third, culminating in the "unity of the global revolutionary

"iff)

movement." Gorz's claimed, however, that the "global" had to include regional

divisions within the advanced nations; "global" leftist theory should not be just

international or transnational in its spatial conception, but regional and local. Not

surprisingly, He was particularly sensitive to the plight of workers in peripheral

regions in France.

Using both US economic colonialism in Latin America and patterns in French

regional development, Gorz demonstrated that there were close parallels between

"actual" colonialism and the exploitation of underdeveloped and poor regions within

advanced nations. In the case of French regions like Vosges and the Choletais,

production of manufactured goods was "for a global market, anarchic and

1
Andre Gorz, Le Socialisme Difficile, 155.
2
Ibid., 156-157, 160.
198
speculative, and not to address regional and national needs." Workers in these

regions experienced exploitation as a lived reality, laboring for wages below

standards elsewhere and condemned to live in a region deliberately and

systematically ignored by the state. At the same time, management could always

move their jobs to even more benighted regions, undermining their bargaining power.

Gorz was aware of the vulnerability of this critique, that he remained focused

on first-world workers who, after all, enjoyed a standard of living dramatically better

than that of their third-world counterparts. His rejoinder was to warn against the

construction of absolute standards of "needs" in the global context. It was certainly

true, for instance, that poor workers from the most far-flung regions of France were

still better-off than their counterparts in Guatemala or Pakistan, but the distance

between their lives and absolute deprivation was less important than the unjust

distribution of social wealth, a phenomenon with exact parallels in the Third World.

"It does not involve therefore critiquing "opulent" consumer goods from a moral or

moralizing point of view...there would be nothing condemnable in these luxurious

frivolities if, at the same time, fundamental needs were already satisfied everywhere,

and if individuals were free to work to acquire these gadgets or (to choose to) ignore

them and work less. But this isn't the case."364 Just as he had insisted that a truly

synthetic socialist movement would have to bind together disparate categories

(workers, students, etc.) in light of the larger struggle, he called for a global

Ibid., 163.
Ibid., 165.
199
perspective of labor exploitation that recognized the parallels between colonized

nations and colonized regions.

The irony is, of course, that Gorz's attempt to reconsider the relationships

between intra-national regions led him away from a sustained consideration of

international colonialism itself. I have repeatedly argued that the years Gorz had

spent as a journalist made him especially well suited, among his fellow intellectuals,

to analyze the state of leftist politics and the labor movement in France. He struggled

to widen his perspective beyond Europe, however - even when he addressed actual,

political colonialism directly, he always found a way to bring the discussion back to

the state of labor and capital in western Europe. In the same manner that he had

centered his discussion of the Sino - Soviet split on its strategic and theoretical

implications for French Marxists, French and American colonialism were for him

primarily models of the exploitation of benighted regions within France.365

Gorz participated in a series of conferences in Sweden in 1966. Labor

organizers and theorists from western Europe met there to discuss strategy against the

various challenges and impasses the European labor movement as a whole faced by

the late 1960s, not least of which was the question of "revolution" against the

Despite Lodziak's and Tatman's defense of Gorz in their work, I think it is clear that the scope of
his analysis was always Western Europe and, to an extent, the United States. See Conrad Lodziak and
Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: a Critical Introduction, 109 - 111. In his later work, Gorz discussed the
"South-Africanization" of society, i.e., a division between the few privileged people with stable, full-
time employment and the mass of semi-employed with no prospects, and he also developed a sustained
interest in the economy and society of Brazil. In both cases, however, he was still using non-European
developments as a reference for issues within Europe.
366
For background on Swedish social democracy, see Jonas Pontusson, "Sweden: After the Golden
Age," in Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds., Mapping the West European Left (London: Verso,
1994), 2 3 - 5 3 .
200
backdrop of ongoing economic growth. The presentations Gorz gave at the

conference are striking for their virulence and vitriol and, so far as I know, are the

only place in his writing in which he openly endorses some kind of revolutionary

violence.367

In his presentation "For a Socialist Strategy of Reforms," Gorz immediately

addressed the question of armed insurrection, noting that the revolutionary process

could only be "more or less" violent since it involved a fundamental restructuring of

social and political institutions in some kind of upheaval. "(The elimination of

capitalism).. .will result only from a conscious and long-term action of which the

beginning could be a coherent broadening of reforms, but of which the sequence can

only be a succession of advances of force, more or less violent, sometimes won,

sometimes lost, and of which the ensemble will form and organize the will and the

socialist conscience of the working classes."

The real point of Gorz's talk was clarifying the idea of revolutionary reform,

which was vulnerable to critique by many of his fellow Marxists who vilified any

theory that might have to do with refornus/w. Revolutionary reform (what he would

later call the pursuit of "mediations" between the present and the socialist future) did

not mean a gradual process moving toward socialism. Instead, each reform was to

serve as an example and as a teaching tool that would further radicalize the movement

and attract new groups to its cause. In wresting concessions from the patronat, each

367
Andre Gorz, Reforme et Revolution (Editions du Seuil, 1969), 205 - 248.
368
Ibid., 206. Italics in original.
201
"reform" would in fact be a demonstration of the viability of worker control, and

back-sliding would be prevented by the intransigence of the movement. In other

words, each reform would embody a post-capitalist logic of autogestion.

Hence the difference between social democracy and socialism. The former

sought to preserve but improve the system, the latter envisaged a new system

altogether. The socialist movement had to be one of confrontation with capital, not

one that sought to negotiate limited pockets of non-capitalist logic, because the

binding principle of the movement was the will to remake the very nature of society.

That will was embedded in the nature of the movement itself. Each revolutionary

reform had to demonstrate not only the viability of socialism, but would expose the

points of capitalist resistance that should be targeted and dismantled in turn.

Gorz insisted that his idea of revolutionary reform was not just another

version of the revolutionary waiting game. The period of transition to socialism

would have to be quite short, he claimed, lest it be once again overtaken by capitalism

and either destroyed by the forces of reaction or simply reincorporated into a

capitalist framework. Likewise, there was no way around the material difficulties of

the period of transition. Standards of living would drop for a time, but the point of

socialism was, once again, not to improve standards of living in the short term, but to

create an entirely new and better system in which standards of life could improve for

everyone in the medium and long-term.369

Gorz used Sweden as an example of the pitfalls of mere social democracy.

369
Ibid., 226-227.
202
Sweden's extensive welfare state and its unique collaborative business management

system, which included workers in official decision-making roles, primarily served to

undermine the efficacy of Swedish capitalist development while failing to bring about

the kind of larger social and cultural changes Gorz associated with socialism. He

wrote "the development of social services and equipment, financed by direct

taxation... resulted in a serious crisis of the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation.

On the other hand, this crisis.. .did nothing to bring about social wealth: the contrary,

there is a sharp crisis of housing and urbanism, a lack of teaching and medical

personnel, an accelerated exodus from the country to the cities, etc."370

Finally, Gorz spoke to the role of the revolutionary party and the history of the

Soviet Union as a potential model for revolution in other European states. Following

Sartre, Gorz noted that the conditions facing the Bolsheviks, of industrial

backwardness and civil war, were such that the democratic model of socialist

organization was simply not possible. In his contemporary Europe, however, Gorz

hoped that a new revolutionary party could lead a revolutionary socialist movement

"from within" without lapsing into the stultifying bureaucratic oppression as it had in

the USSR.371

Gorz's talk at the labor conference was extremely unusual. Nowhere else did

he speak directly to the violence inherent in revolution, nor to the necessity of making

sacrifices in standards of living in the name of the transition to socialism - elsewhere

0
Ibid., 2 2 0 - 2 2 1 .
'ibid., 246-247.
203
he would write of "living differently but better." Likewise, in his vocal contempt for

social democracy as a false alternative to capitalism, Gorz was clearly playing to his

audience, for whom reformism was a sin darker than that of simply being a capitalist.

There was in Gorz's talk a rhetorical hyperbolism predicated on the fear that reforms,

even the nominally revolutionary reforms that he advocated, would amount to a kind

of collaboration with capital. Or, at least, Gorz was clearly concerned that his fellow

activists would accuse him of collaboration, and he embarked on a much more

militant description of his politics than usual.

Gorz was not simply pandering to the radical sensibilities of his colleagues,

however. He was sincerely attempting to come to terms with the problem of

revolutionary theory in a non-revolutionary political and social setting. "There is no,

there can be no "gradual and unnoticeable passage" from capitalism to socialism.

The economic and political power of the bourgeoisie will not be destroyed by a slow

and halting process, nor by a succession of partial reforms which each seem safe and

acceptable for capitalism."372 The only hope was to use reforms as sites of cultural

and political education, to explicitly tie the demands for worker's management to a

larger program that broke with the logic of the system as a whole. Then, during a

point of crisis, there would at least be the possibility that a radicalized working class

(or a portion thereof) could seize political power.

This was the heart of Gorz's political vision as of the late 1960s. In turn,

central to it was Gorz's conviction that only a consciously-chosen political project of

372
Ibid., 206.
204
socialism could contend with capitalism's seductive capacity. Gorz's vision of a

coalition of the disaffected within capitalism, both nationally and internationally, was

one he knew was only viable if leftists could demonstrate the systemic character of

capitalist oppression, of the links between colonialism, war, party politics, and the

profit motive. Gorz believed that capitalism was a totality, something that could only

be targeted as a whole, but he was keenly aware of the myriad of difficulties in

articulating that fact.

The 1960s: Conclusion

The mid-1960s saw Gorz emerge as an important radical thinker and public

intellectual, one closely aligned with Sartre and his circle but distinct from him (and

them) as well. In his journalism, his book-length analyses and his public speaking,

Gorz sought to demonstrate that the hope for a socialist transformation of France was

valid, but only if disparate groups of disaffected individuals could be led to recognize

the systemic character of capitalism and to united against the economic, political and

social matrix of capitalism. It was capitalism that condemned outlying regions of

France to stagnation and neglect, just as it was capitalism that truncated educational

opportunities and undermined the breadth of university education. The very logic of

capitalism held the labor movement in check by substituting concessions that could

be controlled and managed by the patronat, higher wages, for those that were

antithetical to the system, namely autogestion. It was the threat of communism's

205
evident appeal to the oppressed of Third World nations, not the military threat of the

USSR, that led the United States to carry on its brutal and barbaric interventions

around the globe. All roads led to the pernicious system of capitalism, and Gorz

argued that it was the job of the intellectual to clarify that fact to as broad a cross-

section of society as possible.

What, then, made Gorz's thought distinct from the larger milieu of French

Marxism at the time? The most important factor in Gorz's political outlook was his

conviction that socialism was an aspiration, a project of social and political

transformation, not a finished goal to position on the other side of an imaginary

revolution. Gorz's concept of revolutionary reforms, of mediations that could work

toward a revolutionary transformation so long as they included a political dimension,

was an ingenuous intellectual attempt to conceive of a pragmatic revolutionary

politics in a relatively prosperous first-world nation. Gorz confronted the realities of

the French political landscape and insisted on the validity, within a Marxist

framework, of a program of radical reforms.

The politicization of a large section of the working class and the emergent

student movement made Gorz's ideas seem viable at the time. Today, it is difficult to

conclude that they were anything but an admirably level-headed variation on the

revolutionary wishful thinking so in vogue in France in the "red years" of the 1960s.

Yet contained in his thought of that period, Gorz was already working toward his

critique of economic reason, that form of logic that capitalism worked relentlessly to

substitute for ethics concerned with human dignity and justice in the spheres of both
206
public and private life. Gorz was keenly aware of the fact that consumerism was

meant to keep the capitalist system running, not to address the real needs of human

beings. Likewise, education was increasingly^focused on producing the requisite

technicians to service the machines and networks of industry, not on addressing the

philosophical question of what goals society ought to work toward.

In sum, Gorz's ideas of the mid-1960s were in keeping with the New Left

aspiration for a coalition of capitalism's enemies, including the traditional working

class, disaffected white-collar workers, students, and the victims of both political and

economic colonialisms. What differentiated him from his contemporaries, however,

was his diehard existentialist outlook, one that contrasts in some ways with that of

Sartre. In his Critique, Sartre himself seemed almost embarrassed with his former

focus on the atomized individual and went to tremendous rhetorical lengths to create

a new framework of collective action and collective freedom. Gorz was, however,

more Sartrian than Sartre. As we have seen, one of socialism's essential meanings to

Gorz was a social and political system in which individuals had the ability to define

their own projects. Capitalism was repugnant because it alienated individuals from

their inherent freedom to choose by forcing them to toil to live, or in consumerism, to

pursue useless baubles instead of some kind of more authentic existence. Gorz was a

Marxist because he was an existentialist - in Marxism he saw the best analysis and

critique of capitalism, but the impulse behind his interest in that critique was because

of his philosophical outlook.

In conclusion, I would argue that Gorz's political project of an alliance of

207
anti-capitalist forces was ingenuous and existentially "authentic." He also deserves

credit for his diligence, for his rejection of any sacrifice of individual freedoms in the

name of an imagined perfect future. It was also resolutely "utopian," however, in that

the hoped-for alliance of anti-capitalist forces was essentially coincidental, a negative

coalition that might come about if the intervention of leftist intellectuals was

successful. In other words, white-collar engineers, disaffected students, traditional

industrial workers and the Viet Cong shared very little in terms of their daily

struggles. It was Gorz's hope that they could be forged into a group of friends

brought together by their common capitalistic enemy, but in historical hindsight it is

not surprising that these groups went their separate ways once the leftist cultural

flowering of the late 1960s came and went. In France, of course, it is easy to identify

the high point of that flowering: the Events of May of 1968.

208
 Chapter 4: May of '68 and its Aftershocks

Rise and Fall

Political radicalism in France reached its zenith in the late 1960s and

continued to thrive into the middle of the 1970s. Its iconic moment was the student

and worker uprising of May of 1968, later christened "The Events" (Les Evenements)

of May. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a remarkable flowering of innovative

leftist theory, along with attempts to enact that theory in daily life. Outside of the

official auspices of the political parties, self-understood intellectuals like the teams of

both Les Temps Modernes and Le Nouvel Observateur worked feverishly to conceive

of ways in which the working class might be able to seize state power. Following the

Events of May, however, radicalism grew more diffuse, encompassing not only labor

and social hierarchy, but issues of ecology, of sexual identity, and the myriad ways in

which capitalist logics infiltrated the culture of everyday life. The aftermath of the

Events of May saw the growth of the New Social Movements, including the women's

movement, the gay liberation movement, and the ecological and anti-nuclear

movements, as well as a long-term shift away from Marxism among intellectuals.

Gorz was at his most prolific during this period. He often wrote several

373
On the New Social Movements and post-May theory, see Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics,
Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May '68 to Mitterrand (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986),
Jan Willem Duyvendak, The Power of Politics: New Social Movements in France (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995), Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French theory After May '68, Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1995.
209
articles each month for Le Nouvel Observateur, and it was also during this period that

he took a more active role in the editorial direction of Les Temps Modernes. He

published five books from 1968 - 1978, on topics ranging from labor theory to

medicine.374 By 1975, the articles he wrote for Le Nouvel Observateur were reaching

one and a half million readers per issue.375 He lived and worked in the heart of

French radicalism, the Left Bank of Paris, meeting with and reporting on union

leaders, student protesters, and his fellow intellectuals.376 Even if he had not gone on

to publish his "post-Marxist" work of the 1980s and beyond, his writing of the late

1960s and 1970s would have secured his place in the intellectual history of France in

the postwar era.

Because of the breadth of Gorz's writing and the diversity of the topics he

addressed in this period, I will adopt a thematic approach. Gorz wrote extensively, in

both articles and books, on economics and union strategy just as he had in the 1960s.

By 1972, however, he expanded his range to encompass the growing field of ecology.

He was also increasingly interested in those areas of social life that should not, he

thought, be beholden to capitalist logic, especially medicine and education. Overall,

Gorz came to champion the idea that it was possible to live one's life differently and

to break with capitalist norms and values at the level of the individual, but he still

insisted that it was primarily through collective action that the individual's existential

374
Reforme et Revolution (1969), Critique de la division du travail (1973), Critique du capitalisme
quotidien (1973), Ecologie et Liberte, and Ecologie et Politique (both in 1975).
375
This statistic is drawn from an editorial by Gorz's friend and colleague Jean Daniel: Jean Daniel,
"Lettre a une militant communiste," Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 August 1975, 16.
376
Finn Bowring's obituary on Gorz describes this period: Finn Bowring, "The Writer's Malady:
Andre Gorz, 1923 - 2007," Radical Philosophy (March - April 2008): 53 - 54.
210
dignity could be protected.

The Events of May

It is tempting to regard the Events of May of 1968 as the quintessential

example of the Sartrian groupe-en-fusion, a disparate crowd of individuals suddenly

aligned by their shared purpose. Much of the strength of the myth of May of'68 is

due to the power of that radically democratic moment, when the divisions between

students and workers temporarily collapsed and when a new political and cultural

future for France seemed possible. As Julian Bourg has pointed out, however, there

was, in fact, no core to the "project" of the Events of May. Its participants had widely

different goals and completely different political paradigms from one another. The

Events of May were Events in the plural, not the singular, both in terms of the actual

incidents of rebellion, occupation and strike, and in terms of the motives behind the

actions of the insurgents.377

There is a very large literature on the Events of May, most of which has been directed at different
kinds of historical appropriation. The most important recent "pro-May" work is Kristin Ross, May '68
and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Some of the "anti-May" books
include Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensee 68 : Essai sur I'anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), Arthur Marick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the
United States, c. 1958 - c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Serge Audier, La Pensee
anti-68: essai sur les origines d'une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Decouverte, 2008), Michael
Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2004), and of course, the classic work by Raymond Aron, hot off the press when the memory
of the barricades was still fresh: Raymond Aron, La Revolution Introuvable: reflexions sur les
evenements de mai (Paris: Librarie Artheme, 1968). Bourg's work is the only recent major scholarly
work to approach the Events of May from a more dispassionate, analytical angle. See Julian Bourg,
From Revolution to Ethics. A nice summary of the Events and their implications by a venerable
economic historian of France is R.W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (New York: St.
211
 The series of strikes, occupations, and protests late gathered under the rubric

of "The Events" began at the University of Nanterre outside of Paris.378 A protest

against the American war in Vietnam resulted in the arrest of several of the protesters.

The disaffection spread into Paris itself, and on May 3 a major confrontation erupted

between protesters and police at the Sorbonne, the heart of the French university

system in the Latin Quarter. Soon, students built barricades and there were running

street battles between the protesters and the police. The Sorbonne, as well as other

universities in and around Paris and in the provinces, were soon occupied. Despite

the initial hostility of the PCF, by the middle of the month tens of thousands of

workers had joined the students in protest by striking and, in many cases, occupying

their factories. By May 20, some seven million workers were on strike and the nation

was virtually paralyzed.

De Gaulle's prime minister, Georges Pompidou, reached out to the unions and

negotiated a fairly generous, albeit pedestrian, set of wage increases (the Grenelle

Accords.) When union leadership went to ratify them with their members, however,

the rank and file workers rejected them. The student movement occupied the famous

Odeon Theater in Paris and plastered the Latin Quarter with posters declaring that a

revolution was underway. Indeed, by the end of the month, there seemed to be a real

Martin's Press, 1981), 129 - 133. See also the inimitable Tony Judt's description: Tony Judt, Postwar,
409-413.
378
The term "Events" (Evenements) was created while they were still occurring, as witnessed by
articles published in Le Nouvel Observateur while the Sorbonne was occupied and much of France was
on strike; Jean Daniel's opening editorial on the 30th of May began "The events rush ahead, but
definitively, they share the same meaning." Jean Daniel, "Mendes France?" Le Nouvel Observateur,
30 May 1968, 1 - 2 .
212
possibility of revolutionary change, particularly after president Charles De Gaulle

abruptly vanished on May 29 (to verify with his generals that the army stood ready to

intervene if necessary, it was later revealed.)

That possibility, however, was short-lived. De Gaulle made a televised

speech on May 31 calling for new elections and accusing "foreign" (read: communist)

agents of fermenting an attempted coup d'etat. An enormous demonstration of the

center and right took to the streets of Paris, and in the ensuing elections of June the

Gaullist party (the Union des Democrates pour la Republique) won a crushing

victory. De Gaulle's education minister, Edgar Faure, hastily pushed through reforms

in the universities, and by the end of June, France limped back toward normality.

There was an abundance of goodwill, at least for the first few weeks in the

halls of the occupied Sorbonne and in the meetings between students and striking

workers, but it was immediately apparent that the revolution the radicals wanted was

actually several different species of revolution, not all of them compatible. To be

sure, there were many who wanted to see the French proletariat seize state power,

something that seemed possible for the first time during De Gaulle's three-day

absence from May 29 to 31. But many others were in the streets in the name of

personal liberation, of the celebration of sexuality, the collapse of social and class

identity, of life as a form of art. More to the point, there was no practical program for

effecting lasting changes at the institutional level by any of the insurgents.

Thus, the Events of May were not an example of the groupe-en-fusion,

because the insurgents did not actually have a shared project that united them. On the
213
other hand, The Events of May were definitely a stark demonstration of what Sartre

had referred to as "seriality." The myriad of groups and movements collapsed after

the rally of the center and right following the return of De Gaulle from Colombey-les-

Deux-Eglises. The major unions took advantage of the nationwide strike to

achieve modest reforms and concessions from the patronat. The spontaneous

alignment of the various projects of liberation contained within the "revolutionary"

project of May disintegrated, leaving behind the much more diffuse and disparate

New Social Movements that emerged in May's aftermath.

Bourg has argued that the implicit thread that united the majority of the

participants in the Events of May was ethics, the concern with how people ought to

live and how the state should govern based on some (usually unstated) conception of

human dignity. His arguments are more convincing than the nostalgia for political

revolution of someone like Kristin Ross or the May-bashing of Tony Judt or Sunil

Khilnani (not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy.)380 Gorz is a particularly interesting

example of a thinker whose reactions to May of '68 both support and complicate

Bourg's thesis, since he did indeed begin to explore new political questions and

issues, particularly ecology, which had a distinct ethical component. Gorz continued

379
On the 29th of May, De Gaulle met secretly with General Massu, head of the army divisions
stationed in Baden-Wurttemberg, to insure that, should it be necessary, the army would support the
republic against the protesters.
380
It goes without saying that Judt and Khilnani followed Aron's interpretation of the Events of May,
as a "psychodrama" caused by demographic problems in French universities and a whole culture of
irresponsible political dilettantism among students and encouraged by intellectuals. See Tony Judt,
ibid., and Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, 121-124, 136-151. The latest major work in this line
is Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution.

214
to insist, however, that an ethical society could not be achieved under capitalism, and

he fought against the tendency to disinter social and political critique from the focus

with the economic system that underlay those concerns.

During the Events of May themselves, Le Nouvel Observateur published four

issues, the latter two of which were half the usual length, the last missing a cover due

to the haste at which it had been assembled. A notice in the third issue explained that

"The normal consequences of the current events has led us for the second time to

delay the publication of the Nouvel Observateur. Our solidarity with the immense

national movement of contestation, and our active sympathy for the intellectual and

manual workers on strike are such that it is with serenity that we share the common

lot {le sort commuri)? In the next issue, the editorial team declared that "since the

third of May, the team of "Nouvel Observateur," employees, journalists, and

management, has participated with enthusiasm in the extraordinary movement of

contestation against capitalist society, a movement launched by the students,

strengthened and brought to a higher level by the demonstrations of the 13 of May

•501

and the massive action of the working class on strike and occupying its factories."

Over the course of the month, the magazine published editorials, an expose on the

thought of Herbert Marcuse ("the idol of the student rebels"), an interview with

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and analyses of the actions of the unions and of workers

themselves in the events.382

381
Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 May 1968,2.
382
Of the extensive coverage of the Events of May published in Le Nouvel Observateur during May
215
 Behind the scenes, a brief but revealing power struggle ensued between, on

the one hand, a self-appointed group of employees who demanded that all editorial

decisions pass through a "general assembly" of the magazine's workers, and on the

other, Jean Daniel, who argued that a journal could not be run as a direct democracy -

the alternatives were between "monarchy and anarchy." While the argument ended in

a stalemate (and Daniel remained the chief editor), Gorz "declared that he would hand

over his mandate to the disposal of the assembly of copywriters" even before the

copywriters demanded the "mandates" of the editorial team. In other words, while he

was not throwing paving stones at the police, Gorz was perfectly content to relinquish

his own editorial power in the name of the principle of direct democracy.383

One article that deserves special note is Gorz's "Pouvoir etudiant et pouvoirs

ouvriers" ("Student Power and Workers Powers"), written during the heart of the

Events of May and published in the May 22 issue. Here, he anticipated both the

central problem and the most important innovation of the student movement then

occupying the Sorbonne: the fact that its goals were not translatable into the kind of

conventional demands normally made during strikes or protests. This "cultural

revolution" in course had to ask itself:

itself, see in particular Serge Mallet, "L'Idole des etudiants rebelles," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May
1968, 5 - 1 1 , Rene Backmann, "Barricades au quartier latine," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May 1968,
1 7 - 1 8 , Maurice Clavel, "Universite: ceux de Nanterre et de Sorbonne," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8
May 1968, 44, Jean Daniel, "Dix ans c'est trop," Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 1968, 22 - 23,
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, "Notre Commune du 10 mai," Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 1968, 32 - 34,
Maurice Duverger, "La Revoke de la jeunesse," Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 1968, 37, Serge
Mallet, "Pas Seulement pour quelques francs," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 May 1968, 1 4 - 1 5 , Lucien
Rioux, "Syndicats: la longue nuit des dupes," Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 May 1968, 4, Michel
Bosquet, "Pourquoi les ouvriers ont refuse les accords," Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 May 1968, 7.
383
Jean Daniel, L 'Ere des ruptures (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1979), 52 - 64 .
216
 "What to do when the adversary gives in or retreats? Elaborate a list of more
or less linked-together demands and defend them step-by-step through hard
negotiations? This tactic, normal in unionism and among reformist
movements, probably corresponds to the wishes of a fairly large mass. But
that mass of the prudent, the realistic, the reasonable is missing. They are
sleeping, just as they did on the night of the 10th of May, just as they slept
through every night when history is suspended. And those who are
present.. .are resolved not to accept these solutions.. .which would
necessarily signal the death of the movement."384

According to Gorz, the wholesale rejection by the student movement of

consumer society, the capitalist division of labor, and the structure of the school and

university system, all exceeded any historical precedent that might dictate a specific

course of action. As it stood, the student movement's insurrection and occupations,

not just of universities across France but of symbolic monuments like the Odeon

Theater, might demonstrate to the worker's movement that new forms of resistance

were needed above and beyond the usual tactics of reformism.385

Gorz claimed that a worker confronted with growing unemployment, brutal

work conditions, and a life set in a consumer society outside of his reach might well

learn from the student movement that students and workers were confronting parallel

problems: the superfluity of their qualifications in the job market and, more

importantly, their rejection tout de suite of a society that intended to "use" them as

cogs in its economy.386 Against the old French leftist tradition of demanding changes

"from on high," the student movement was in the process of discovering that power

384
Michel Bosquet, "Pouvoir Etudiant et pouvoirs ouvriers," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 May 22 1968,
385
Ibid.
386
Ibid., 8.
217
had to be seized from below, that occupations were themselves the first step of a

political reconstruction.387 The actual goals of that reconstruction were being

modeled already by the students in terms of "pedagogical rapports, the redefinition of

subjects and disciplines, the suppression of exams in their traditional sense, the goals
TOO

of studies as a whole," all carried out "m a free collective debate." Ultimately,

"The conquest of power is not the end of the struggle. It is the means to continually

elevate the level of the struggle."389

This was the crux of the issue, not just for the student movement itself during

the heady days of mid-May, but of Gorz's outlook on politics in the late 1960s and

early 1970s in general: his answer to the implicit question of "what is to be done?"

was that every situation demanded its own response by the concerned parties, be they

students, workers, or intellectuals, all in the name of individual needs and against the

demands of the state, Xhepatronat, and capital. There was a terrible problem,

however, in articulating the connections between local goals and the larger epochal

shift towards which Gorz always insisted local goals had to orient themselves. In

other words, how was the reform of university examinations, for instance, to be

directly linked to a program of radical worker's control in factories? Ultimately, how

were local strikes, occupations, and protests to be joined into a lasting union that

might dissolve and remake state power itself?

In a 1997 interview with Jeremy Tatman, a British "Gorzian" scholar, Gorz

387
Ibid., 9.
388
Ibid., 10. Italics in original.
389
Ibid.
218
noted "The real change that May 1968 had made only became obvious in the 1970s.

It was a cultural revolt which made quite evident the change in values that had

occurred in younger people, and the impossibility of continuing with politics and

society as had been done up to that point. The left and socialism needed to be

basically redefined."390 Broadly speaking, Gorz's position did indeed shift over the

course of the 1970s from a left-trade unionist position to one more concerned with a

broad cultural shift targeting both the traditional working class and the whole swath

of society disaffected by capitalism. It is important to emphasize, however, that Gorz

never lost sight of the primacy of the political in his analyses - without a

corresponding political movement, he knew, a new leftist cultural shift would prove

all too ephemeral. In his books and articles of the decade, he himself tried to link all

of the areas of his interest and expertise together in a unified political project.

To Gorz and the rest of the Sartrian circle, the Events of May were most

important as a practical demonstration of both the strengths and weaknesses of

precisely the kind of politics they had been advocating in Les Temps Modernes since

1956: a mass movement of the Left organized in terms of direct democracy, joining

together the various leftist social movements and millions of French workers. The

Events demonstrated the truth of various claims that the contributors to Les Temps

Modernes had been making for years: that the PCF was not, in fact, revolutionary,

that the student movement was a tremendous source of revolutionary fervor, that

consumer culture had not entirely blunted the radicalism of the working class, and

390
Andre Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction, 125.
219
that millions of people recognized capitalism as a pernicious system, not just a natural

economic arrangement.

Unfortunately for the Sartrians, the Events of May also proved that direct

democracy was strategically ineffective without some kind of larger coordinating

body. For the two years that followed, a series of articles tried to define the functions

of an imagined "revolutionary avant-garde" or "new revolutionary party" that could

coordinate a future uprising without lapsing into the kind of bureaucratic defeatism of

the PCF. Taking the existence of a mass radical movement for granted, the

contributing writers of Les Temps Modernes tried to reconcile, in practical terms, the

very Sartrian contrast between the freedom of individual insurgents and the necessity

of group coordination.

Gorz was at his most lucid in his responses to the Events of May, and his

articles from the period outshine those of his colleagues at Les Temps Modernes in

terms of clarity and, especially, pragmatism. As the one core member of Les Temps

Modernes with considerable experience in the French labor movement, thanks to his

decade of journalism, Gorz was able to frame his discussion of the "new

revolutionary party" in terms of the real lived experiences of workers. Whereas many

of the other contributors to Les Temps Modernes could only gesture at an imaginary

avant-garde, Gorz could speak to more grounded political possibilities in the

aftermath of the Events of May.391

391
1 contrast Gorz's writing with that of his colleagues at Les Temps Modernes in the immediate
aftermath of the Events of May. See Andre Barjonet, "C.G.T., 1968 : Le Subjectivisme au secours de
220
 To Gorz, the central lessons of the Events of May were that, first, capitalism

had failed to integrate a significant portion of French society and had also failed to

mute the class struggle, and second, that despite the depth and breadth of indignation

against the capitalist system, the Events of May had still not resulted in meaningful

political changes. Thus, his tasks were to define how capitalism failed to provide for

the needs of millions of people in one of the richest societies on the planet and,

further, to determine how a future uprising might result in a qualitatively different

state and society, not just a brief flowering of revolutionary sentiment and
392

pageantry.

According to Gorz, The Events had failed because they lacked an intellectual

dimension that could have defined what its medium-term and long-term goals should

be following the short-term successes of university and factory occupation and the

shutdown of the transportation infrastructure. If the Events of May had actually

toppled the French government, its participants would have been unable to effect an

interim government because they had no plans in place to do so. Likewise, as had

l'ordre etabli," Les Temps Modemes 265 (July 1968): 94 - 103, Marc Goldstein, "Le P.C.F. du 3 mai
au 16 juin 1968," Les Temps Modemes 269 (November 1968): 827 - 894, Jean-Marie Vincent,
"Reflexions Provisoires sur la revolution de mai 1968," Les Temps Modemes 265 (July 1968): 104 -
110, Ernest Mandel, "Lecons du mouvement de mai," Les Temps Modernes 266 - 267 (August-
September 1968): 296 - 325, Jean-Marie Vincent, "Pour Continuer mai 1968," Les Temps Modernes
266 - 267 (August-September 1968): 265 - 295, and especially Paul Mazure, "Pour un parti
revolutionnaire," Les Temps Modernes 266 - 267 (August-September 1968): 377 - 387. Mazure's
breathless article, lauding a kind of mythical avant-garde to-be, is a particularly neat contrast with
Gorz's relatively practical outlook.
392
See T.M. (almost certainly Gorz, writing as Les Temps Modernes' lead editor), "Un
Commencement," Les Temps Modernes 264 (May - June 1968): i - viii, Andre Gorz, "Limites et
potentialities du mouvement de mai," Les Temps Modernes 266 - 267 (August-September 1968): 231
- 264, and especially Gorz's introduction to Reforme et Revolution: Andre Gorz, Reforme et
Revolution, 9 - 5 6 .
221
happened so many times before in the history of Parisian revolutionary takeovers,

without a solid political platform and connections to the revolutionary party's base in

the working class of the entire nation, other political forces could have rapidly

undermined the long-term stability of the new government.

It was in defining goals and strategy, then, that intellectuals had to play their

part in a new radical politics. And, anticipating a theme he would expand

considerably in his writing of the 1980s and 1990s, politics was here to be understood

as the field of compromises, debates, and arrangements that necessarily arose when

people of different interests had to share a governing structure. One of the capitalist

system's major failings to Gorz was precisely its lack of genuine "politics," since the

party structure encouraged a strategy of pandering to voters and watering down

political messages to appeal to the majority through sound bites and banal slogans. A

new revolutionary party would, he hoped, use its intellectual arm to pierce through

the obfuscating ideology of the capitalist parties and would be able to rely on the

militancy of its base (i.e the insurgents who brought it to power) to force the other

groups to accept revolutionary changes.

We should note that Gorz's contempt for the politics of postwar electoral

democracy was not just a symptom of intellectual elitism or a token piece of radical

intransigence (although it does smack a bit of the latter.) The Sartrians regarded the

entire history of republican democracy in France since the end of the war as a

222
failure., The tremendous flowering of potential Gorz had identified in Le Traitre,

when intellectual speculation acquired a new urgency and vitality, passed as quickly

as it had arisen. The Fourth Republic's major achievement was dragging France into

the colonial imbroglios of Indochina and Algeria. The Fifth Republic was the brain-

child of a military populist and arch-nationalist. In short, the democratic ideal was

not well-served by the postwar French example. The only visible alternative was the

nominal adherence of the PCF and the growing body of unaligned radicals to

revolution, but as the Events of May had demonstrated, there was an enormous gap

between that imagined goal and the practical demands of both parties and smaller

radical groups and organizations.

The Cultural Turn

The failure of the Events of May to effect lasting large-scale political change,

at least on a revolutionary scale, led Gorz to reconsider the priorities and strategies

leftists had to adopt. His writing of the early and mid-1970s shifted away from an

exclusive focus on labor-movement strategy and the hope for a revolution along

Marxist lines, including his earlier modified Marxist positions centered on

393
This is obviously a rather large blanket statement, but for examples see Beauvoir's La Force des
choses II, Sartre's article "Elections: piege a cons," Les Temps Modernes 318 (January 1973): 1099 -
1108, and the interview with Beauvoir in Alice Schwarzer, After the Second Sex: Conversations with
Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Marianne Howarth (New York, 1984), 74, in which Beauvoir concluded
that she simply refused to vote. We should also note that the only time Sartre, Beauvoir, or Gorz
whole-heartedly wrote in support of a political party was Sartre's notorious "Les Communistes et la
paix" on behalf of the PCF in 1952.
223
revolutionary reforms. Instead, Gorz was part of a diffuse movement of thinkers like

Herbert Marcuse and Ivan Illich who began to consider the need to break with the

logics of capitalism in everyday life and at the level of the individual. Gorz also

became much more sensitive to the pernicious influence of market logics in areas of

life that should, he insisted, be completely distinct from them: medicine, education,

and the natural world.

In particular, it is necessary to emphasize the growing importance of Ivan

Illich on Gorz's thought, particularly during the 1970s. Illich was, like Gorz, born in

Austria to a "mixed" marriage of Catholic and Jew. Unlike Gorz, Illich achieved

remarkable academic success, training as a Catholic priest and achieving a doctorate

in theology. He also mastered close to a dozen languages, making Gorz's own

impressive lingual breadth pale by comparison. Sent by the church first to North

America, then to Cuernavaca in Mexico, Illich undertook a life-long project of

critique of what he regarded as the cultural imperialism latent in the first world's

charitable projects in the third. He was also a scathing critic of the tendency of

modern capitalism to favor elite technicians with specialized fields of expertise over

traditional forms of knowledge and practice, particularly in areas like education and

medicine. In a series of works in the early 1970s, Illich attacked first education, then

so-called technocracy, and finally medicine in his three best-known books:

Deschooling Society, Retooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical

224
Nemesis.

Illich and Gorz did not meet until 1973, but Gorz was already impressed by

the force of Ilich's arguments and, perhaps more importantly, by the similarity and

compatibility of their respective intellectual projects.395 Both Illich and Gorz were

simultaneously engaged in analyses of capitalism that sought to trace the impact of

social structures on individuals; Gorz had always been sensitive to the myriad of

ways in which social hierarchy was inscribed by capitalism in the workplace, but

Illich inspired him to look beyond the workplace to areas that were not part of the

economic "base" in so many words. Thus, it was really a confluence of Mich's

influence and the growing ecology movement that reoriented Gorz's thought away

from labor theory and toward this new "global" critique.

Indeed, one of the roles Gorz is best known for playing in the French

intellectual milieu is that of the champion of Illich - when Illich died in 2002, one

Surprisingly, given the importance of his thought and the breadth of his influence in Europe, Latin
America, and North America, there is no definitive intellectual biography of Illich in English. A
German-language biography was published in Austria in 2007: Martina Kaller-Dietrich, Ivan Illich
(1926-2002): sein Leben, sein Denken (Vienna: Enzyklopadie des Winer Wissens, 2007). A series of
essays considering his work is also available: Lee Hoinacki, Carl Mitcham, eds., The Challenges of
Ivan Illich: a Collective Reflection (Albany, SUNY Press, 2002). There are two English-language
dissertations on Illich, both written while he was a contemporary theorist: Martha Kaye Wallis Crouch,
"Smiling the System Apart" the Life, Thought and Work of Ivan Illich (PhD Dissertation, Dallas,
Texas, 1972) and John Lawrence Elias, "A Comparison and Critical Evaluation of the Social and
Education Thought of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, with a Particular Emphasis upon the Religious
Inspiration of their Thought (PhD Dissertation, Ann Arbor, 1974), as well as a dissertation-project
intellectual biography that has not yet been published: Patricia L Inman, An Intellectual Biography of
Ivan Illich (PhD Dissertation, Dekalb, 1999). An informative posthumous piece was published in Le
Mondesi, online version: Thierry Paquot, "La Resistance selon Ivan Illich," Le Monde Diplomatique,
January 2003, <http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2003/01/PAOUOT/9866>. Finally, see Illich's
four best-known works: Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), Ivan
Illich, Retooling Society (Cuernavaca: Centro Intercultural de Documentation, 1973), Ivan Illich, Tools
for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), and Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: the
Expropriation of Health (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).
395
Andre Gorz, Lettre a D., 64.
225
journalistic eulogy noted that "in Le Nouvel Observateur, Michel Bosquet (alias

Andre Gorz) explained, discussed and popularized the ideas of Illich, while

constructing his own original oeuvre."396 Gorz wrote several articles for both Les

Temps Modernes and Le Nouvel Observateur about Illich's thought and Illich

himself.397 Gorz went on to write his own attacks on the structure of both education

and the medical industry in France that were heavily influenced by Illich. For the rest

of his life, Gorz would continue to pen articles and books that employed this new

critical perspective on the importance of what older orthodox Marxists had described

as the social "superstructure."

As explained in the full-length expose Gorz published on Illich in the

September 11, 1972 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur, "there is not a single person

today who can match the breadth of the thought of Ivan Illich." For Gorz, the heart of

Illich's thought was his search for "conviviality": "The sole issue, in his eyes, is the

installation of a "convivial" economy, in which each member uses tools at his or her

own control, tools simple enough to be mastered by each." Ultimately, Illich's vision

was one of Christian rebirth: "our task is to be, in the twentieth century, that which

the Christians were in the sixth...there is no hope in and for our system, every action

and hope is linked to its "collapse." The hope of the rebirth of man excludes every

Thierry Paquot, "La Resistance selon Ivan Illich."

397
Gorz's treatment of Illich-inspired themes is considered in detail throughout this chapter; his two
articles about Illich himself in Le Nouvel Observateur were Michel Bosquet, "Pour Retrouver la vie,"
Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 September 1972, 62 - 78, Michel Bosquet, "Echanges: l'adieu a
Cuernavaca," Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 April 1976, 56.
226
reformist hope." The parallels with Gorz's thought are clear; although Gorz drew

his inspiration from existentialism and Illich from heterodox Catholicism, both

aspired to break the logic of the capitalist system as a whole by attacking its

constituent parts. Illich described those parts as the "tools" of the system, which

included not just its economic formations, but its educational, medical, and

entertainment industries as well.399

Over a decade earlier, Gorz had argued in La Morale de Vhistoire that the very

essence of (the existential version of) socialism was its break with "systems," its

refusal to succumb to the fossilization of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and ultimately, of

Sartrian seriality. When Illich chose to close his center of research in Cuernavaca in

1976, Gorz saluted his decision because Illich and the center's other researchers were

refusing to allow the center to become an institution; having established links of

correspondence and collaboration between its international membership, Illich was

right to allow the center to "disappear." Gorz also used the occasion to salute the

success of the Cuernavaca center, and of Illich, for producing its seminal studies of

education, medicine, transportation, and bureaucracy, whose relevance had become

"evident for all" by 1976.400

398
Michel Bosquet, "Pour Retrouver la vie," 63.
399
The first essays by Illich Gorz had a hand in publishing were actually in print two years earlier in
Les Temps Modernes. They were both transcripts of presentations Illich had given at a conference on
"Youth and Development" given in Salzburg, Austria in 1970, which contained an endorsement for a
new kind of cultural revolution and the thesis of Deschooling Society, as yet unpublished when he gave
the talks. See Ivan Illich, "Revolution culturelle, ecole et developpement," Les Temps Modernes 287,
(June 1970): 2074 - 2083 and Ivan Illich, "Descolariser l'Ecole," Les Temps Modernes 289 - 290,
(August - September 1970): 475-495.
400
Michel Bosquet, "L'Adieu a Cuernavaca," 56.
227
 Thus, inspired in large part by Illich, much of Gorz's writing began to explore

new forms of cultural resistance to capitalism. Of particular interest in this period of

Gorz's writing were the brief vignettes published in Le Nouvel Observateur as "La

Subversion par le Bonheur" ("Subversion through Happiness.")401 He took a two-

month trip to the United States in 1970, meeting with both leftist political figures like

Ralph Nader and various members of the American counter culture, describing his

experiences in a series of short, arresting articles that were later re-printed in his

collection Critique du capitalisme quotidien {Critique of Everyday Capitalism.) The

articles testify to Gorz's altered focus in the post-'68 environment; he increasingly

shifted away from labor strategy to consider what role cultural shifts might play in

defying capitalist norms.

The journey made a profound impression on him. He was inspired by his

encounters with various people who were rebuilding their lives according to different

standards than those of consumer capitalism, and Gorz found in their lives models

that might be applicable to his European readers. He was also fascinated by the

differences between the context of political radicalism in the US as compared to

Europe. Whereas European states and the Europeanpatronat provided obvious

targets for radical protest, he was shocked by the facelessness of power in the US, the

lack of visible targets and the strange, almost invisible diffusion of capitalist ideology

401
Michel Bosquet, "La Subversion par le Bonheur," Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 December 1970,45 -
54.
228
in US culture. Whereas, particularly in France, being a radical meant being part of

movement with stated goals, Gorz discovered that American radicals were often

"radical" in their lifestyles and in the politics of their everyday lives rather than in

terms of a commitment to direct confrontations with capitalist power.

In this, Gorz championed the validity of the cultural revolution of the West

and its "revolutionaries" against orthodox Marxists who saw in the emerging social

movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s nothing but "distractions" from the

primary task of class warfare. After visiting a food co-op that ran a small

underground journal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gorz wrote ""Utopians.

Parasites. Petit-bourgeois." They always say. Who is a parasite in a country which

fattens itself on the sweat and blood of three quarters of humanity? Where, on the

back of a small minority of actually-productive workers, lives an entire population of

lords, of speculators, of rentiers, of explorers of the moon, of decorated generals, of

singers of toothpaste commercials, of the permanently unemployed in their ghettos, of

the procrastinating unemployed in the universities, of heart-transplanters, of

researchers whose work is useless for humanity, disgusted of themselves. Work? For

whom? For what?"403

Against the European model of hyper-intellectualized, theoretically-informed

debates in the latter-day salons of Paris, Gorz reported on the experience and

importance of Americans who were in the process of living their politics, not just

402
Beauvoir had noted precisely the same thing in her Amerique au Jour le Jour.
403
Andre Gorz, Critique du capitalisme quotidien (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1973), 325.
229
talking about them. He wrote about the importance of the emerging American

women's movement and the gay liberation movement, about the growth of collective

living among the youth and, at least sporadically, the emergence of a more equitable

distribution of gendered labor in childcare and domestic tasks. He also wrote about

Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers, who tried to give a lecture about Marx

and Mao and was shouted down by his comrades. Newton apologized and

acknowledged that he had to remember what his priorities were and who he

represented. If Marx and Mao did not have anything directly to say about the

experience of American blacks, they did not have a place in his movement.404

It is clear from Gorz's anecdotes about his travels in the United States that he

was anticipating attacks from his fellow leftist intellectuals back in Europe, for whom

"cultural revolution" was flimsy and ephemeral without some kind of working-class

revolutionary movement underpinning it. Gorz pointed out that the very idea of

"working-class revolution" was vacuous in the context of the United States. The US

working class was completely non-revolutionary and beholden to consumer culture.

American radicalism may have been diffuse and lacking in some kind of larger

binding theory holding it together, but its strength was in its ability to change the lives

of individuals. American radicalism was in the process of creating a "parallel

society" in opposition to the mainstream, and even if its indulgences in sexual

liberation, drugs and music seemed like distractions to the revolutionary theorists of

404
See also Gorz's article about the radical youth movement in Holland: Michel Bosquet, "Les Jeunes
Prophetes d'Amsterdam," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 January 1973, 46 - 48
230
Europe, Gorz claimed that they still represented an important alternative model.

Even as he lauded the radical political possibilities opened by the cultural

revolution of the late 1960s, Gorz was keenly aware that the Right was mobilizing

against them. One of Gorz's priorities as a journalist for Le Nouvel Observateur was

monitoring the efforts of the French patronat to disrupt not only the labor movement,

but the emergent anti-capitalist culture of the late 1960s. Particularly after 1968,

there was a deliberate movement among members of the patronat to introduce

cultural counter-measures, to create an ideology of cooperation between workers and

management and avoid the messiness of collective action. This, of course, was an

effort that de Gaulle himself had been in favor of, with his entire program of

"participation" in the economy, an effort that went down to a dismal defeat in the

1969 referendum that saw his final exit from French politics.

An iconic example of Gorz's reporting on the strategy of the Right was his

article "Les Deux Visages du Patronat" ("The Two Faces of Management.") After

1968, a group of industry leaders calling themselves Enterprise et Progres (Enterprise

and Progress) set out to incorporate workers and unions into decision-making in some

ways. They launched a propaganda campaign and redesigned the workflow of certain

factories to allow workers to have a more varied set of tasks and a less brutal pace of

work, all in an effort to inculcate a sense of belonging and solidarity between workers

Andre Gorz, Critique du Capitalisme Quotidien, 332 - 335. Note that Gorz wrote another series of
American vignettes six years later that were an exact parallel with the first set: Michel Bosquet,
"Californie: la Revolution Americaine Recommence," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 May 1976, 102 —
146.

231
and their managers. Simultaneously, the same group began hiring ex-convicts

straight out of the penitentiaries and organized them as the Centre de Liaison et d'

Action Nationale, (Center of Liaison and National Action) a right-wing strike-

breaking and anti-communist group. Members of CLAN were sent into the same

factories with the reorganized workflow to monitor and prevent the spread of

collective action among workers, with violence if necessary. The result was

"managerial military police and "factory fascism" on the one side, "enterprise and

progress" and managerial humanism on the other."406

The real ideological heart of this effort was the attempt by the patronat to

reclaim power. As he had argued throughout the 1960s, Gorz noted that the only

reforms worthy of the name were those the labor movement had seized through

struggle, because only those could be maintained with the threat of further collective

action. Reforms handed down from management could be revoked just as easily.

The program of reform led by Enterprise and Progress was, among other things, a

psychological effort to reassert the control ofthe patronat and disrupt the desire for

self-management among the workers. "It is in giving, not in refusing, explained a

psycho-sociologist, that the patronat reinforces its social authority" and defends its

conception of the framework of society."407 Thus, only a cultural counter-image of

what society should be, of its organization and its priorities, could resist this double-

edged attack by the patronat.

406
Michel Bosquet, "Les Deux Visages du Patronat," Le Nouvel Obsevateur, 22 May 1972, 37.
407
Ibid.
232
Les Temps Modernes, 1970 - 1979

One of the most peculiar tributes to Gorz after his death was penned by

Claude Lanzmann, long-time editor of Les Temps Modernes, former friend and

romantic partner of Beauvoir, and another core member of the Sartrian circle.

Lanzmann wrote "I had always thought of him (Gorz) as Gerard Horst, the identity

under which I had met him very early on, he and his wife Dorine, who was always for

me Dorine Horst, to whom he had dedicated a stunning {bouleversanf) book of pure

love that disclosed almost everything."408 Lanzmann expressed some irritation with

Gorz's public identity, wrapped as it was in pseudonyms, related an anecdote about

their last lunch together in the village of Vosnon where Gorz lived, and then noted the

following:

"In almost all of the books that Gerar - or Andre Gorz if you prefer - wrote,
the first part, the "critique of capitalism" section, was always devastating and
exciting; one could only agree with him and wait for the rest. I was, for
myself, usually disappointed, because, with the second section, we passed to
Utopia, to idealism, to impossible Icaries. In the eulogies that have been
consecrated to him, his presence at TM (i.e. Les Temps Modernes) is
strangely, for the most part, passed in silence. One asks oneself why and one
scarcely dares reply {on ose a peine repondre). He had, starting in 1968, a
strong hold on the review, (and) we were struck, year after year and month
after month, with economic articles which were more and more "hard"409,
many of them coming from his Italian allies, which discouraged readers. It
took a while to rediscover the right path (le bon cnemm.)"410

408
Claude Lanzmann, "Pour Gerard Horst, Andre Gorz, Michel Bosquet," Les Temps Modernes 645
646, (September 2007): 1 - 3.
410
In English in original.
Ibid., 2 - 3 .
233
While Lanzmann nevertheless concluded that he would miss Gorz because "he was

my friend," his final tribute was thus an almost embarrassed note on Gorz's editorial

leadership during a period over thirty years in the past. Likewise, his short piece on

Gorz is all the stranger in that it blamed Gorz for an excess of radicalism, hardly a

quality the journal had lacked during the 1950s and 1960s.

For all their bluster, Lanzmann's comments are still useful in helping to

situate Gorz at the journal following the Events of May, and there is indeed a striking

period in the early 1970s in which Les Temps Modernes consistently covered

"Gorzian" themes, including the focus on Italian Marxist theory Lanzmann referred

to. Gorz became increasingly interested in the activities of certain groups of Italian

Marxists operating outside of the purview of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and,

under his editorial direction, he devoted several issues to their activities and had

numerous pieces translated from the Italian.411

Much of the coverage of independent Italian Marxists in Les Temps Modernes

was focused on three groups: II Manifesto (The Manifesto), Poterere Operaio (Worker

Power), and the journal and movement Lotta Continua (Continual Struggle). All

411
See Jean-Paul Sartre and II Manifesto, "Masses, spontaneite, parti," Les Temps Modernes 282
(January 1970): 1043 - 1063, the theme issue on Italian and Chinese Marxist theory in Les Temps
Modernes 289 - 290 (August - September 1970), including the article by Potere Operaio, "Pour un
Travail Politique dans les quartiers populaires," in ibid.: 415 -424, II Manifesto, "Pour faire l'unite de
la gauche de classe" by II Manifesto, Les Temps Modernes 296 (March 1971): 1615 - 1651, the theme
issue on Lotta Continua in Les Temps Modernes 303 (October 1971), including Gorz's "Presentation"
in ibid.: 477 - 478, and the three articles by Lotta Continua: "Prenons la Ville (I)," "Prenons la Ville
(II)," and "Sur l'Organisation" in ibid.: 479 - 513, Lotta Continua, "Lutte de classe et unite Europeen,"
Les Temps Modernes 319 (February 1973): 1420 - 1455, the theme issue on Lotta Continua in Les
Temps Modernes 335 (June 1974), including Gorz's "Presentation" in ibid.: 2105 - 2106, and Lotta
Continua, "Introduction" and "Qui Sommes-Nous?" in ibid.: 2107 - 2115, 2150 - 2184, and the theme
issue on Antonio Gramsci, Les Temps Modernes 343 (February 1975.)
234
three were part of a broad movement on the radical left of Italian communism called

operaismo, or "workerism."412 Some members of the movement were part of the

official PCI, while others organized outside of the auspices of the party. If anything,

the Italian Left was even more powerful and vibrant than its French equivalent, both

in its party form and in the various groups of workers and intellectuals who refused to

join the party, and Gorz devoted considerable editorial attention to developments in

Italy in the post-'68 period.

Workerism, while shot through with internal divisions, was defined by a focus

on the internal dynamics of the industrial working class. In general, members of

workerist groups believed that the official party communisms of western Europe, as

well as that of the USSR, were out of touch with the lived experience of actual

factory workers. While there were various internecine conflicts fought on the

ideological plane between different workerist factions, another important concept that

loosely united them was the belief that the development of capitalism was basically a

reaction to the development of the international working class movement, and not the

other way around.413 Thus, hope for revolutionary change had to spring from the

most advanced sectors of the industrial economy and, more to the point, from the

organization of workers in those sectors.

Reflecting back on this period decades later, Gorz noted "At the time, I read

the principle publications of these different groups. I occasionally met some of their

412
The essential work on Italian workerism is Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and
Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
413
See ibid., 64.
235
protagonists. I was connected to a certain degree with Lotta Continua, from whom I

published several texts in Les Temps Modernes and about which I liked their

imaginative and spontaneous allure.. ,"414 Speaking in the mid-1990s, Gorz claimed

that workerism had produced "the most astonishing and radical movement of

worker's contestation of the twentieth century" and he clearly still admired their

erstwhile intransigence.415

The affinity between workerism and Gorz's labor theory should be clear.

Both emphasized the need for local parties of workers and incremental, articulated

confrontations with the patronat, rather than placing any faith in the traditional large-

scale political parties of the Left. Both were also strongly in favor of a kind of

vanguardism, in which the most politically radical workers in the heart of the most

highly-developed industries would carry out exemplary strikes in the name of outright

worker's control (i.e. autogestion) of industry. As Gorz put it in his presentation of a

theme issue of Les Temps Modernes on the workerist group Lotta Continua:

"With the concept of "worker autonomy," Lotta Continua gives an

explication and a connecting thread to the new political sensibility which has
manifested in the working class: extreme hardness (durete) of struggle,
attempts (to create) worker organization outside of the official unions, as
well as new themes and areas of struggle, including the rejection of the
hierarchy of salaries, of command, of capitalist productivity, of the division
of labor, and of the disjunction between factory struggles and struggles over
social issues. "Autonomy" signifies that at least a fraction of the working
class is redefining itself as a revolutionary class in attacking capitalism not
just in its effects, but in its foundations: the wage system {salariat) and the

Interview with Andre Gorz in Francoise Gollain, Une Critique du travail: entre ecologie et
socialisme (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 2000), 228.
415
Ibid.
236
 division of labor."'

Ultimately, Lotta Continua sought to break with capitalist social and cultural

forms, not just economic patterns; they attacked "the ensemble of domains in which

the bosses control the initiative and impose their solutions, from health to justice,

education, and the manner to amuse one's self and live."417

Other themes of the journal in this period were clearly the result of Gorz's

editorship, including a few articles on ecology. More frequent were attacks the

structure of the French educational system, inspired by the work of Ivan Illich. Gorz

had some of Illich's work translated for the journal and drew enough attention to

Illich's work that a critique of "Illichism" even appeared in the September - October

1972 issue. Both of these themes would figure prominently in Gorz's books of the

1970s, and he used the journal as a forum to alert a wider audience to their

importance.418

Gorz's editorial dominance at Les Temps Modernes during this period came

about in part because of Sartre's extremely poor health. Sartre was all but blind by

T.M. (almost certainly Gorz), "Presentation," Les Temps Modernes 303 (October 1971): 477.
417
Ibid., 478.
418
On ecology, see "Andre Granou, "A Qui profite l'anti-pollution," Les Temps Modernes 316
(November 1972): 750 - 759 , Stefano Varese, "Au Sujet du colonialisme ecologique," Les Temps
Modernes 321 (April 1973): 1815 - 1826, and later, two articles on the dangers of nuclear power: John
T. Edsall, "La Toxicite du plutonium et de quelques autres actinides," Les Temps Modernes 366
(January 1977): 1088 - 1115, and Dominique Pignon, "LeNucleaire dans tous ses etats," in ibid.: 1130
- 1152. Gorz himself contributed a brief article in the same issue on nuclear power: A.G. (Andre
Gorz), "L'Escroquerie Nucleaire," in ibid.: 1116-1129. On "Illichism," see Herbert Gintise,
"Critique de l'lllichisme," Les Temps Modernes 314 - 315 (September - October 1972): 525 - 557.
On other critiques of the educational system, see Ecole et Societe, "Pour une Strategie Descolarisee,"
Les Temps Modernes 329 (December 1973): 1129 - 1132, the theme issue on "Normalisation de
l'ecole - scolarisation de la societe," Les Temps Modernes 340 (November 1974), and the theme issue
on "Petites Filles en education, Les Temps Modernes 358 (May 1976).
237
the early 1970s and suffered from poor circulation, reduced kidney function,

incontinence, fainting spells and exhaustion, all of which were exacerbated by his

ongoing alcoholism and addiction to tobacco. His attendance at and participation in

Les Temps Modernes'' meetings were periodic at best, leaving Gorz as one of the

senior members of the committee.419 When Sartre finally died of uremia in 1980,

Gorz was one of the small group of immediate friends who came to view the body

and comfort Beauvoir in the hospital.420

One issue of note regarding the relationship of Sartre and Gorz was the

former's strange connection to Pierre Victor, the pseudonym of Benni Levi, a Maoist

militant who made Sartre's acquaintance in the early 1970s. Victor and Sartre

collaborated in a series of discussions that was meant to culminate in a co-authored

book to be titled Pouvoir et Liberte {Power and Freedom), in which Sartre hoped he

would finally be able to specify in precise philosophical language how individual

agents could join together in a shared identity, a "we," in a work he hoped would be

more clear and more compelling than the Critique?11 In 1976, Sartre convinced the

rest of the editorial committee that Victor should become a member, a position that

Victor would hold for just over two years.422 During the course of the decade, Victor

came to exert a powerful hold over Sartre, pushing Sartre toward a shallower and

more extreme form of political radicalism. According to Beauvoir, Sartre's last

419
See Simone de Beauvoir, La Ceremonie des Adieux, 13 - 174.
420
Ibid., 173.
421
Ibid., 139.
422
Victor was first listed as a member of the editorial team of Les Temps Modernes in March of 1977
and last listed in November of 1979.
238
published interview, which was conducted by Victor, amounted to a kind of bullying

session in which Victor dragged Sartre through a series of loaded questions and
423

statements.

The problem was that Gorz was still very much in command of his faculties

and, along with the rest of the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes, came to

detest Victor and to resent Victor's influence over Sartre.424 In Gorz's 1999 interview

with Bo wring, he noted that one of the major reasons for his critique of Marx in

Adieux au proletariat, which he wrote at the end of the 1970s, was "to uncover what

it was in Marx's writings that has led many Marxists - and in particular the European

and North American Maoists during the 1970s - to adopt a religious belief in what I

called 'the gospel according to St. Marx' and in the supposedly messianic mission of

the proletariat."425 Victor's fanaticism and literal-mindedness was repellant to Gorz,

and under Gorz's direction Les Temps Modernes devoted much more space to Italian

varieties of radical leftism, especially workerism, than it did French Maoism.426

423
Ibid., 165 - 167. The interviews were the last published conversations with Sartre before his death.
See Benni Levi and Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'Espoir, maintenant," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 March 1980,
18 - 19, 56 - 60, Benni Levi and Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'Espoir, Maintenant (II),violence et fraternite," Le
Nouvel Observateur, 17 March 1980, 52 - 58, Benni Levi and Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'Espoir, maintenant
(III), Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 March 1980, 55 - 60.
424
Ibid., 162-163.
425
Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrian Legacy, 189. My discussion of Adieux au Proletariat
is in Chapter 5.
426
On the development of French Maoism, see Julian Bourg, "The Red Guards of Paris: French
Student Maoism of the 1960s," History of European Ideas, 31, 2005. The only article published in Les
Temps Modernes in the early 1970s about Maoism was Rossana Rossanda, "Le Marxisme de Mao,"
Les Temps Modernes 293 - 294 (December - January 1970 - 1971): 1202 - 1234, and that was
actually a translation from the Italian by a member of II Manifesto - in other words, from an Italian
workerist perspective on Maoism, not a French sympathizer of Maoism.
239
Le Nouvel Observateur, 1969 - 1974

Gorz thus used his leading editorial role at Les Temps Modernes to introduce

its readership to topics and themes he thought to be of particular importance. Many

of these articles were indeed "hard" - their conclusion was always that the only

conceivable escape from the injustices and penuries of capitalist society was a

revolutionary break, one that would aim to not only seize state power and the means

of production, but remake the entire cultural apparatus surrounding consumption,

education, and medicine. In short, Gorz envisaged a new kind of socialist "New

Man" and argued that if the opportunity afforded by the cultural radicalism of the

early 1970s was missed, the future would only hold destitution and environmental

collapse.427

This was also the case in Gorz's writing at Le Nouvel Observateur during the

same period. As in the 1960s, however, his approach was markedly different at the

two periodicals. Almost all of his articles in Le Nouvel Observateur were very short,

often only one or two pages long, and provided a kind of capsule history of an event

or a political issue. They all closed with a forceful argument that it was capitalism's

systemic status that lay behind the smaller local injustices and problems. No longer

did Gorz discuss the potential utility of revolutionary reforms; his outlook in the early

427
This is my interpretation - Gorz did not use the term "new man." On that concept, see Yinghong
Cheng, Creating the "New Man ".from Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 2009).

240
1970s amounted to an outright demand for revolutionary upheaval, albeit one written

in the pithy, accessible prose of a journalist.

The major ongoing event of the early 1970s in France was the end of the

trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of rapid economic growth, and the ensuing

period of stagnation. Since the end of World War II, the United States had overseen a

global system of exchange and finance that brought unparalleled prosperity to North

America and Western Europe. Energy, in the form of the massive oil fields of the

middle east, Canada, and the US itself, was both cheap and abundant. Despite the

ongoing conflicts between labor and management that so interested Gorz and his

fellow intellectual leftists, there was a widespread compromise between labor and

capital overseen by the governments of all the western nations that did result in

incrementally improved conditions for most workers.428

This system began its decline in the early 1970s. West Germany and Japan

had become genuine competitors of American manufacturing, leading to a state in

which global markets were saturated with goods and the pace of growth simply could

not be sustained. In turn, the event that definitively spelled the end of postwar

prosperity was the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, when OPEC boycotted shipments of oil

to the United States and its allied nations then supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur

428
This and the following discussion are based on Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds., Mapping
the West European Left (London: Verso, 1994), Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., The
Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: the West European Left in the Twentieth Century
(London: Tauris Publishers, 1996), Roger Morgan and Stefano Silvestri, Moderates and Conservatives
in Western Europe: Political Parties, the European Community, and the Atlantic Alliance (London:
Heinemann Education, 1982), and Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of
Leisure (New York: BasicBooks, 1992).
241
War. Prices for oil shot up to unprecedented levels, bringing about a major stock

market crash across the western world. The long-term political-economic effect of

the decline of the early 1970s was the rise of neoliberalism under Thatcher in the UK,

Reagan in the US, and Deng Xiaoping in China, as governments embraced financial

speculation and global outsourcing of labor as responses to the breakdown of the old

Keynesian system.429 In the short term, however, the citizens of the rich countries of

the west were shocked and bewildered by the rapidity of price increases and the

growth of unemployment - Gorz himself noted that prices were climbing at a rate of

0.9% per month by the end of 1972.430

We should note one other important contextual factor behind Gorz's

journalism of the early 1970s: the political strength of the French Left. The 1960s

had been the period of Gaullism triumphant: under the personal leadership of De

Gaulle himself, even a large percentage of the working class voted for his party (the

UDR), and neither the PCF nor the socialists were able to mount a serious electoral

challenge at the national level.431 De Gaulle departed from office in 1969, leaving his

party with his hand-picked successor, Pompidou, a considerably less charismatic

individual. Simultaneously, there was a broad effort by the parties of the Left (again,

the communists and the socialists) to put aside their differences in a united coalition

429
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
430
Michel Bosquet, "Inflation: L'Intendance n'a pas suivi," Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 December 1972,
36-37.
431
There were two socialist parties in 1960s France: the old Section Frangaise de I 'Internationale
Ouvriere (SFIO) and the new, more dynamic Parti Socialiste Unifie (PSU), later dubbed the
Convention des Institutions Republicans (CIR). Ultimately, the socialist parties would unify under
Mitterand in 1971 as the Parti Socialiste (PS.) See R.W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left,
52-68, 156-158.
242
of the Left against the center and right.

The strength of this coalition was bolstered by, first, the increasingly visible

gap between the very wealthy and the working poor, and second, by the economic

downturn of the early 1970s itself.432 The members of the UDR squabbled among

themselves after Pompidou's death in 1973, and in the presidential election of 1974

the Gaullist candidate, Giscard d'Estaing, won the presidential election against the

socialist Mitterand by only 0.3% of the vote, easily the closest national election of the

postwar period in France. The point here is to emphasize that Le Nouvel

Observateur's remarkable growth in its first decade was due in large part to the

waxing strength of the French Left itself, against the backdrop of a growing economic

crisis, and that Gorz was able to reach such a broad audience because he was part of

that movement.

Gorz was well-positioned to report on these changes as they occurred, in part

because he took on a diminished editorial role early in 1969. Prompted by a new

legal requirement that the administration of businesses had to include members who

were not employees, there was a major reorganization of the editorial board at the end

of January.433 As a result, Gorz stepped down from the editorial board of the journal

he had co-founded just five years earlier, leaving the editorial direction of the

magazine to his friend Jean Daniel. Within a year, the journal had divided reporting

duties by areas of specialty. Its previous category of Current Events (L 'Evenement)

432
Ibid., 116-121.
433
See Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 February 1969, 11.
243
was augmented with specific assignments of personnel. Gorz was listed under Social

and Economic Politics (Politique Economique et Sociale) as of the November 30

issue.434 This category was broad enough to encompass the expanse of Gorz's

interests, and while most of his articles were focused on economic issues, he also

continued to write on foreign politics, ecology, medicine, and education.

As the economic situation in France grew worse in the early years of the

1970s, Gorz wrote many articles on the growing crisis and the French state's attempts

to "re-launch" growth.435 The strategy of the state was, essentially, more of the same:

because growth had slowed, every effort would be made to further modernize

industry and increase the pace of productivity. As of 1971, the state's official

economic plan called for an annual increase of 7.5% in industrial productivity and

600,000 new industrial jobs, all in the name of "expansion a la Japanese."436 That

See Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 November 1969, 21.

435
See Michel Bosquet, "Les Responsables," Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 November 1968, 1 8 - 2 0 ,
Michel Bosquet, "Economie: la prime a la speculation," Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 December 1968, 26
- 27, Michel Bosquet, "La Defaite du consommateur," Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 January 1969, 15,
Michel Bosquet, "Impots: moins egale plus," Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 March 1969, 24, Michel
Bosquet, "Devaluation: les dessous de la bataille des prix," Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 August 1969, 4
- 5, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: une recession contagieuse," Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 February
1970, 24 - 25, Michel Bosquet, "Energie: le fiasco du "national-petrolisme"" Le Nouvel Observateur,
8 March 1971, Michel Bosquet, "Finances: mort dans l'apres-midi," Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 August
1971, 13, Michel Bosquet, "Capitalisme: apres le coup de force de Nixon," Le Nouvel Observateur, 23
August 1971, 21 - 23, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: l'agonie d'un empire," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10
July 1972, 2 0 - 2 1 , Michel Bosquet, "Les Mirages de 1'inflation," Le Nouvel Observateur, 11
November 1972, Michel Bosquet, "Inflation: l'intendance n'a pas suivi," Le Nouvel Observateur, 4
December 1972, 36 - 37, Michel Bosquet, "Ce Qui Va Changer," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 January
1973, 22 - 23, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: une situation prerevolutionnaire," Le Nouvel Observateur,
25 March 1973, 26 - 27, Michel Bosquet, "La Fin de l'opulence," Le Nouvel Observateur, 20
November 1973, 32 - 33, Michel Bosquet, "Crise: ce n'est qu'un debut," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10
December 1973, 30 - 32, Michel Bosquet, "Civilisation: profiter de la crise," Le Nouvel Observateur,
24 December 1973, 22 - 23, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: la fin de la belle epoque," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 1 July 1974, 28 - 29.
436
Michel Bosquet, "Le Meilleur Plan du monde," 3 May 1971, 28.
244
plan amounted to a kind of financial tautology; it would be paid for by increased tax

revenues brought about by expansion, which would be paid for by state investment,

and so on.

This "Japanese expansion" did not, of course, occur. Instead, particularly

after oil prices shot up in 1973, job losses and slowed growth combined with inflation

to produce the notorious phenomenon of "stagflation." What is particularly

noteworthy about Gorz's treatment of the crisis was that he welcomed it. In his

articles of the first years of the decade, he scoffed at the state's attempts to reverse the

economic implosion, seeing in stagflation the perfect example of a capitalist crisis of

overproduction, originally described by Marx. By 1973, however, he had adopted the

position that the crisis should be regarded above all as an opportunity for the Left.

The crisis proved that endless economic growth was impossible, and thus that it

suggested the need for a whole new culture of work and of life that broke with that

logic. He wrote "The Commissariat of the Plan [the state body charged with

economic planning] anticipates the beginning of "good" growth for 1976 and the

government, always convinced that growth contains the solution to all problems, asks

nervously how it can inspire patience among the French for two or three years of lean

times...as in the rest of Europe, the premises of a social and political crisis have come

together. The situation is pre-revolutionary: this is not to say that a revolution is

imminent, but simply that the capitalist states cannot continue to reabsorb the

heterogeneous ensemble of popular demands through compromise, development, and

245
political mediations."

Decades earlier, in Le Traitre, Gorz had described his early journalistic

writing for the Citizens of the World bulletin as that of a "poisonous spider in the

middle of its web, decoding the vibrations and rejoicing when things were going

badly."438 That image still resonated with his journalism written in the midst of the

world economic crisis of the early 1970s; his writing took on an almost gleeful tone

as the problems continued. He wrote that the economic "bell tolled not for others, but

for you" and that there were simply no capitalistic mechanisms available to the state

or corporations to restore growth. With oil prices at historic highs, enormous capital

reserves had to be dedicated to energy purchases. That money was, in turn, largely

invested in American bonds by the oil kingdoms of the Middle East. Europe was

simply out of the loop, jettisoning the financial fruit of the last thirty years of growth

and watching as unemployment and inflation grew hand-in-hand.439

Gorz had no difficulty in drawing on both statistics and the analysis of

scholars and business leaders alike to make his points:

"It is no longer only the management of the capitalist economy that is in

question, but its nature and its very laws. This is the position, with a few
caveats, of Jean Denizet, director of studies of the Bank of Paris and the Low
Countries: for the second time in two months, he adopted in his account, in
"The Expansion," the Marxist theory of crises. He placed the fall in the rate
of profit at the foundation of all the current impasses. Overinvestment,
pollution, the growing scarcity and cost of "natural" resources, the gigantism
of industry and cities, all of it arrives at the same result: the direct and

Michel Bosquet, "Economie: Uune Situation prerevolutionnaire," 26 - 27.

' Andre Gorz, The Traitor, 246.
Michel Bosquet, "La Fin de la belle epoque," 28.
246
 indirect cost of additional investments tends to exceed the gains that they
bring about; the yield of capitalist growth becomes negative."440

Thus, the crisis demanded a new system, not slight modifications of the

existing one. This point was driven home by the French state's official response to

the energy crisis: while encouraging increased efficiency in industry, it also sought to

shift to the large-scale reliance on nuclear energy for France's power needs. In the

midst of the crisis, however, and even while dismissing the concerns of scientists

about the safety and environmental effects of nuclear energy, the nuclear "solution"

could not be effected for years to come. There were only two alternatives: either

"The mode of production and way of life remain unchanged. In this case, there will

be stagnation of the quality of life from the point of view of global consumption of

material goods and degradation of the quality of life from the qualitative point of

view., .or the mode of production and of life are profoundly transformed, in which

stagnant material production from the quantitative point of view nevertheless permits

a qualitative amelioration. This amelioration can be obtained by the development of

collective goods and services, the greater durability of products...a non-oppressive

organization of labor, the equalization of conditions of life and of revenues, etc."441

In short, Gorz's position on the crisis was that capitalism was no longer

working, even capitalist leaders acknowledged that fact, and it was high time for a

new socialist solution. Within that position, however, were two subsidiary ones: the

concept of the shortened working week and the importance of the ecological setting
440
Ibid., 29.
441
Michel Bosquet, "Energie: l'inevitable rationnement," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 July 1974, 30.
247
of human industry. Gorz's economic reporting brought him into close contact with

union leaders and militants. He followed strikes and negotiations between unions, the

state, and the patronat closely and personally interviewed union members about their

activities and perspectives. Throughout his reporting, the major theme of Gorz's

writing was that the electoral system was not sufficient in redressing the needs of

workers, that only direct action and resistance could result in any meaningful

changes.

Of course, as of the early 1970s unions could no longer make the argument

that workers were entitled to a larger portion of the wealth generated by economic

growth, since that growth had stagnated. As has been noted, revolutionary rhetoric

had long served the major French unions as a kind of ideological backdrop to their

pursuit of fairly pedestrian demands for wage increases. The larger economic crisis

posed a serious problem to unions, as they found themselves fighting to preserve what

they had won in the past, rather than pursuing new goals for yet higher wages or

greater involvement of workers in factory decision-making.

Out of this conundrum, Gorz arrived at a position he would repeat many times

in his future writing: since economic growth could no longer be taken for granted,

and since growth was also inherently destructive to the ecosystem, unions and the

state should both renounce attempts to "re-launch" growth itself. Instead of somehow

pursuing a renewal of growth, existing jobs should be more fairly and equitably

distributed. The method to achieve that goal should be the reduced working-week,

one limited to thirty or even twenty hours per worker, but held to existing wage
248
standards. Businesses would thus be forced to hire more workers overall and wealth

would be more evenly distributed, despite the reduction in the absolute number of

hours worked.442

The shortened working-week was really just a component of Gorz's larger

concern with the ideology of growth inherent to capitalism. The strange pleasure he

took in the crisis was due to the fact that, to him, the crisis itself demonstrated that the

very concept of unending, unstoppable growth was predicated on faulty empirical

foundations. It was impossible for growth to continue forever as it had for the last

thirty years, and furthermore ecology demonstrated convincingly that if growth did

continue, it would result in disasters far greater than unemployment and inflation. In

short, the crisis of the early 1970s proved that his enormous hostility to capitalism

was grounded in hard facts, not just sentiment.

Critique de la Division du Travail

In 1973, Gorz edited and contributed to a volume, Critique de la division du

travail {Critique of the Division of Labor), concerning the cultural and social

structures that the capitalist division of labor both relied on and perpetuated. It was

442
See Michel Bosquet, "Economie: l'imperatif industriel," Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 March 1971,
25, Michel Bosquet, "La Journee de quatre heures," Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 September 1971, 18,
Michel Bosquet, "Economie: chomage: la grande peur," Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 November 1971,
28 - 29, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: le sursis de 1972," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 December 1971,
1 6 - 1 7 , Michel Bosquet, "Economie: le "petit livre rouge" de Sicco Mansholt," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 10 April 1972, 36 - 37, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: mieux vaut moins mais mieux," Le
Nouvel Observateur, 12 February 1973, 34 - 35, Michel Bosquet, "Economie: reinventer l'avenir," Le
Nouvel Observateur, 4 March 1973,46 - 48
249
his first attempt to join together his new focus on leftist culture and his continued

insistence on the need for a practical political project of and for the Left. Its major

innovation in his thought was an updated consideration of alienation within

capitalism, of the immanent logics at work within both technology and the social

hierarchies of work.

Gorz argued that the subdivision of tasks within western industrial capitalism

was primarily a strategy by management to dominate and control workers rather than

simply a factor dictated by technical requirements. In the workplace, "the

organization and techniques of production" were linked directly to "the matrix of

hierarchical rapports of domination and of command."443 The "gigantism" of

industry in the west required workers who could be forced to hyper-specialize,

schools to acculturate the workers beforehand, and large-scale bureaucratized

management to control them. Thus, what Illich had called the "logic of tools" applied

to industry in general. He wrote "Briefly, the link between social production and

individual consumption, between individual work and social consumption, between

the individual and society is broken at the level of sensible experience; the individual

is never "at home" anywhere: he encounters the tools and the results of social

production as "an exterior foreign power" which "escapes from his control" and

which "subjugates him in the place he uses it."" The quotes were from Marx's The

German Ideology, and Gorz framed his discussion in direct reference to Marx's

Andre Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, 16.

250
assertion that "to subdivide a man is to assassinate him."

The goal of the volume was to trace precisely the "logic of tools" at work in

the division of labor in industrial capitalism. The great threat was that, despite the

strength of the cultural revolution represented by the student movement and the

radicalism of unions like the CFDT, if a new culture and social organization did not

accompany "communism," the hierarchy implicit in the division of labor would be

reinstated "automatically" by the means of production themselves.445 While he did

not write specifically about the Soviet Union in his introduction, the points he had

made seven years earlier in Mexico were still applicable: by focusing on the

expansion of industry, the USSR had doomed itself to a parallel hierarchy rather than

a potential liberation from hierarchy itself.

Gorz was clearly still committed to the idea of worker's control of their own

labor, but he was forced to modify his earlier enthusiasm for autogestion. Gorz

conceded that even a fully worker-controlled production process would not change

the ultimate orientation of capitalist industry. The goal of capitalistic enterprise,

profit, was always "external" to the workers themselves. Even if workers controlled

the entire production process, they would not control the products being made, nor

the purpose of those products in the market. The point, per Gorz, was moot at any

444
Ibid., 9. Gorz's citations from Marx were from the French editions of the Germany Ideology and
Capital Vol. I. See also Jacques Julliard's posthumous tribute to Gorz: see Jacques Julliard, "La Mort
Choisi," NouvelObs.com, 25 September 2007,
<http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/actualites/20070925.OBS6530/?xtmc=gorz&xtcr=9>.
445
Note that Gorz credited the CFDT with being one of the most important elements of the French
radical Left of the 1970s, as many of its members actively sought to create dialogue between the labor
movement, the ecological movement, and the broader currents of "cultural revolution." See Gorz in
Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: a Critical Introduction, 126.
251
rate since management would only accept even limited concessions to autogestion if

it was forced to do so by the intransigence of the workers, something that it tried to

prevent precisely through the functional separation of workers in the factory.

Industrial organization "could be read" as the imposition of control over the worker

more so than the creation of the most efficient system of production.446

Some factories, primarily in Italy and Sweden, had indeed attempted to

include workers in more decision-making at the managerial level by the early 1970s.

According to Gorz, those experiments were of secondary importance, since the

system as a whole limited them and their efficacy. He continued to insist, as he had

throughout the 1960s, that local struggles had to be joined in a larger articulation that

rejected the logic of the system as a whole. "The contestation of the capitalist

organization of work implies the contestation of the system in its ensemble. It is only

by making the contestation explicit and autonomous that one will prevent the

reformist reduction and the recuperation of worker's resistance to the despotism of the

factory."447

The factory, however, was no longer necessarily the primary site of resistance

to capitalism - the working class could no longer be unified in political theory nor in

practical politics on its behalf simply in terms of conditions of work; "work" was now

too diverse and disparate a phenomenon to be contained within the traditional

structure of industrial unions with their shop stewards, committees, and appeals to

446
Andre Gorz, Critique de la division du travail (Paris: Editions du Seuil), 1973), 95 - 96.
447
Ibid., 101.
252
better and safer conditions. Thus, the cultural shift he described was actually a

necessity for the labor movement; it had to demonstrate to workers outside of

industrial production that their interests were linked with those of traditional workers,

that the right to autonomy within the workplace and the rejection of hyper-specialized

positions was something that all working people should fight for together.

Following Illich, Gorz argued that an emerging priority for the labor

movement was its educational program. Studies by the Italian socialists Sergio

Garavini and Antonio Lettieri had demonstrated that the primary result of the French

and Italian educational systems were to inculcate a system that rewarded deference to

authority and respect for hierarchy.449 French education's real purpose, per Gorz, was

to demarcate those students who were able to fit in to and accept social hierarchies

from those who rejected them or were incapable of assimilating.450 As he had noted,

the labor movement had hoped to incorporate the new groups of elite workers,

including technicians, scientists, white-collar workers in the liberal professions, and

so on, as a kind of new vanguard that could use their qualifications to force capital to

deal more fairly with the movement as a whole. According to Gorz, the problem with

this formulation was that elite workers were educated in such a way as to be almost

completely assimilated into capital's preferred forms of social organization: "because

of (their) tradition and... education, the spontaneous ideology of this group is

technocratic and corporatist." The diversity in the forms of "work" thus increasingly
448
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 154 - 155.
449
Ibid., 156. Lettieri's article was of those published in Critique de la division du travail.
450
As an aside, while he cited several of his contemporary thinkers in describing the institutional role
of education in inculcating respect for authority, Louis Althusser was conspicuously absent.
253
undermined the traditional labor movement's efficacy.

Finally, Gorz addressed the role of unions in the post-'68 environment. Gorz

had argued for years that the most important attribute of unions was their autonomy

from political parties. It was by representing workers directly based on their lived

experiences in the workplace that unions remained a legitimate political structure. In

the midst of '68, some radicals had come to believe, however, that unions were too

entrenched in bureaucracy and hierarchy themselves and that they should be

dissolved and replaced with more directly-democratic forms of worker organizations.

Gorz cautioned against this line of reasoning by pointing out that there had to be a

dialectical relationship between leftist theorists, including the new self-styled

revolutionary avant-garde, and unions. The former held unions accountable to their

professed role as the expression of worker interests in the name of the long-term goal

of a revolutionary transformation of society, but the latter were the best-positioned

institutions to continue meaningful short and medium-term struggles.451

There was a certain wariness in Gorz's post-'68 writing on the labor

movement. He was both energized by the antipathy to capitalism demonstrated by

May's participants and discouraged by the failure of the organized labor movement to

pursue radical reforms, let alone revolutionary ones. As a whole, Gorz's writing

shifted away from its previous focus on labor in the early 1970s and broadened its

scope to become a kind of cultural critique, still rooted in Marxist political economy

but having less and less to do with the working class. Gorz was increasingly

451
Ibid., 163-167.
254
interested in the ways that capitalism perpetuated itself in institutions and cultural

forms (schools, hospitals, infrastructure) and in the possibilities to break with those

built-in logics.

Education

In 1971, Gorz published an article concerning the status of science and

technical knowledge within socialism and socialist strategy. In it, Gorz drew

attention to the changes then taking place regarding the attitude of leftists to science

itself- from regarding science as "positive and neutral," leftists were becoming

cognizant of the ways in which the forms of reason that underlay science and

technological progress were in fact antithetical to the cultural aspirations of socialism.

This was an important element not only in Gorz's emerging interest in political

ecology, but in his more rigorous treatment of the logics at work within capitalism,

above and beyond his work situated directly within Marxism.

Traditionally, socialists had seen in science a necessary element of progress

toward human liberation. After all, it was industrialism that had unleashed the

"Promethean" forces Marx saw as finally allowing humanity to permanently

overcome scarcity and remake the world for the better. "Said otherwise, the

ensemble of professions, of competences and of capacities of work which converge in

capitalist production are considered recoverable, in their articulation and their

hierarchical structure, by the society in transition to socialism, without the necessity

255
of any ideological rupture, of "cultural revolutions," of professional, intellectual, and

moral conversions."452 The question, of course was whether "science and techniques

of production carry the imprint of capitalist rapports of production and division of

labor."453

A related question had to do with the status of technicians themselves,

"workers" defined by their technical competence and the degree of independent

initiative they had to exercise in the creation of new products and the refinements

they introduced into processes of production. While he maintained that the

preeminent goal of the industrial division of labor, particularly in the factory, was to

prevent initiative on the part of workers, educated technicians clearly did not fit into

that model. Thus, Gorz asked "is the definition of qualifications and competences

first of all ideological and social, to prolong and consolidate the social division of

labor?"454

According to Gorz, the real role of technicians within capitalist industry was,

first, to reduce the cost of production by eliminating living workers in favor of

automation, and second, to create new versions of products that made older ones

obsolete. Both of these arguments were clearly inspired by Marx's analysis of fixed

versus relative capital, in which capitalist industries constantly refined their

techniques of production and tried to eliminate the burden of salaries for actual

workers, in the context and under pressure from competition in the market. Thus,

452
Andre Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, 252.
453
Ibid., 254.
454
Ibid., 255.
256
technicians played a key role: "Briefly, the principle function of research and

innovation is to oppose the tendency for profit to fall and to create new occasions of

profitable investment."455 In other words, the work of technicians was to prevent

precisely what Marx had diagnosed as the fatal flaw of all capitalist enterprises, the

falling rate of profit, through reinvention and adaptation.

As he had in his series of lectures at the National School of Social Science in

Mexico City half a decade earlier, Gorz cast doubt on the idea that "techno-scientific

workers" were somehow a "natural" avant-garde for the labor movement. In fact,

technicians were often tasked with monitoring and controlling less skilled workers

and, in doing so, were encouraged to regard themselves as distinct from and superior

to their less-skilled counterparts. Likewise, as the workers tasked with increasing

efficiency, technicians were inherently beholden to the pernicious logic of the

capitalist workplace. "Efficiency...is (really) the greatest possible quantity of a given

product with the maximum amount of human energy that can be obtainedfor the least

amount of wages." By that definition, "efficiency" was precisely equivalent to the

hardship of workers as a group, and technicians were responsible for the techniques to

achieve that hardship.456

Gorz trenchantly argued that technicians, in their roles within capitalist

industry, were ultimately the watchdogs and the hatchet men of the whole system, not

the potential forefront of the labor movement. They developed and implemented the

Ibid., 258.
Ibid., 266. Italics in original.
257
means to achieve "the ends which are not those of the worker but those of

capital... This is why all of those who, under the cover of their technical competence,

are called to survey the implementation of production in fact work to perpetuate the

hierarchical division of work and the rapports of capitalist production."*51 In a pithy

and insightful note, Gorz described his own interview with a factory technician whose

entire job was to monitor the actual workers "under" him. When asked what

differentiated him and his competences and training from those he surveyed, the

technician answered that it was his education, culminating in his command of

differential calculus. Gorz noted that differential calculus had nothing to do with this

technician's job, that in fact, it was merely the "cultural symbol" of his class-based

superiority to the workers. Likewise, if the workers at this factory had been allowed

to branch out from their hyper-specialized tasks, Gorz argued that they would have

been capable of fulfilling almost any of the higher-level tasks within the workplace.

He noted that "the definition of a mystification...is that it can be perceived as such if

lifted by a change in consciousness, an "ideological conversion" in a situation of

sharp conflict."458 Gorz hoped that such mystifications as the false competence of the

factory mathematician would come to light in a true labor conflict.

The implications were clear: unless there was some kind of cultural shift, a

program of education and outreach directed by the labor movement and its allies at

technicians, they would by default be among the most conservative members of any

Ibid., 274. Italics in original.

Ibid., 277.
258
workforce. For the Left, it was in the field of education and "outreach" in the sense

described above that technicians might be won over. Likewise, the fact that job

prospects for young technicians emerging from their specialized schools were

increasingly dismal, as of 1971, could potentially inspire them to criticize the system

as a whole. "The attack against the hierarchy of the factory must prolong itself by the

attack against the education system which is its matrix and thus produce a crisis in the

capacity of the capitalist system to reproduce its social rapports and its hierarchical

division of labor...this is why, in a communist perspective, the reunification of

education and of production, of work and of culture is an essential requirement."459

Gorz did not limit his considerations of education to his books - some of his

most controversial articles were written on the subject as well. The Events of May

emboldened Gorz and sharpened his rhetoric, at least for the first few years of the

1970s. One particularly noteworthy, albeit brief, article in Les Temps Modernes

neatly captures this phenomenon: Gorz's "detruire l'universite" (destroy the

university). Here, Gorz argued that post-'68 reforms of the French educational

system were pointless, because they did nothing to resolve its paradoxical character.

On the one hand, with the explosion of postwar university attendance, the promise of

an actual meritocracy that potentially undermined class relations, capitalism's training

facility had become a site of potential resistance. On the other hand, however, neither

was the university curriculum directed at exploring new and better social or cultural

forms. He wrote "In brief, it is a place where one cannot pass his or her time in a

459
Ibid., 286 - 287.
259
useful, nor an interesting, manner. No variety of reform can change the situation. It

does not therefore have to do with reforming the university, but only with destroying

it in order to destroy all at once the separated culture of the people it incarnates (that

of the mandarins) and the global stratification of which it remains, despite everything,

the instrument."460

Gorz's long-standing dislike of the posturing of France's academic elite was

given free reign. The whole university apparatus, he claimed, was of a kind with

factory organization, perpetuating the division of labor. Unlike the factory, however,

the university existed in an uncomfortable limbo between being just another

apparatus of capitalism or an actual meritocratic challenge to the capitalist social

order. In the end, that limbo was, in fact, a pointless ghetto within the larger social

field. In some of his strongest and most provocative language, Gorz claimed that

only violence "is capable of breaking, if only temporarily, the encirclement of the

university ghetto and of posing a problem of which the reformists of all stripes (de

tout poll) prefer to ignore."461 Ultimately, the radicalism of the student movement

emboldened Gorz to claim that freely-organized underground centers of teaching and

exchange were preferable to the entire education system as it existed in France.462

This article was important in the history of Les Temps Modernes as a journal

in that it led to the resignation of one of its core members: Jean-Baptiste Pontalis.

460
Andre Gorz, "Detruire l'Universite," Les Temps Modernes 285 (April 1970): 1557.
461
Ibid., 1558.
462
Howard Davies drew attention to "detruire l'universite" but incorrectly attributed its provenance to
a directly Sartrian inspiration, rather than Gorz's own uncomfortable relationship with the French
academic scene. See Howard Davies, Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes', 184, 194.
260
Pontalis had a formal academic background and felt increasingly alienated and

marginalized by the anti-academism of Gorz and the rest of the board.463 It also

inaugurated the phase of Les Temps Modernes' greatest radicalism, the one that

Lanzmann decried in his posthumous piece on Gorz decades later. In short, the early

1970s saw Gorz at his most rhetorically unrestrained, believing as he did that the

cultural flowering of the late 1960s might contain within it the kernel for true political

transformation.

How should we evaluate Gorz's ongoing consideration of labor and

capitalism, as of the early 1970s? In particular, did anything really distinguish it from

his comparable work of the 1960s? I would note two innovations. First, Gorz wrote

in the hope that the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Europe and

the United States had created an environment in which unprecedented numbers of

people, particularly among the youth, could potentially recognize the unity of the

capitalist system. He repeatedly ended his articles in this era by gesturing toward the

possibility that each worker, student, or technician won over to the Left would realize

that to demand reform in limited, local ways was necessarily linked to the demand for

a wholesale restructuring of society itself. Second, in his growing focus on what

Louis Althusser called "Institutional State Apparatuses" like schools and the medical

industry (considered in more detail below), Gorz began to move away from his focus

See Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise, 238 - 240. Boschetti incorrectly asserted that
another member of the team, Bernard Pingaud, also resigned in protest. In fact, Pingaud remained on
the board for several more years.
261
on the conventional setting of Marxist inquiry: factory work.

Ecology

It was also during the early 1970s that Gorz discovered ecology, and he would

soon become one of the most vocal advocates for a fusion of ecological concerns with

the leftist critique of capitalism. In 1973, Gorz and Dorine met and became friends

with Michel Roland and Robert Laponche, the editors of two new ecological journals,

La Guelle Ouvert and Le Sauvage, and Gorz soon contributed articles to the latter.

The same year, Gorz finally met Ivan Illich in person, and they soon became friends

and colleagues.465 As noted above, Gorz was already impressed by Illich's insightful

attacks on the entire "megamachine" of industrial capitalism, which poisoned the

natural world through pollution and human bodies through industrial medicine, and

Gorz became Illich's greatest champion in France. Gorz also used Illich's themes and

arguments in his own initial considerations of ecology and, particularly, his own

increasingly forceful attacks on western medicine.

The first book to bear both of the pseudonyms (Bosquet and Gorz) of Gerard

Horst was Ecologie et Politique; a brief note at its beginning called attention to the

fact that the two facets of the individual, Bosquet the journalist and Gorz the

philosopher, were finally joined in the project of political ecology: "Here Gorz and

464
For Althusser's concepts of ideology and ideological state apparatuses, see Louis Althusser, On
Ideology (London: Verso, 2008).
465
Andre Gorz, Lettre a D.,64.
262
Bosquet are reunited under one unique signature which marks a turn in the reflection

of an author considered in France and internationally as one of the best theoreticians

of socialism in the industrial countries. This book can be considered as an

"introduction to the critique of political ecology""466 A similar note would introduce

Gorz's subsequent publication (little longer than a pamphlet) Ecologie et Liberte

{Ecology and Freedom) in 1977.467 These were, in turn, the last books to be

published under the Bosquet pseudonym - all of Gorz's subsequent writing featured

this combination of journalistic detail and philosophical concern for meaning, and all

would be published as works of Andre Gorz.

The French ecological movement grew rapidly in the late 1960s, particularly

after the Events of May. It was comparable to the ecology movements of the rest of

Western Europe and the United States, a confluence of scientific concern with

diminishing natural resources as well as more diffuse counter-cultural impulses that

"rediscovered" the natural world as a spiritual sanctuary from modern life.468

Environmental concerns rapidly shifted from the fringe to the mainstream of French

society by the early 1970s; President Pompidou created the Ministere de la Protection

de la Nature et de I'Environnement (Ministry of Nature and the Protection of the

Environment) in 1971, the same year that 15,000 protesters demonstrated against a

466
Andre Gorz / Michel Bosquet, Ecologie et Politique (Editions Galilee, 1975).
467
Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz), Ecologie et Liberte (Editions Galilee, 1975), 9.
468
See Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960
- 2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially Part II. Note also that the French
terms "ecologie" and "ecologiste" are comparable to "environmental" and "environmentalist" in
English; I will note instances in which Gorz made distinctions between them.
263
new nuclear reactor at Bugey. While most French citizens fell short of denouncing

industrial society and marching off to join a commune, it is clear that environmental

awareness grew considerably from 1968 to 1975, the precise period in which Gorz

"discovered" ecology and began writing articles on the subject.

It is important to note that Gorz was never a "deep" ecologist, a green

anarchist, or an enthusiast of industrial sabotage. From his earliest writings on

ecology, he insisted that the ecological movement was a stage in a broader anti-

capitalist critique, not an end unto itself. Environmental degradation was a result of

industrial expansion, and if necessary capitalism could devise its own defenses

against it without an ecologically-inspired politics. For ecology to be anything more

than yet another corrective mechanism, ultimately playing into and lengthening

capitalism's reign, it had to be a single component of a larger project that contested

capitalism's core logics. The most important aspect of ecology, to Gorz, was the fact

that it suggested the existence of objective physical limits to industrial expansion;

whereas socialism had always been about how economy and society "should"

function, ecology required changes in patterns of production and consumption.

At the same time, it would be an error to conclude that Gorz tried to substitute

an ecological requirement for a leftist politics of choice. In his initial inquiries into

ecology in the early 1970s, particularly his participation in a 1972 forum titled

Ecologie et Revolution, Gorz sought to demonstrate that ecology necessitated

revolutionary politics, that ecological imperatives themselves would in fact bring

469
Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz), Ecologie et Politique, 8 2 - 9 2 .
264
about a revolutionary transformation. He quickly revised that opinion, however,

noting in his 1997 interview that "You should never, never, try to found a political

movement that intends to be emancipatory or revolutionary on a material necessity,

never.. If it is a material necessity it cannot be an emancipatory movement. You can

only take advantage of a necessity in order to further something that you have wanted

any way... You cannot found revolution on science. So I am very self-critical of my

original writings on ecology. But I very quickly changed from the first articles,

which were published in 1972, stressing the need for an ecology that was based upon

aspirations of self-determination and autonomy, rather than necessity."470

In fact, Ecologie et Revolution was the centerpiece of the June 19 edition of

Le Nouvel Observateur, printed as a supplement within the main body of the

magazine. It contained the transcripts of the lectures given at a large public meeting

organized by the Club De L 'OBS, the journal's new forum for public debates. At the

meeting, Gorz (again, as Bosquet) was the only participant representing the journal

itself. The two biggest attractions were Sicco Mansholt, president of the European

Economic Commission and a newly-won convert to ecology, and Herbert Marcuse,

typically cited as one of the most important philosophical influences on the French

student movement during and after the Events of May.471

Many of Gorz's subsequent articles and books about ecology would develop

themes he first considered at this meeting. The example of Mansholt, in particular,

470
Andre Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction, 125.
Italics in original.
471
See Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse: An Intellectual Biography, 184 - 192.
265
prompted Gorz to grapple with the possibility of a technocratic answer to ecological

degradation. Gorz summarized his reaction to Mansholt at the meeting itself: "After

having recognized in Sicco Mansholt a possible ideological ally, I see in him a

serious political adversary. What does he propose? Simply to bet on the moral

conversion of the managers of big capital and on an enlightened intervention of the

machines of the state, both national and supra-national, in order to realize a post-

industrial and post-capitalist civilization."472

This was, indeed, the essence of Mansholt's ideas regarding ecology. He had

noted earlier in the meeting that even large firms were confronting the reality of

environmental damage and the un-sustainability of their current business practices in

the long term. His hope was that a large-scale management effort on the part of a

supra-national body like the European Community or United Nations could check

those practices while also pursuing programs to slow global population growth.

Mansholt proposed a kind of high-technocratic solution, of central planning and

direction, up to and including regulations that force companies to hold steady and not

grow, from profit to what Marx called "revenue."

To Gorz, this program was hopelessly naive. "In sum, I ask myself, what the

devil (qui diable) would be able to bring about this economic politics? The state

apparatus? From where would it get the means? What social forces would support it

to promulgate its laws and regulation and, most of all, to apply them, to impose them

472
Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz) et. al., "Ecologie et Revolution," Le Nouvel Observateur, supplement
to 19 June 1972, v.
266
on capitalists and bring about their (capitalists') extinction? Is this not completely

Utopian? Do the reforms conceived by Mansholt not suppose a revolution?"413 In

short, Gorz argued, the only viable check on ecological destruction was a truly radical

political intervention, one directed from below and not relying on the goodwill of

capitalist enterprise and the wishful thinking of well-meaning bureaucrats. Marcuse

warmly agreed: "Michel Bosquet has formulated it well: ecological logic is the

negation pure and simple of capitalist logic; one cannot save the Earth in the context

of capitalism..."474

Gorz came to explore the points of confluence between ecology and socialism,

then, rather than simply insisting in a millenarian mode that only revolution could

save the world from disaster. The problem was that the confluence of the socialist

ethic and the ecological requirement were certainly compatible and could serve to

reinforce one another, but ecological concerns could still be appropriated by

capitalism instead. Here, Gorz cited the OPEC crisis of 1973 as an example of an

issue that arose out of a matrix of political and environmental factors, but which was

swiftly absorbed by capitalism. Likewise, citing the European context, Gorz noted

that even the Right acknowledged the scientific correctness of ecological warnings

about the limitations of natural resources and the economic threats posed by

unchecked pollution, and French industry was already taking steps to shore up

Herbert Marcuse in ibid., viii.

267
supplies and mitigate fallout.

Gorz focused his ecological articles on intersections between ecology as-such

and politics: areas where decision-making at the state level had a direct impact on the

natural world and the humans living in it. He was relentlessly hostile to the French

state's plan to shift to reliance on nuclear energy following the OPEC crisis, arguing

that it should instead explore the clean alternatives of solar and wind power. He

wrote an expose on factory farming, still relatively new in French agriculture, and on

the threat to human health posed by the "poisoned meat" produced in factory farms.

He warned his readers that the Earth's growing population could not sustain a

European standard of living, and that it was essential for people to move away from

consumer culture. In short, he became a champion of ecological concerns writ large

in the two major leftist journals he was part of.476

Gorz wrote in hopes that ecology could inspire genuine alternatives to

capitalism and its concomitant consumer culture. Gorz's writing of the 1970s

occasionally held clues to his "Utopian" visions of different forms of social

organization, many of them considerably less fanciful than, for instance, a Fourierist

Phalanx.477 Primarily, Gorz advocated semi-autonomous communities that broke

with the economic and environmental circuits of production and consumption by

475
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 1 2 - 1 4 .
476
See Michel Bosquet, "Le Scandale d'un ete," Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 August 1973, 18 - 20,
Michel Bosquet, "Le Soleil au detail," Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 May 1973, 62, Michel Bosquet,
"Energie: 1'inevitable rationnement," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 July 1974, 29 - 30, Michel Bosquet,
"La Viande Empoisonnee," Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 July 1974, 2 0 - 2 1 , Michel Bosquet,
"Population: douze milliards d'hommes," Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 September 1974, 30 - 32.
477
On the Fourierist Phalanx, see Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 241 -257.
268
consciously choosing to produce their own food, goods, and power as much as

possible. Key to this vision was planning: vehicles held in common, solar and wind

power that could be managed and maintained by members of the community, and a

culture that encouraged personal growth outside of the parameters of consumerism.478

There is a bit of irony in these communitarian visions, in that Gorz remained a

deeply private, introverted individual who was in no hurry to personally join a

commune. Despite that fact, there is no question that Gorz was impressed by the

changes individuals were making in their own lives, the deliberate decisions to live in

a manner compatible with the long-term survival of both the natural world and,

ultimately, humankind. Gorz was sensitive to the accusation that attempts to break

with mainstream modes of life were naive and "utopian." The true "utopia" was the

belief among capitalist economists that constant economic growth could be

maintained indefinitely against a finite and shrinking pool of natural resources,

placing infinite faith in the ability of science to invent its way out of finitude. He

wrote "the utopia consists in believing that growth of social production can continue

to bring about well-being, and that it is physically possible."479

Taking ecological limits as a given, there were two possible solutions to the

environmental impasse capitalism had reached. Society could either be reorganized

to dramatically reduce its demands on the environment, or the state could introduce a

kind of "technofascism," arbitrating the necessary restraints and limitations from

478
An example is Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 1 4 - 1 6 .
479
Ibid., 20.
269
above. Nothing about ecology as a field, either as a branch of environmental science

or a philosophical concern with the place of humans in the natural world, was actually

antithetical to the technofascist solution, which could, after all, achieve the same

results as a voluntary change in consumption patterns. In contrast to this value-

neutral sense of ecology, Gorz preferred the term "ecologism," which used ecology to

orient itself but only as one component of a larger conception of anti-capitalist

logic.480

Where ecology was indispensable to socialism was in breaking with the logic

of maximization and the tools that accompanied it. Logics were, according to Gorz,

built into the tools society used. To take an example Gorz was increasingly interested

in, nuclear power could not exist without a massive bureaucracy, with its

accompanying hierarchy, and there was no way that nuclear energy could be

produced locally or on a small scale. The logic of global circuits of exchange and the

absence of local autonomy were, in that sense, built in to nuclear power. Ecology's

suggestion of hard limits implied a break with nuclear power not only because of the

danger of meltdown and the problem of waste disposal, but because the entire social

edifice surrouding nuclear power was antithetical to the local and restrained

implications of ecology.481

To Gorz, ecologism was first and foremost a shift to the local. The entire

social edifice of capitalism expanded outward, seeking new markets and new sources

480
Ibid., 24. In his work of the 1990s, Gorz would employ the term "eco-social logic" instead.
481
Ibid., 2 5 - 2 7 .
270
of materials, in the process not only undermining the local and national frames of

labor relations but destroying the ecosystem. Education forced students to specialize

and focused their studies on skills that could be remunerated in the workplace,

reducing thought itself to a commodity. Political parties sold their watered-down

ideas to electorates, playing rhetoric against reality. In sum, Gorz argued, the whole

question of autogestion as antithesis to capitalist society would only make sense if it

sought to repurpose modern technology to the needs of local communities; tools and

production would have to change along with social organization. Ecology, by

demonstrating hard limits to expansion, implied a kind of purposeful, deliberate

contraction of production.482

In one of the very few passages in which Gorz went beyond fairly brief

discussions of community organizations and workshops as examples of social forms

and logics he found inspirational and exemplary, he ended the first section of

Ecologie et Politique with a fairly elaborate description of how everything could

change if the French awoke one morning and spontaneously embraced ecologism.

The opening of this passage should be quoted at length:

"As they wake this morning, the French ask themselves what new upheavals
await them. Since the elections and while waiting for the transition in power,
the occupations of businesses have multiplied. Along with the jobless youth
who, for ten years, have worked to occupy closed factories in order to
organize them in "wild production" of all sorts of useful articles, licensed
workers, retired people and students have come to join in growing numbers.
Empty buildings have been transformed into communes, into productive
cooperatives or into "wild schools." In the schools, students have worked to

Ibid., 4 4 - 5 1 .
271
 import their new forms of knowledge and, with or without the cooperation of
teachers, to build rabbit pens, and carp and trout ponds, along with machines
483
to work metal and wood."

Gorz's vision, titled "One Possible Utopia Among Others," continued, with

the president and prime minister proclaiming that private cars will be phased out, that

inspired by the success of the occupations, all of France would strive to work less but

better and more usefully, to break permanently with the economy of growth in favor

of the economy of sufficiency. Local communities would organize committees to

attend to the logistics of the transition and to chart out future plans for ever-more

efficient and self-sufficient local economic organization. Television would be limited

to two hours a week on communal screens. Ultimately, wages would come to be

based on the number of hours worked, not the prestige of the job position.484

I would draw attention to a few specific factors in Gorz's vision of a possible

Utopia. It comes about within the national frame and the state is the primary

mechanism by which society is reorganized. By the time it happens, the majority of

the French are aware of the need to live differently and resistance is scattered and

ineffective. Industries are nationalized in the name of local control, and the

potentially messy logistics of how France might be rendered autonomous from global

networks are left to small think tanks. Two of Gorz's pet-peeves, televisions and

automobiles, are strictly limited, the latter to be eliminated within a year and replaced

with efficient mass-transit. Access to luxury is to be earned through hours of labor,

483
Ibid., 53 - 54. This remarkable sketch of a Gorzian Utopia was originally published as Michel
Bosquet, "Le Coup de Foudre du 4 septembre," Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September 1975, 30-31.
484
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 53 - 60.
272
not Francs in the bank account. In one brief passage, Gorz presented his most

comprehensive vision of the cultural and political shift for which he hoped; he would

retreat from the possibilities of liberation suggested in Ecologie et Politique just a few

years later and would never again describe a "utopia" in as much detail.

The rest of Ecologie et Politique was a series of short articles, many

previously published from 1971 - 1975 in Le Sauvage, while others took the form of

fairly brief sketches, drafts of ideas Gorz had considered as he read more deeply in

ecological theory. As a group, the articles dealt primarily with two related themes:

following Gramsci, what we now refer to as capitalist hegemony, and the role

ecologism could play in contradicting and undermining that hegemony.485 In this,

Gorz began to explore new avenues of potential resistance to capitalism that had

increasingly little to do with a revolution in the Marxist sense. The most significant

new theme of his work in this stage was his consideration of whether or not the

working class was a viable site of potential resistance any longer.

Following Illich, as well as two other French scholars, Jacques Attali and

Marc Guillaume, Gorz argued that the claim that the lives of the working class had

improved thanks to economic growth was simply wrong, thanks to the confusion

surrounding the term "poverty." There was no question that the European working

class had more wealth and access to material possessions in 1974 than they had ten,

twenty, or fifty years earlier. At the same time, however, the possessions the average

485
Gorz did not use the term hegemony. I believe, however, that the Gramscian concept speaks
directly to his work of the 1970s in critiquing capitalism's ability to assimilate whole spheres of human
life hitherto distinct from it and to colonize resistance.
273
worker had to own to achieve a minimal level of social dignity were dramatically

more expensive than they had ever been. Furthermore, in order to afford the

requisites of respectability, the average worker actually worked harder and had less

time and space to him or herself than they ever had.

While the worker was thus obliged to devote his or her entire life to the tasks

of accumulation and consumption, capitalism systematically eliminated alternatives.

In Illich's words, everyone in capitalist society was embedded in "mega-institutions"

from which there was no escape. Food was sold by corporate chains of grocery

stores, large corporations purchased smaller ones or drove them out of business, and

products were assembled from parts made all over the world. By the mid-1970s, the

idea of autogestion was already outdated as a result; Gorz claimed that shareholders

and management sought to make their companies larger primarily to make them more

difficult for the labor movement to control. And in the context of the competition

between massive corporations, even if (somehow) a group of workers could achieve

self-management, their company would simply become an experiment in worker-

managed capitalism unless it was accompanied by a profound cultural shift.487

Initially, Gorz hoped that ecology's status as a value-neutral field suggesting

the existence of hard limits to growth would inspire capitalists themselves to

reconsider their economic paradigm. One iconic example was the Meadows Report.

The Club of Rome, a network of bankers, corporate executives, and financiers, issued

486
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 64.
487
Ibid., 6 4 - 7 1 .
274
a summary of capitalist strategy vis-a-vis environmental degradation, the Meadows

Report, in 1972. It concluded that economic growth and industrialism could not be

exported to the underdeveloped world in the same form that it had existed in Europe

and North America: the standards of living of the First World put such a burden on

natural resources that the world population literally could not all share in an

American lifestyle.488

Gorz pointed out that the real question arising from the Meadows report was

whether or not it was possible to conceive of a non-destructive ecological balance

within capitalism, since that was clearly the goal of its draftees. Gorz pointed out,

however, that capitalism was defined by the need to grow; its core definition was an

economic system in which profits were reinvested in the name of higher profits. As a

result, capitalism was trapped in what appeared to be an inescapable paradox: hard

ecological limits on the one hand and its endogenous requirement for growth on the

other.489

Capitalism's response to this conundrum was twofold. First, as of the mid-

1970s, it was expanding actively into the realm of the immaterial, capitalizing and

controlling access to formerly-free resources like sun, air and water. Simultaneously,

it built industries around sex, medicine and education, breaking down cultural bonds

of affection in favor of regulated ones within the market system. The net effect was

to "prevent people from satisfying their needs in a spontaneous and autonomous

488
Pubslished as Donella H. Meadows, Dennis 1. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III,
The Limits to Growth, A Report to The Club of Rome (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
489
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 90.
275
manner; they must, for the satisfaction of their needs, depend on institutional and

industrial methods to which they cannot have access except through purchasing or

renting them from institutions.. ."490 In short, capitalism was monetizing whole areas

of life, ones that could be sustained without recourse to massive industrial production

and its concomitant environmental destruction.

Second, capitalism simply exported environmental destruction to the Third

World, moving sites of production and their accompanying pollution abroad while

maintaining ownership and financial control. At the same time, the developed nations

tried to dictate policies to the underdeveloped, urging them to limit population growth

even as the developed world used a vastly disproportionate amount of natural

resources. In fact, the only reliable check on rapid population growth had been

proved to be prosperity, but the net effect of the politics of the developed world had

been to stunt any hope of prosperity in the underdeveloped. Gorz's depiction of

capitalism's tactics was thus of first-world corporations increasingly sending their

dirty work abroad while trying to tie the elements of life, of ideas, education, sex, and

personal interaction, to the market in the monopoles.491

The Logic of Tools, Nuclear Energy, and Medicine

Some of Gorz's best writing and analysis had to do with the forms of social

ll/IU., 1UU.

'ibid., 104-110.
276
organization that certain technologies required for their creation, implementation and

use. In the aptly named section "The Logic of Tools," Gorz explained exactly why

nuclear power was not just an environmental disaster, but an institution that

represented the very antithesis of democracy. Its technical requirements were such

that it had to be financed by the state or by big business, it had to be managed by

hyper-specialized teams of technicians, and it had to be supplied by materials drawn

from a global network of uranium mines and waste disposal sites, all of which existed

outside of the purview of democratic decision-making.

In France, the nuclear power industry was the result of a scheme of a group of

powerful corporations who sought to build advanced reactors and sell them to

American companies. There had been a cursory parliamentary debate in 1975, but it

was kept deliberately brief and its conclusion was preordained: the French state

would support every effort to improve nuclear technology and make it more

profitable.492 It was, in sum, a political choice, not a technical imperative, for France

to pursue nuclear power as its chosen source of energy for the late twentieth century.

To Gorz, this was the quintessential example of technocratic government in action:

immune to public opinion and operating according to a combination of technical and

(capitalistic) economic imperatives, the government had relied on the opinions of

"experts" without considering the long-term impact on its citizens or on the

492
Ibid., 111-112. Gorz's assertion is supported by Bess's analysis - see Michael Bess, The Light-
Green Society, 93 - 100. For the larger context of the anti-nuclear movement, see Lawrence S.
Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: a Short History of the World Disarmament Movement (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), although it should be noted that Gorz's concern was always with
nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.
277
environment.

Originally, the OPEC oil crisis had established the French state's commitment

to nuclear power, and at the same time the government officials who oversaw the

various nuclear projects soon adopted a "cop-like" critique of internal enemies to be

monitored at all costs. The head of one of France's major nuclear lobbies,

Framatome, noted that "For me, it is essential that relatively few nuclear centers are

built, built on a grand scale, on ad hoc sites and run in a quasi-military fashion."493

This culminated in the self-proclaimed "nuclear knighthood" envisaged by the

nuclear lobby in which these "quasi-military" organization of guards and technicians

oversaw a network of huge reactors providing the entire nation with power.

Somehow, the same knighthood would find a way to store the waste that would

remain a major hazard for 700 years.494

Gorz insisted that, based on the evidence he had gathered as a journalist, it

was clear that the goal of the nuclear lobby in business was to create a new industry

and sell it to both the French state and foreign corporations. In this, the nuclear

industry was comparable to arms manufacturers, who did not care what their products

were used for so long as someone bought them. In fact, based on a study by a group

of engineers in 1975, many reactors would represent a net loss of energy when the

energy costs of uranium refining and transportation were taken into account, costs

which would presumably be offset to power generated by fossil fuels. Meanwhile,

493
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 122.
494
Ibid., 123.
278
alternatives like solar and geothermal power were largely ignored by large

corporations and the French state not because of technical limitations, but because

they broke with the logic of profit: they could be managed locally and maintained for

relatively little, while nuclear power required an entire costly edifice of

management.495

It should be clear that, for Gorz, ecologism was part of a larger synthesis of

anti-capitalist critique. Behind that critique was a (often implicit) vision of healthy,

autonomous life that was incompatible with capitalism's rapacious need to grow.

Industrial expansion poisoned the natural world, hyper-specialized education

poisoned the minds of students, and modern medicine literally poisoned its patients.

This latter issue was of great personal importance to Gorz because of what happened

to Dorine.

In 1973, Dorine was diagnosed with arachnoidite, a degenerative spine

disease. Dorine's doctors tied the condition to the use of lipiodol in a minor surgery

she had undergone for a hernia eight years earlier. Lipiodol, an oil-based substance

used in x-ray diagnostics, had leaked into Dorine's spine and went on to cause her

chronic pain for the rest of her life. Thus, while Gorz was passionate about ecology,

the life experiences of working people, and questions of existential autonomy more

generally, the issue of medicine became especially personal to him by the early

1970s.

Here, the influence of Illich was instrumental in forming Gorz's critique of

495
Ibid., 124-127.
279
medicine, and in the growth of the medical industry Gorz saw a particularly egregious

example of the profit margin and economic rationality overtaking a field that should

have been based on the moral concern for human wellbeing. Having met and

befriended Illich, Gorz and Dorine returned to Mexico in 1973 for a conference on

the medical industry Illich had organized, and Gorz soon launched a series of

polemics in Le Nouvel Observateur at the whole edifice of western medicine, even as

Dorine began practicing yoga and corresponding with other victims of lipiodol
496

poisoning.

Put briefly, Gorz cited a wealth of studies and statistics demonstrating that the

entire edifice of western medicine did more harm than good and argued that the true

purpose of the medical industry was the same as that of every other industry: profit.

Its one positive social function was, ironically, the maintenance of the only space of

legitimate respite from the hell of the modern workplace. "The request for relief, to

be socially acceptable, must take the form of an organic disorder, external,

independent from the will of the patient. You have no chance of being heard by your

boss or your supervisor if you tell them: "I can't do it anymore, I'm losing sleep,

appetite, sex drive, I don't have a taste for anything, give me eight days off." To be

accepted, it has to be that your "I can't do it anymore" takes the form of a physical

obstacle.. .in brief, a malady must justify a medical expenditure." Even in that

function, a certified technician, the doctor, had to formally recognize illness or

Andre Gorz, Lettre a D.,65 - 68.

280
exhaustion in order to legitimate the absence.

Gorz argued that the increase in the average lifespan in the twentieth century

had everything to do with better nutrition and hygiene and almost nothing to do with

improvements in medicine. Hygiene and nutrition had dramatically decreased infant

mortality, while cures for diseases later in life made a negligible impact. Meanwhile,

the cost of access to medical care grew exponentially while health, measured in

various ways, barely improved. While he was clearly cognizant of and hostile to the

various ways the medical industry actually made people less healthy, Gorz was

perhaps even more concerned with the larger implications at work, again in the mode

of "the logic of tools." Modern medicine treated illnesses as distinct and fragmented,

to be treated individually, rather than having a more holistic view of the overall health

of the patient. This approach to medicine embedded the individual in a vast

bureaucratic edifice, managed by technicians, in which the patient was a kind of

malfunctioning automaton to be repaired, rather than a living being whose biological

functions were interrelated. The whole lifetime experience of health was in the hands

of doctors; the individual was now born in a hospital, diagnosed in a hospital, and

died in a hospital.498

The medical industry was, of course, part of an entire growing culture of

sickness; per Gorz, three of the most powerful factors of illness were cars, drugs, and

work. The medical industry was merely another symptom of the economic rationality

497
Andre Gorz, Ecologie et Politique, 202.
498
Ibid., 189.
281
that underlay bourgeois thinking: it treated illness in terms of individual maladies,

rather than investigating the social causes of disease and potential sources of hygiene

in the original, Greek sense of the term as care of the self. "Industrialization has

broken this integration of the art of living ("hygiene") in all social activities. It is

easy to understand why: with the generalization of wage labor, workers ceased to be

masters of the duration, the intensity, the rhythm and the conditions of their

labor.. .they could no longer control their own needs, the duration of the effort of

breaks, of rest, of sleep. Dispossessed of the possibility of timing their life, they are

also disposed of the culture of the "hygiene " of work.499

Illich had concluded his Medical Nemesis by arguing for the de-

professionalization of medicine and the return to a model of care that emphasized the

skills of caregivers within communities.500 Gorz noted that to envisage a society

without a medical industry, one would have to imagine the concomitant changes that

changed and eliminated the causes of malady. As it was, "Neither the board of

directors nor hospital-university management would accept collectives of doctors

invested by communities with the role of defending public hygiene.. .Medicine takes

its "impartiality" for the condition of its "scientific" credibility and, like all

institutions which take part in the established order, it realizes "impartiality" as the

499
Ibid., 207, italics in original. Note that this article was written in 1976; Foucault's work on the
"care of the self was underway at that point, but as yet unpublished.
Just as Illich's Deschooling Society was a major inspiration for Gorz's ongoing critique of
education in the 1970s, it was Illich's Medical Nemesis that Gorz used as background to his own
attacks on the medical establishment. See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971) and Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1976). Note that both were originally written in English but were quickly translated into
French.
282
acceptance of dominant norms and of the power of the dominant class."501 The theme

is familiar: to Gorz, to break with the logics of any part of the capitalist order was to

imply a break with the entire social and cultural edifice.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Gorz was at his most prolific and

most radical in the early years of the 1970s. His writing spanned a remarkably broad

range of themes. Whereas most intellectual histories on the major thinkers of this

period in French history have only to contend with the contexts of philosophy and

political theory, Gorz's work addressed quotidian politics, union strategy, cultural

change, medicine, education, and ecology. By the middle of the decade, this

remarkable torrent began to ebb. The French economy remained in the doldrums, and

the cost of oil never retreated to the levels seen before the OPEC crisis, but it soon

became clear that neither the economy nor the state was on the verge of an actual

collapse. Gorz still wrote regularly for Le Nouvel Observateur, but his articles were

less frequent. Also, from the diverse range of topics of the early part of the decade,

Gorz's work came to focus largely on one issue: nuclear power.

Gorz had been writing about nuclear power intermittently since the start of the

decade. In 1975 and 1976, however, almost half of Gorz's articles in Le Nouvel

Observateur had to do with nuclear power: its risks, its thermal pollution and waste

disposal problems, the poor treatment of workers and technicians at power plants, and

the political machinations that had enshrined it as the source for France's future

'ibid., 217-218.
283
power. Nuclear power was a kind of "perfect target" for Gorz in that it bound

together many of his disparate concerns and themes. Nuclear power joined the profit

motive of private enterprise and governmental complacency, while ignoring both

scientific evidence as to its ecological dangers and the practical possibilities for

alternative sources of energy (particularly solar energy.) The proliferation of nuclear

power plants implied the continuation of the model of "endless growth" endemic to

capitalism, instead of cultural alternatives based on breaks with that logic. Finally,

despite the best efforts of the anti-nuclear movement, there were no democratic

checks on the nuclear industry.

Nearly all of Gorz's articles on the subject of nuclear power followed a

pattern: an expose on some scandalous aspect of the nuclear industry (workers

exposed to radiation, cronyism between nuclear lobbyists and politicians, etc.)

followed by an argument that alternative sources of energy would be cheaper, more

ecologically sound, and ultimately provide more jobs.503 The scale of the nuclear

industry in France, costing some thirty billion Francs per year in state investment and

See Michel Bosquet, "Francais, si vous saviez...", Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 February 1975, 64 -
76, Michel Bosquet, "Les Cinq Illusions de l'atome," Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 February 1975, 24,
Michel Bosquet, "On peut se passer des centrales nucleaires," Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 February
1975, 24 - 26, Michel Bosquet, "Nucleaire: un dossier Truque," Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 March
1975, 33, Michel Bosquet, "Mensonges par omission," Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 April 21 1975, 45 -
46, Michel Bosquet, "La Fin des experts," Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 May 1975, 34, Michel Bosquet,
"Le Repli de l'atome," Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 July 1975, 1 7 - 1 8 , Michel Bosquet, "Nucleaire: la
seine aussi," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 December 1975, 26, Michel Bosquet, "Les Deserters de
1!'atome," Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 March 1976, 4 0 - 4 1 , Michel Bosquet, "La Dictaturedu
plutonium," Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 June 1976, 36 - 38, Michel Bosquet, "Nucleaire: les
mensonges officiels," Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 September 1976,27 - 28, Michel Bosquet, "Les
Damnes de l'atome," Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 October 1976, 42, Michel Bosquet, "Valse-Hesitation
Nucleaire," Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 October 1976, 26, Michel Bosquet, "Les Poubelles de
l'atome," Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 November 1976, 45 - 46, Michel Bosquet, "Nucleaire: la Longue
marche d'E.D.F.," Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 December 1976, 38,.
503
For instance, Gorz's "Les Poubelles de l'atome" follows this pattern exactly.
284
subsidies, was infuriating to Gorz in that a comparable investment in solar,

hydroelectric, and wind power could (and would, he insisted) solve France's energy

needs instead. As ever, the real culprit was the profit motive; a network of private

companies and the state were making large profits not only by building France's

nuclear network, but by exporting plutonium and the means to refine it overseas.504

The 1970s: Conclusion

The total break with the existing social, political, and economic structure was

the binding theme of Gorz's thought of the 1970s. Discussing the status of illegal

immigrant laborers in France back in 1970, Gorz wrote "the defense of foreign

workers cannot be reduced to the demand for wages or more "decent" conditions of

life. This defense passes through and leads to the global contestation of the way of

life, of social hierarchy and of the type of civilization that is only possible because of

the exploitation of foreigners. It was not a coincidence that, in May 1968, when this

global contestation was effective, the junction between French and foreign workers

came about spontaneously."505 To Gorz, there was the potential, as demonstrated by

the emergence of the counter culture and student movements, that large numbers of

people in capitalist societies were in the process of awakening to the need for such a

global contestation. The central issue of radical politics was perspectival, and his

504
Michel Bosquet, "Valse-Hesitation Nucleaire."
505
Andre Gorz and Phillipe Gavi, "La Bataille d'lvry," Les Temps Modernes 284 (March 1970): 1393.
285
writing of the 1970s was directed at inspiring precisely this totalizing perspective.

Likewise, during his travels around the United States, Gorz concluded that

revolutionary potential existed in the cultural changes he encountered in California

communes, in the activism of Ralph Nader and Jerry Brown (both of whom Gorz

admired), in cooperative community libraries and gardens. The Sartrians had long

been troubled by the fact that their favored political tactics, strikes, petitions, press

conferences, publicized confrontations with the police, were essentially impractical in

the United States. Gorz, however, touring the American counterculture of the mid-

1970s, found in the very diffusion of American radicalism a cause for hope.

American radicals knew that they could not confront the system directly, because it

was too widespread and lacked a center. Their individual choices, however, and the

modes of life they had adopted, represented an equally widespread response.

To Gorz, the individual reclamation of education, medicine, and quotidian life

itself all represented potential acts of existential choice, the creation of new lifestyles

that might be sustained over time. A neighborhood cooperate or a group of medical

care providers could sustain a groupe-en-fusion in a way that the would-be

revolutionaries of May of '68 could not. The counterculture was just that: it was a

culture that provided a new set of default assumptions and choices to its members,

and its priorities were at least in part dictated by the rejection of prevailing choices.

Because it took place as an aggregate of individual choices, a cultural response was

both more viable and more authentically existential than the concept of an outright

political revolution.
286
 Gorz was definitely part of the larger diffusion of French radicalism following

the Events of May's "failure." Gorz's writing, however, helps to demonstrate the

degree to which the whole question of the success or failure of the Events of May is

misleading. Simply put, the emergence of the New Social Movements and the

flowering of the post-May cultural changes, ones Julian Bourg has described in terms

of a growing concern with ethics, were not failures. In fact, they enjoyed lasting

success in the forms of the gay rights movement, the women's liberation movement,

and the ecology movement, the latter of which Gorz deserves considerable personal

credit for helping to achieve.

Gorz himself moved away from the rhetoric of the proletarian revolution, with

or without "mediations," toward a broader concern with capitalist forms of logic that

infiltrated spaces of hitherto autonomous human activity. He came to see culture

itself as a viable weapon against capitalist hegemony, but only if it could join local

struggles together in light of a larger anti-capitalist perspective. His attitude, in short,

was of an updated version of the Sartrian imperative. No longer did the intellectual

just feel out weak points to be attacked by the labor movement, with or without the

help of its "allies" among students and writers. Now, the job of the intellectual was to

clarify where capitalist logics were undermining remaining areas of autonomy and to

inspire individuals to break with those logics in their own lives.

It is not surprising that Gorz's identity as one of the great promoters of

ecology among established intellectuals in the 1970s is one of the things for which he

is best remembered. His work of the 1970s was simply more compelling,
287
demonstrating both real ecological limits to capitalism and defending areas of human

life in which capitalist logics should not hold sway. As the philosopher of

autogestion, he had made important points and complicated the concept of the

working-class revolution. But as he himself came to recognize, autogestion was

dangerously fragile and easily overtaken in any capitalist society; in fact, his analyses

of autogestion and of "revolutionary reforms" remained strictly theoretical, despite

the strength of the French labor movement of the 1960s. Simply put, autogestion

never happened, because the labor movement could never be as radical and

intransigent as it would have to be in Gorz's descriptive theories.

In ecology and in his critique of capitalist logics, however, Gorz could

demonstrate convincingly that there were ecological limits that proved that

capitalistic growth had to be held in check, as well as social practices and institutions

(notably medicine and education) that should operate according to different logics.

The target, it was clear, was still capitalism, but the solution was now something

different: a wholesale cultural shift away from the logic of maximization toward the

local, the sustainable, and the interpersonal. In his work of the late 1970s through the

1980s, Gorz would expand these themes in what culminated in a vision of a new form

of state capitalism, one that would expressly to protect both individuals and the

environment from the depredations of unchecked capitalist expansion, while leaving

spaces of individual and community autonomy intact.

288
 Chapter 5: The Demise of the Revolutionary Subject

The 1980s

Gorz's life had changed dramatically by the late 1970s. The high point of his

involvement in the day-to-day operation of Le Nouvel Observateur was earlier in the

decade, and the "Gorzian" period of Les Temps Modernes was also from about 1970

to 1974. According to a contemporary scholar who knew Gorz, the theme issue Gorz

spearheaded on Lotta Continua in June of 1974 resulted in considerable "gnashing of

teeth" among the other members of the editorial team, and Gorz actually offered to

step down from the review. He stayed on, but his articles became increasingly

infrequent over the remaining years of the decade. He and Dorine had been planning

their retirement from public life in Paris already, and they moved to a modest country

house Dorine designed in 1979.506

Despite this semi-retirement, Gorz continued to contribute articles to Le

Nouvel Observateur, albeit only about half as frequently as he had before leaving

Paris. From twenty-one articles in 1978 and twenty-four in 1979, Gorz authored only

twelve in 1980, sixteen in 1981, and twelve again in 1982. While he was still listed

as a member of the journal in 1983, his last article, an idiosyncratic critique of the
506
See Christopher Fourel, "Itineraire d'un penseur," in Christophe Fourel, ed., Andre Gorz: un
penseurpour le XXIe Steele, 23 - 28, and Andre Gorz, hettre a D., 7 1 - 7 3 . Ironically, they had to
move again shortly thereafter thanks to the planned installation of a nuclear plant in their vicinity. In
1983 they moved to the village of Vosnon, where they would remain until their deaths.
289
state of the public transportation system in and around Paris, was published on

September 11, 1982. The themes of his last few years of journalism were familiar,

focusing primarily on ecology and his unflappable opposition to nuclear power, but

they seem in hindsight to be a bit rehearsed; Gorz did not explore new areas in his

late journalism, in contrast to his constant innovation of the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, in 1983, Gorz retired from journalism. He last appeared listed on the

editorial board of Le Nouvel Observateur in its edition of September 16, 1983, and on

the board of Les Temps Modernes in its October issue of the same year. The historian

Howard Davies noted that, with the death of Sartre in 1980 and the departure of Gorz

from the editorial team three years later, Les Temps Modernes definitively lost its

core Sartrian identity. Since Sartre's withdrawal from the day-to-day operation of the

journal in the mid-1960s, it was Gorz who had maintained its political stance. Back

in 1975, Sartre noted that "the practical work...is currently assured overall by (Jean)

Pouillon and Gorz."508 Thus, with Gorz's departure, Les Temps Modernes lost its

direct link to Sartrian politics, moderating its overall tone and moving toward a

slightly more moderate political position.

In fact, by the mid-1970s Gorz was already becoming less involved in Les

Temps Modernes, producing only three articles from 1975 until he formally retired in

1983.509 The journal also moved away from "Gorzian" themes after the high-point of

507
Michel Bosquet and Francois Dupuis, "Ile-de-France: Comment rouler en common," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 11 September 1982, 68 - 70.
508
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations X, 215. See Howard Davies, Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes,' 205 -
208.
509
Andre Gorz, "Pour une critique des forces productives: reponse a Marc Rakowski," Les Temps
290
its coverage of Italian workerism in the early part of the decade, focusing instead on

sexism, international relations, and various questions of social justice (all areas of

which Gorz was interested, of course, but not ones on which he was especially

focused.) In short, the 1980s marked a turning point for Gorz, after which he would

concentrate on book-length works of political theory while occasionally granting

interviews and participating in conferences.510

Beyond Marxism

Gorz's work of the late 1970s through the 1980s lies at the intersection of

several major contemporaneous changes in the French intellectual environment.

From being a hotbed of Marxist theory, the French intellectual scene largely retreated

from its erstwhile radicalism and began to focus instead on moral issues, embracing

an ail-but-forgotten strain of liberalism whose only major intellectual champion for

the prior thirty years had been Raymond Aron. In a remarkably short period of time,

former French radicals abandoned their allegiance to Maoism, Trotskyism, or Third-

Worldism and instead began ruminating on the dangers of totalitarianism.511

Or did they? The narrative is a familiar one for anyone interested in recent

Modernes 355 (January 1976): 1271 - 1295, Andre Gorz, "Neuf theses pour une gauche future," Les
Temps Modernes 416 (March 1981): 1541 - 1554, Andre Gorz, "Sur Deux Fronts," Les Temps
Modernes 435 (October 1982): 646 - 650.
510
For example, as the resident expert opponent of nuclear power, he was brought in by his former
colleagues at he Nouvel Observateur to discuss the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the
USSR in 1986. See Michel Bosquet, "Catastrophe Nucleaire: Plus Dangereux que Tchernobyl: la
Hague," he Nouvel Observateur, 9 May 1986, 9 0 - 9 1 .
511
This narrative is addressed in the literature review section of Chapter 1.
291
French intellectual and cultural history. As both Julian Bourg and Michael

Christofferson have pointed out, however, the rise of the Nouveau Philosophes and,

later, the emergence of French liberalism's new champion in the person of Francois

Furet can function as historical blinders, events of unquestionable importance but

ones that also obscure the continuities of radical thought between the highly visible,

carnivalesque explosion of May of '68 and later political discourse in France. Gorz is

an exemplary figure in this regard; like so many other figures of the intellectual Left,

he too came to question certain Marxist concepts by the late 1970s. But, unlike the

better-known and much more media-friendly figures like Bernard-Henri Levy, Gorz's

work of this period was a sober assessment of the elements of Marxism that were no

longer relevant or realistic that was, nevertheless, still committed to an ideal of social

justice that was utterly incompatible with capitalism.512 The exemplary work in this

regard is his justly-famous Adieux au proletariat {Farewell to the Working Class.)

Adieux au proletariat is unquestionably Gorz's best-known theoretical work,

marking the point at which Gorz moved into his "post-Marxist" or "Marxian"

period.513 What makes it a watershed in Gorz's thought is that its core project is a

critique of the ideas of Marx himself at least as much as it is an exploration of the

changing status of labor in the context of automation. As Gorz pointed out, Marx's

512
Levy is, to this day, the poster child of French intellectual liberalism, and was probably the most
famous of the New Philosophers. Interestingly, he published regularly in Le Nouvel Observateur
during the 1970s, including a fascinating interview with Raymond Aron, later considered the godfather
of contemporary French liberalism: Bernard-Henri Levy, "Raymond Aron et nous," Le Nouvel
Observateur, 15 March 1976, 84 - 110.
513
See Christophe Fourel, Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXe Siecle, 27 - 29, Finn Bowring, Andre
Gorz and the Sartrian Legacy, 8, and Adrian Little, The Political Thought of Andre Gorz, 88 - 100.
292
writings, in all their diversity, depth, and complexity, had always been treated like

scripture by French Marxists; they had never shied away from interrogating one

another, but to actually question the fundamental precepts of Marx's thought itself

had been almost unheard of, at least until the sea change announced by the New

Philosophers.514

Likewise, to abandon Marxism in France was normally to convert to anti-

Marxism. As was most famously illustrated by the Nouveau Philosophes, French ex-

Marxists were among the most vocal in attacking Marxist politics and theory,

particularly in the emerging space of the intellectual mass media of the 1970s (i.e.

television and radio programs devoted to questions of theory and the opinions of

public intellectuals.)515 There was thus a virtual line in the sand of political belief: to

self-proclaimed Marxists, all theories and theorists had been fair game for criticism

except (those of) Marx himself, while ex-Marxists were among the most virulent

critics of Marxism in the intellectual sphere but had relatively little to say about

capitalism.

Gorz was thus an anomaly, a committed radical who continued to dissect

capitalism's inner workings in hope of discovering social and political alternatives,

514
Gorz noted that "In Farewell I wanted to uncover what it was in Marx's writings that has led many
Marxists - and in particular the European and North American Maoists during the 1970s - to adopt a
religious belief in what I called 'the gospel according to St. Marx' and in the supposedly messianic
mission of the proletariat." See Gorz in Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrian Legacy, 189.
Note also that the team of Le Nouvel Observateur published a clever satire of the idea that Marx's
thought contained the 'seeds' of the gulag archipelago, asking whether the roots of the crusades, the
inquisition, and religious wars were embedded in the life and thought of Jesus Christ: "Jesus est-il
Coupable?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 December 1977, 58 - 66.
515
On this phenomenon, see the scathing critique by Dominique Lecourt: Dominique Lecourt, The
Mediocracy: French Philosophy since the mid-1970s (London: Verso, 2001).
293
but who also made a major intellectual break with Marx, not just with a particular

species of Marxism. Adieux au proletariat is a cogent study of some of the major

problems with Marx's theory, on par in its coherence and command of Marx's oeuvre

with some of the work of Raymond Aron.516 In fact, there are striking parallels

between Gorz's and Aron's analysis of Marx, most importantly those dealing with the

prophetic character of some of Marx's writing and the logical disparities between the

concept of the proletariat and the lived reality of actual flesh-and-blood workers.

Gorz began his analysis of Marx by considering the Hegelian framework in

which Marx had worked, a framework that remained intact despite being "turned on

its head." The problem, per Gorz, was that no empirical study could ever conclude

that the proletariat has or had a "mission," that instead, within Marxism, only Marx

himself was ever credited with being able to discern the existence and the

mechanisms of that mission. For Hegel, the historical mission of Geist (mind or

spirit) was only readable (lisible) by the philosopher, a tradition that Marxism

inherited. The reason that Marx attributed so much importance to the proletariat was

that it represented the synthesis of total human mastery over nature and total human

interchangeability in the workplace; all that had to happen was the universal human to

seize the universal tools. Meanwhile, the philosopher, as separated from the

proletariat, could see that process unfolding, even if actual workers could not.

516
See Raymond Aron, An Essay on Freedom, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: World Publishing
Company, 1970), Raymond Aron, D'Une Sainte Famille a I'autre (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
1969),Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1968) and Raymond Aron, La Revolution Introuvable: reflexions sur les
evenements de mai (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1968.)
294
 According to Gorz, Marx had drawn false conclusions from the "universal"

status of the industrial worker. Marx believed that, first, by being stripped of his tools

and moved off the land his ancestors had worked as farmers, the proletarian owned

nothing and had no connections tying him to a place or a trade. Second, with only his

labor to sell, the proletarian was indifferent to the ends that labor was put to; labor

was an undifferentiated activity, equally applicable to all areas of industrial

production. According to Gorz, Marx seized on these linked attributes of the

proletarian and saw in them an equally universal potential: if the worker could

possess the means of production as well as the labor he already provided, there was

the promise of a wholeness, a universal human being, in a way that had hitherto never

been historically possible.

The problem was that Marx himself was never able to describe the actual

relationship between the flesh-and-blood worker and the class that he somehow

incarnated. In the German Ideology, Marx claimed that the worker "must and can"

take over the means of production because of his subject-position within capitalism.

Inspired by anarcho-syndicalism, Marx had concluded in the Grundrisse and the

Gotha Program that it would be the workers as skilled workers, themselves capable

of running the entire industrial apparatus, who would be able to take over.517

In fact, as Gorz argued, Taylorism and automation had led to precisely the

opposite conclusion: the actual worker had no way of recognizing his own class

identity because of the complexity of modern capitalism. Likewise, it was because of

517
Andre Gorz, Adieux au Proletariat, chapters 1 and 2.
295
the latent philosophical identity of the proletariat as mover of history that actual

Marxist movements tended toward militarization and the culture of self-sacrifice in

the name of the higher cause. What was needed, instead, was a movement that

completely rewrote the cultural parameters of its goals; so long as the worker was a

Worker, "taking over" capitalism was and remained impossible, because work itself

was no longer the major source of identity for most working people. "There is no

question for the "worker" of identifying with "his" work or function in the process of

production. Everything seems to occur beyond him. "Work" itself is a certain

quantity of reified activity encountering the "worker" and subjecting him to itself."518

According to Gorz, one of the major shifts that had occurred in the postwar

era was that the entire apparatus of production had reached unprecedented levels of

abstraction for the individuals working within it. This phenomenon was equally

applicable to workers and the managing classes, all of whom found themselves

immersed in the murky depths of production. Gorz argued that work in the post-

Fordist era was almost unrecognizable in its results and goals; nothing tangible or

emerged from work, just a salary. "The question is of knowing where the class of

productive workers begins and ends; in what category must we place the physical

therapist, the employee of a tourism office, the "master of ceremonies" of a vacation

retreat, the programmer-analyst, the employee of a biological analysis laboratory, the

telecommunications technician.. ."519

518
Ibid., 103.
519
Ibid., 107.
296
 Thus, with the dissolution of the clear-cut boundaries between classes, the

actual existing labor movement tended to represent a shrinking percentage of working

people, while clinging to its old rhetoric. In the absence of any coherent vision of a

political alternative like "seizing the means of production," the worker's movement

instead sought to control the state, which was the one point of visible power over

everything in modern society. Per Gorz, "The project of a "popular" or "socialist"

power confounds itself with a political project in which the state is everything, society

nothing, and wherein the atomized mass of workers, always totally deposed of

themselves, is linked by a rapport of client to parties that direct the state and that

become the parties of the state: that is to say parties which, in the absence of a social

fabric, of a capillary diffusion of power, represent the central state and its

technocratic imperatives compared to the mass, and not the inverse."520

Meanwhile, the complexity of modern production was so great and the sites

from which the components of any finished product were so geographically diverse

that "seizing control" of any one factory would not result in the ability of workers to

produce anything. In other words, the idea that the proletariat could "recognize" its

control over the work process that resulted in finished goods was contradicted by the

social reality of modern work. Raw materials came from somewhere, finished

products were shipped somewhere else, and nowhere did the worker encounter the

results of his or her position.

Gorz insisted repeatedly that the modern organization of work made it

520
Ibid., 62.
297
impossible for the worker to recognize that his or her labor has anything to do with

the richness and opulence of life. Historically, when skilled labor was an

acknowledged necessity, workers simply improved their conditions of labor in

negotiations with management. At certain points in the past, work was not seen as a

burden; workers took pride in their work and celebrated their technical mastery.

Modern, post-Fordist work was different: atomized, each worker had nothing in

common with his comrades, nor did he have irreplaceable skills. Likewise, the

worker of the early 1980s loathed his work, regarding the salary as the only possible

recompense for a workplace experience of drudgery, boredom, and privation. Work

itself was the enemy of the worker, and the practical struggles that had occurred

within the labor movement of the postwar era reflected that fact.

As a journalist of some twenty-five years experience, Gorz was easily able to

provide practical examples from the 1960s and 1970s of strikes that succeeded in

redefining the work process, only to have those definitions immediately contested by

the workers labor leaders had represented. In the case of the Jaeger factory in the

northern French town of Caen in 1972, workers had provisionally secured the right to

determine the "natural rhythm" of work, but decided in short order that "our natural

rhythm is to not work at all." A similar situation had occurred in Turin; workers there

secured the right to an impressive degree of self-management, but promptly split

apart into groups contesting the standards they themselves had just created. In every

298
case, work was always considered a "straightjacket" (carcan) by workers.

In discussing the situation workers found themselves in within modern

industry, Gorz struck a strikingly poststructuralist note: "All modern powers are of

this type. They have no subject: they are not carried nor assumed by any sovereign as

the source of every law and the foundation of every legitimacy. In the modern state,

no chief, no tyrant commands men by virtue of his command, nor (does he) require

allegiance and submission from anyone. The carriers of power, in the modern state,

command men in the name of submission to a given order of things in which nothing

can be recognized as the author. The present technocratic power presents a

legitimacy (that is) essentially functional: it belongs to not a person-subject but to a

function, to a place that an individual occupies in a flowchart of the business, the

institution, the state."522 Foucault could not have said it better.

As early as La Morale de I 'histoire, Gorz had distinguished between

structures of modernity, in particular its tendency to depersonalize social and

economic relations and to bureaucratize all forms of social organization, and

capitalism, which operated within the larger structures of modernity but which was

analytically distinct from it. InAdieux au proletariat, much of the strength of his

arguments arose from the fact that he was able to demonstrate that modernity

undermined the applicability of many Marxist categories of analysis. Beyond the

problem of the identity of "the proletariat" versus that of actual workers, Gorz drew

521
Ibid., 75 - 76.
522
Ibid., 79. Italics in original.
299
attention to the problem of even imagining alternatives to capitalism, since capitalism

was so deeply embedded in the facelessness of modernity itself. In a word, capitalism

presented no visible targets.

During the "heroic" era of the worker's struggle, which Gorz identified as

being the anarcho-syndicalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, sociological reality had sometimes corresponded with Marxist categories.

Skilled workers knew that they were essential to the ongoing productivity of their

factories, and management knew that they had to contend with a united labor

movement. In the modern "post-Fordist" labor environment, however, automated

tasks did not require skilled laborers, and even white-collar workers knew themselves

to be interchangeable and replaceable. Likewise, it was impossible to locate an actual

human being who had the power to change the quotidian experience of drudgery and

vulnerability.

The predictable and reasonable response to this situation was anger.

According to Gorz, the rage directed by subalterns within society at large, both in the

context of labor struggles and in larger political movements, was normally directed at

the heads of state precisely because they, at least, were an identifiable target. French

workers tended to cultivate their spite for their positions and their employers, hiding

their own feelings of helplessness behind a series of banal, bitter slogans: "I'll do

what you want me to and I'll get one past you all the same, screw the bosses, the

bosses can pay, (give us) our sous, for a merde salary merde work: (the) language of

300
proletarian resentment, (the) language of impotence."

The bottom line for Gorz regarding the plight of workers in his contemporary

economic world was that the purported solutions of Marxism, and indeed the very

structure of Marxist analysis, were now largely obsolete. Having worked through

how and why Marxist categories no longer accurately defined neither workers nor

work itself, Gorz proposed a new goal for leftist theory to replace the illusory goal of

the working-class revolution: instead of seizing and controlling work, the worker

must be liberated^ow work as much as possible. Where Marx had seen in the

formless non-identification of the worker to any specific craft a kind of universality

that should and would result in an equally universal takeover by the working class,

what had actually happened was the growth of the "lumpen," the masses of various

backgrounds and social identities who did not identify with any class.524 What was

truly universal was the disdain felt by working people toward their work, since it was

no longer the source of their identity.

The goal of Marxist theory had long been to "clarify the methods" by which

the working class and its intellectual allies could effect a revolutionary change.

Leninism and Maoism had been the most successful historical instances of Marxist

theory resulting in actual political change, however disastrous that change may have

been for millions of people in Russia and China. The new goal, per Gorz, was to

define new goals, ones beyond the seizure of state power. History had no immanent

Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 108-109.
301
meaning, but by working from an existential starting-point, it was nonetheless

possible to categorize, critique, and rank possible meanings that leftists could and

should impute to history. In other words, this was a creative intellectual process, and

one that Gorz believed was much-needed in the historical conjuncture that had

undermined the traditional bases of leftist thought.

In an interview in the mid-1990s, Gorz clarified the position and the approach

he had taken to Marxist theory in the 1970s, leading up to Adieux. "I was on a fairly

classically Marxist trajectory, but one in frontal opposition to the dominant university

structuralo-Marxism."525 This was, clearly, a thinly-veiled reference to the Marxist

theory of the PCF's in-house philosopher Louis Althusser, which posited an

ahistorical and genuinely scientific concept of Marxist dialectical materialism, one in

which Marxism truly was a science of historical development. To Gorz, however,

"There is in dialectical materialism a religious root which, in vulgar Marxism, takes

the form of scientific or theoretical dogmatism...to instead accept the historicity of

labor is to accept that the meaning of history is suspended in that we (must) make or

fail to make that meaning and that nothing guarantees that we will not (instead) sink

into barbarism."526 Thus, the central issue for Gorz remained the primacy of choice

in the field of politics; Marxism might reveal "laws" of capitalist economics, but it

certainly did not spell out how human history as a whole would proceed.

Gorz had argued that Marx remained locked in a Hegelian framework, despite

525
Interview with Andre Gorz in Francoise Gollain, Une Critique du Travail, 222.
526
Ibid., 221.
302
his (Marx's) claim to have grounded Hegel in material reality. For his part, Gorz

continued to employ an existential framework in describing the social and political

reality of contemporary Europe. Whereas Marx had claimed that the proletariat was

both the vehicle and the inheritor of universal liberation, Gorz argued instead that the

"non-class of non-workers" were able to, and in fact had to, define what exactly

"liberation" meant. After all, the historical socialist movement had always implied a

collective goal, a universally applicable and available state of "freedom," but it had

never really defined what that political and social state would look like. Likewise, the

problem with socialism in the twentieth century was that the existence of some kind

of collective goal implicitly elevated the state, which had become the substitute for

the imagined socialist collectivity, above the individual's goals and needs.

While Gorz was thus critical of the attempted implementations of socialist

theory as they had occurred historically, he was equally critical of liberal

democracies. By its nature, modern democratic government was a bureaucratized set

of compromises between competing interest groups within a society. Here, Gorz

directly cited Sartre's concept of seriality the collectivity formed by individuals who

were in a similar structural position, but who did not share a similar subjective

outlook or set of goals.527 To Gorz, any sacrifice, any truncation of the horizon of the

individual's choices was existentially "abusive." "This is why the primary task of a

post-industrial Left must be the maximum extension, in and especially outside of the

family, of autonomous activity carrying (portanf) their finality and their

527
Andre Gorz, Adieux au proletariat, 120.
303
compensation in themselves, and the restriction to a strict necessary minimum of

salaried and marketed activities carried out for the sake of a third party (even if this is

the state.) The reduction of the duration of work is a necessary condition; it is not a

sufficient condition."528 In addition to an absolute limit on the working week, he

wrote, a true expansion of "the sphere of individual autonomy" required a new culture

and new "tools" of "conviviality" - shared workshops and studios, libraries and

classrooms, in the name of individual epanouissement.

Gorz's positive program had thus evolved considerably, breaking decisively

with its earlier focus on industrial workers. It had also sharpened its concern with the

whole question of existential dignity that had haunted Gorz's earlier work, often an

implicit stowaway in the explicit discussion of the labor movement and revolution. In

other words, the concern with "autonomy" was a concept born of Sartrian

existentialism, a conceptual cousin of "authenticity" in that both had to do with the

freely-chosen projects that defined the individual in the world. But just as Gorz's

renunciation of the zero-sum game of Marxist revolution freed him to reconsider the

status of labor in the post-Fordist economy of the late 1970s and early 1980s, his

approach to the issue of autonomy freed him from the zero-sum game of authenticity-

versus-bad faith. Gorz's own review of Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique

essentially admitted that Sartre had proven that authenticity never lasts and that the

groupe-en-fusion must inevitably collapse. The concept of autonomy, while less

philosophically rigorous, was more useful and more flexible in discussing the real

528
Ibid., 131-132.
304
lives of individuals in the advanced economies of Western Europe.

Autonomy was a relative, not an absolute, concept. As he would go on to

argue, it was naive and fundamentally unrealistic to imagine a complete escape from

heteronomous work, not least because human life itself was sustained by work that

had no relationship to creativity or pleasure. As far back as Fondements pour une

morale, Gorz had insisted that the essential condition of human life was to labor in an

unfriendly world, and that individuals usually sought to comfort themselves by

inventing metaphysical or ideological excuses that justified their unhappiness. For

Gorz, one iconic example of this phenomenon was the monastic community: by

pretending that God was manifest in quotidian drudgery, the member of the

monastery, convent, or temple avoided confronting the actual banality and suffering

involved in working to stay alive.530 The task for the Left, per Gorz, was to imagine

and create more authentic ways of life that preserved the largest possible space (or,

more to the point, the greatest possible amount of time) of autonomy without clinging

to the illusion that a total triumph was possible.

That, of course, was one of the great tasks Gorz himself set for himself in his

writing of the 1980s and 1990s. The problem was that, just as existentialism was

always better at describing the various modes of bad faith than in defining a truly

"authentic" position or action, "autonomy" defies a static definition. The concept is

defined instead by the freely chosen activity of individuals, after all, and while Gorz

529
Andre Gorz, "Sartre and Marx," New Left Review 37 (May - June, 1966).
530
Andre Gorz, Adieux au proletariat, 161-164.
305
was quick to attack as somehow inauthentic mere leisure, with its attendant television

mini-series and alcoholism, his vision of autonomous behavior was certainly

embedded in his own predilections: reading, repose, conversation.

Where he was at his most incisive and perceptive was in his descriptions of

how capitalism systematically reduced the time and space available for any possible

autonomy. This concern was moral as well as logistical - Gorz was as concerned

with the cultural and ethical impacts of capitalism as he was with its strictly economic

functions. Working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, Gorz argued that ethics

within capitalism tended to correspond with the exigencies of the technical and

functional imperatives of the capitalist system. Thus, individual morality began with

the refusal to be complicit with that system.531 Again, Gorz insisted that it was

impossible to escape from the heteronomous demands of life and work entirely.

Instead, the goal was a "dualist society" in which the amount of time devoted to

heteronomous labor was kept to a strict minimum, explicitly for the sake of protecting

the individual's leisure.532

Attempts in the past to achieve a dual society had been undermined by their

existential bad faith, i.e., their disingenuous approach to work as something that was

not inherently heteronomous. As noted above, Gorz cited the examples of

monasteries and communes, both of which had attempted to manage the amount of

necessary labor in the name of creating more time for either religious devotion or,

'ibid., 137-140.
2
Ibid., 143.
306
typically, intellectual pursuits and contemplation. These attempts were failures,

according to Gorz, since they inevitably came to treat work as an aspect of the sacred

or at least the desirable, an element of the project of the community as a whole, rather

than treating it as a necessity that did not coincide with the community's higher

purposes.

Per Gorz, the spheres of heteronomous labor and autonomous activity had to

be kept distinct, and the only institution with the breadth and power to do so was the

state. The purpose of the state should be to make labor ever more impersonal, to

calculate the amount of labor necessary to sustain society and to protect the individual

within that framework from having to work more than the prescribed minimum. As

he had argued in earlier works, the sphere of politics was the contested realm in

which the specifics of how conflicting interests might be reconciled, and in his vision

of a state-regulated economy, Gorz could only insist that the political sphere must

sustain a healthy and active discourse in deciding the specifics of its implementation.

Thus, a major part of his proposed solution to the encroachment of capitalism in the

sphere of autonomous life activity was a kind of broad and powerful state capitalism.

Gorz's conclusion was something of a paradox. One of the major themes of

Adieux au proletariat was that bureaucratic modernity was inescapable and inherently

pernicious, truncating the field of the individual's choices and imposing the

requirements of instrumental rationality into the field of ethics. In the end, however,

Gorz invoked bureaucratic management on the largest possible scale, endorsing the

idea that the state should manage the national economy as a whole. The difference,
307
of course, was that Gorz proposed a radically new guiding principle to the political

management of the state: rather than its attempts to reconcile the needs of capitalist

enterprise and interest groups within society, it should impose temporal limits on the

demands that could be made on anyone. In short, the state was to protect its citizens

from work itself.

In his postface, Gorz noted that the belief that had emerged among leftists

during the 1970s that people and communities should reduce their consumption levels

to a kind of comfortable subsistence, to use only what they really "needed" (it should

be remembered just how complex the concept of "needs" was to Gorz), was

completely antithetical to the logic of capitalism. Likewise, the official economic

indexes of each national economy, in terms of total productivity, GDP, and so on,

were a stark example of his earlier discussion of ethics within capitalism; every

increase in productivity and total volume of goods produced was "good," every

decrease, even every decrease in the rate of increase, was "bad." The militants of the

1970s had at least demonstrated that social experiments could succeed on the local

scale in creating communities that broke with this logic and substituted the idea of the

"sufficient" while renewing ethics in terms of human "needs" and priorities instead of

those of capital.

With his customary skepticism about political parties, Gorz called for

continued experiments on the local level, since European parties were either marginal

(the Greens) or beholden to the logic of capital (including the so-called socialist

parties.) Thus, the struggle (lutte) for a new conception of the state's role in
308
regulating the economy had to be carried out by social movements outside of the

auspices of the parties. That being said, Gorz cautioned against a completely cynical

rejection of the party system, since the existence of the parties was the only thing that

kept the increasingly pervasive state apparatus from sliding toward totalitarianism.

There was thus a puzzling contradiction at work in Gorz's argument: the state

was the only imaginable institution capable of checking the intrusion of capitalist

logic into private life and in regulating the working week, yet it simultaneously

remained the most intrusive and potentially dangerous apparatus in society. It was to

perform a normative role in championing the cultural spaces of non-work on behalf of

the non-class of non-workers even as it was also limiting the actual hours they could

be legally obliged to work. In other words, it was to exert almost total influence in

the political economy of the nation, regulating business and influencing national

culture, while treating autonomous activity as sacrosanct.

Gorz was clearly concerned about the power of the state to interfere in the

private lives of individuals; he may have abandoned the Left's more hyperbolic fears

of "fascism," but he was still sensitive to the threat of state surveillance. As we have

seen, he was also inspired by the left-libertarian impulse of the cultural revolution of

the late 1960s and early 1970s, one that sought to reconstruct individual life despite

and without interference from larger political and social structures. The fact remains

that he was committed to an idiosyncratic vision of a pervasive state: one guided by

the duty to interfere in the market in the name of human needs, but equally committed

to staying out of private life. And where those concerns intersected or conflicted,
309
Gorz simply gestured at the specifics being the business of "politics" itself, decisions

that he could not anticipate beforehand.

According to Finn Bowring, Gorz's Les Chemins duparadis was inspired in

part by the negative reaction to Adieux au proletariat from much of the intellectual

left in France and Britain. Gorz was accused of focusing too much on the loss of

class identity and in claiming prematurely that the proletariat could no longer be

considered a potential revolutionary subject. He was also, predictably, accused of

that great betrayal of Marxism: reformism.533 Thus, Gorz wrote to emphasize the

possibilities that the crisis of work he had identified in Adieux au proletariat

represented to the Left, not just the problems. Furthermore, he wrote to reiterate the

revolutionary nature of the changes he envisaged for European societies. The

proletarian revolution was not a practical possibility in 1983, whether or not it had

been ten or twenty years earlier. Gorz wanted to demonstrate, however, that what

would be called "transformative politics" by academic leftists some twenty years later

were more accessible in the 1980s than ever.

After reiterating the main arguments from Adieux au proletariat, particularly

that the conditions of work in Western Europe were such that society should and, in

certain senses, had to abandon work as the central locus of social identity, Gorz

embarked on a set of analyses regarding late industrial society. His central argument

was that the model of industrial growth common to the capitalist societies of the West

533
Finn Bowring, "Misreading Gorz," New Left Review, vol. I, no. 217, May - June 1996. Christophe
Fourel notes the same thing regarding the French context: Christohpe Fourel, Andre Gorz, unpenseur
pour le XXIe siecle, 27 - 29.
310
and the nominally-socialist societies of the East had reached its limits in terms of both

the consumption of resources and of the creation of new markets, and that the future

was thus ripe to be remade along a new set of priorities.534

To begin with, Gorz considered the status of Keynesian economics, then in the

early stages of decline against the backdrop of the Thatcher - Reagan neoliberal

"revolution." Keynesian economics were, per Gorz, both necessary and useful to

capitalism so long as overall economic growth was a given. Keynesianism was, in

fact, the name given to the economic policies of the "neocapitalist" state that the

contributors to Les Temps Modernes had considered at such length in the 1960s.

When growth slowed or halted, however, capitalists immediately blamed Keynesian

regulations for impeding growth, since their legal restrictions on speculation closed

off sources of short-term profits even if their overall effect was to prevent

catastrophic crises.535

Here, Gorz noted that the relative success of the European labor movement

during the entire postwar era had, among other things, undermined the efficacy of

European capitalism.536 Capitalists, the French patronat among them, were right to

blame the labor movement and Keynesian regulations for presenting obstacles to the

maximum possible rate of economic growth. Thus, within a strictly capitalistic

perspective, each firm "had to" try to replace living workers with automation (a

534
Andre Gorz, Les Chemins duparadis: Vagonie du capital (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1983).
535
Ibid., 2 7 - 2 9 .
536
This is a conclusion many economic historians agree with; strictly speaking, the strength of the
western European labor movement was a factor in containing economic growth by the crises of the
early 1970s. See Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., The Golden Age of Capitalism:
Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
311
theme of capitalism going back to Marx's day, of course.) Likewise, capital "had to"

try to outsource jobs to cheaper labor markets abroad.

The problem was that growth could not be "relaunched" in the manner that

neoliberal economists hoped, because every job lost to automation or outsourcing

undermined the consumer market that was now the heart of European capitalism

itself. In other words, one of the effects of the trente glorieuses was to render

obsolete one element of the Marxist alienation of labor: the worker's inability to

purchase the products he or she produces. In fact, modern capitalism now depended

on the ability of workers to do just that, and to buy the products built by workers in

other industries. If too many jobs were lost in the domestic market, the entire system

would be wracked by a massive crisis of overproduction and under-consumption.

Even as the model of economic growth that had served Europe since the end

of World War II was thus disrupted and undermined, technology introduced equally

unprecedented challenges. Technology had heralded the end of heavy industry as the

backbone of work in industrial society. The "micro-electronic revolution" allowed

industry to automate work to a degree hitherto unimaginable, with robots replacing

skilled workers and whole factories operating under a handful of managers and

technicians. In the postwar era, there was an inexorable link between (near-) full

employment and productivity, as there simply had to be workers in the factories to

produce the goods fueling the "consumer revolution." In the "post-Fordist" era,

312
though, jobs were permanently lost as automation replaced workers. For the first

time, productivity could now increase as jobs vanished.

So what was to be done? Gorz argued that there had never been a time in

history as congenial to the move beyond the existing, growth-based systems of

capitalism and quasi-socialism to what Marx had called communism. "Workers" had

never been more disillusioned with "work" as such; in lieu of trades and vocations,

work was simply an undifferentiated obligation, a mass of time sacrificed in the name

of salaries. Thus, the imagined link between workers socialized by their shared

experience and a collectivist form of society and government had been proven

historically untenable. That was why Adievx au proletariat had to be written -

"workers" were vanishing at an unprecedented rate, and the psychological experience

of work simply did not accord with communist theory.538

The solution was to break permanently with the various ideologies that

glorified work. Unemployment was still treated as a defect of the unemployed, an

aberrant social status of those who lacked the intelligence and self-discipline to find

jobs. Meanwhile, the "caste" of full-time workers shrank as society moved toward a

bifurcation of the elite whose experience of work matched the dominant ideology and

the actual majority who scrounged for whatever part-time and temporary positions

they could find. As he had argued in Adieux au proletariat, it was that mass of

537
Gorz made heavy use of statistics to prove these points, tying the increase in automation in various
industries with concomitant reductions in the total number of jobs. See Andre Gorz, Les Chemins du
paradis, 185 - 2 0 6 .
538
Gorz was increasingly hostile to "worker's conservatism" - the outdated ideology that glorified
work among the relatively few remaining skilled industrial workers. See ibid., 76 - 79.
313
people, the "non-proletariat of non-workers," that now represented the subject of

potential social and political change.

The response of society and state in the midst of this emerging crisis was a

confused jumble of semi-solutions, ones lacking in the global perspective that Gorz

advocated. In the West, particularly in nations like France with strong welfare states,

an enormous system of state-managed remunerations supplied the young and the

elderly with scholarships and pensions to insure their ability to continue to function as

consumers. The army was always available to young people without any other

prospects, and forms of quasi-employment like internships and "work-study" jobs

kept the dissatisfaction of the perennially unemployment at a manageable level.539

All the while, various state apparatuses of surveillance kept watch to insure that new

social and political movements like those of the "red years" of the 1960s and 1970s

did not emerge again.

In a striking argument, Gorz claimed that this was not capitalism, it was a

facade of capitalism put in place to maintain the existing social and political order.

The material foundations of "late" capitalism, full employment and consumer society,

were in the process of disintegration. The complex web of pseudo-employment,

pensions, handouts, and surveillance kept the system running even as the dominant

ideology glorifying work and placing work at the center of social identity was

growing more obviously obsolete. "The remuneration of citizens takes on the

appearance of a salary, consumer products take on the appearance of merchandise

539
Ibid., 80.
314
and social rapports the appearance of market rapports; but these appearances are

hollow. What is preserved is not the capitalist system but the system of domination of

capitalism of which salaries and the market were the cardinal instruments ,"54

Gorz's point was that, alongside the ubiquitous profit motive, (French) society

tended toward a political order of surveillance and control that used capitalism to

justify the maintenance of social hierarchies for their own sake. Gorz's inspiration

for this analysis was his friend and colleague Alain Touraine, who after Illich became

one of Gorz's most frequently cited sources. In particular, Touraine's Au-dela de la

Crise underwrote Gorz's analysis about the prevalence of the inertia of hierarchical

social structures in "late" capitalism. It is thus all the more interesting to examine

Gorz's ideas regarding paths away from hierarchy and surveillance and toward

individual autonomy - once again, the state was to play the primary role.

Gorz's proposed solution to this matrix of problems was a new exit from

capitalism, one fundamentally different than those models of revolution that drew

their inspiration from 1789 and 1917 but equally "revolutionary" in their

implications. Central to his new proposals was the concept of the guaranteed

minimum income, an idea percolating among radical labor theorists at the time.541 He

had rejected the idea in Adieux because, he argued, revenue received from the state

would put the recipient in a subordinate position vis-a-vis the state and social power

541
See Jean-Baptiste Foucauld, "Gorz et le temps choisi, un debat inacheve," in Christophe Fourel, ed.,
Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe siecle, 145 - 147.
315
in general, resulting in social stigma rather than liberation from want. In Chemins

du Paradis, reversed his earlier position. The basis of his argument was that each

adult had only to work roughly 20,000 hours per year, or roughly 30 hours for most

weeks, in order to equal the amount of real and necessary work that presently existed

in the advanced nations.543

A leftist conception of the guaranteed minimum income would "banalize"

work, reducing its importance in the self-conception of individuals and breaking with

the idea that a person was worth only as much as their profession and its attendant

prestige or shame. Work would have to be reorganized and education expanded in

such a way that almost everyone could take on almost every job, rather than the

highly specialized routes to specific professions then in place in nations like France.

Above all, the new system would refuse the stratification between the elite

professions and everyone else, forcing "elites" to pursue new avenues of personal

growth and allowing access to interesting and challenging work to people hitherto

trapped in drudgery.

Per Gorz, one of the great crimes of capitalism had been to separate "work"

from the other spheres of human life. Despite the struggles of pre-modern forms of

labor, work was integrated with the rest of life much more closely than it was in

capitalism. By focusing on wage-labor as the central model of work, capitalism

broke work off from other life activities and forbade their intrusion in the sphere of

542
Andre Gorz, Adieux au Proletariat, 1 1 - 1 3 .
543
Andre Gorz, Chemins du Paradis, 87 - 199. See also Foucauld's reflections on Gorz and the
question of "chosen time" and the guaranteed income in "Gorz et le temps choisi," 145-160.
316
work. "Insofar as the life of work, regulated by the payscale and by the productivist

logic of "you're not here to have fun," comes to occupy...the life of each, and the

despotism of the clock embeds the time of everyday life in the schedule of the job, the

discovery, the reinvention of non-economic richness becomes equally improbable

outside of work (as in it.)544 So long as the ethic of work infected the general life

experience of the individual, there remained an insuperable obstacle toward the

expansion of autonomy in private life.

While Gorz's strength was never systematic planning for his visions of better

societies, he did make a number of cogent points about the guaranteed minimum

income. Many of its opponents claimed that no one would want to work at all if they

were provided with an income large enough to live with; Gorz noted that the same

people were usually those who also claimed that work was the most sacred and

fulfilling part of human life: "This objection is particularly prevalent among the

traditional left which continues to profess the religion of labor.. .the paradox is

evident in that it consists in simultaneously glorifying labor and in thinking that no

one would want to work if there was not a permanent necessity to do so."545

The necessity of the guaranteed minimum income arose also from the fact that

without it, the time opened by the shortened working week could not be enjoyed as a

space of autonomy, since the reduced income of the 30-hour worker would force him

or her to look for supplementary jobs. Against the backdrop of the shortened working

Ibid., 103.
Ibid., footnote 110-111.
317
week and the guaranteed minimum income, each individual could have

unprecedented access to explore personal growth - epanouissement.546

There were two central factors at work throughout Gorz's advocacy of the

guaranteed minimum income and the shortened working week. First, he did not

believe that capitalism could find a way out of the impasse of jobs lost to automation

on the one hand and the necessity of a society of potential consumers on the other.

The available jobs simply had to be spread around more equitably or consumer

society itself would break down and an increasingly rigid distinction between full-

time elites and the masses of the semi-employed would emerge. Second, he argued

that the very idea of "the richness of life" could be best measured in terms of the free

time each individual had to enjoy. Gorz cited both Marx and Ricardo, as well as an

anonymous economist Marx himself had cited in several sections of the Grundrisse,

in emphasizing as early as the 1820s that "the primary symptom of an authentic

prosperity and national richness" was the fact that workers could potentially work less

than they had.547

Thus, despite his "break" with Marxism in Adieux auproletariat, Gorz's

critique of the modern, post-Fordist society of 1980s Europe was really an updated

version of familiar Marxist themes. He still insisted in the 1990s that "I prefer to see

myself as a critical Marxist or post-Marxist."548 Many of Marx's insights remained

546
Note Julian Bourg's discussion of the theme of epanouissement. Again, Gorz's work represents a
continuity with this (slightly) earlier strain of radical theory, but one that was updated to the changed
circumstances of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
547
Andre Gorz, Les Chemins du Paradis, 120.
548
Andre Gorz in Finn Bowring, Andre Gorz and the Sartrean Legacy, 189.
318
true; the economic structure of capitalism was at a fatal impasse, but the impasse

itself suggested a means of overcoming it and replacing it with something

qualitatively better and more desirable. The resources and the technology were there

to free everyone in a given society, if not the world, from material scarcity, and it was

fundamentally a question of politics in how to grant that freedom. Only now, it was

not only "workers" who had nothing to lose but their chains; it was everyone tied to

the drudgery and frustration of their jobs. Thus, the potential for a mass-movement of

the Left transcending class divisions had never been greater.

Here, it is appropriate to reconsider the breadth of Gorz's project and its

philosophical foundation. Sartrian existentialism had always been universalistic in its

aspirations; Sartre's projects in L 'Etre et la neant and the Critique had been based on

universal descriptions of human consciousness and its confrontation with the world.

Starting with structuralism, there had been in France a sustained attack on these

universal pretensions, not least because Sartre himself was caught in the same bind as

Marx vis-a-vis colonialism and imperialism: socialism was the universal liberator,

while all other political formations would result in the triumph of a bourgeoisie, even

if that bourgeoisie happened to be native to a non-European country.549

Furthermore, the most productive lines of theory and practice arising from the

aftermath of the Events of May had been increasingly particularistic. As noted above,

the women's movement, the gay liberation movement, and the struggles over ethnic

54
The iconic instance of structuralist rejection of existential universalism was Claude Levi-Strauss's
The Savage Mind, whose last chapter was a fairly brutal polemic against Sartre's Critique.
319
and cultural identity in France in the early 1970s undermined the idea of a single

political project benefiting and liberating all people equally. One iconic example is

Beauvoir - having avoided joining a mass movement for her entire life, she finally

became a member, and a leader, of the women's movement in the early 1970s, largely

because she realized that the existing Left was doing almost nothing to change the

lives of women in the present.550

At his best, Gorz was able to adjust his theory to accommodate this shift by

considering factors that remained universal: economics and the political relationship

between individuals and the state. In his later work, discussed below, he also

engaged with issues arising from the New Social Movements, particularly the

women's movement. He remained a steadfast universalist and humanist, however,

arguing that the content of autonomous behavior, the actual choices, pursuits, and

projects of individuals, could never be defined beforehand by the philosopher, the

businessman, or the state. The sphere of autonomy had to be championed and

protected by the Left or the gains of the various particularist movements would be

specious and hollow. In short, so long as the majority of the population was forced to

devote most of its time to unfulfilling, unstable jobs, identity politics were of

secondary importance to Gorz.

See Beauvoir in Alice Schwarzer, After the Second Sex, esp. 29.
320
Metamorphoses du Travail

His next major work, Metamorphoses du travail, quete du sens: critique de la

raison economique (Metamorphoses of Labor, Quest for Meaning: Critique of

Economic Reason), was a departure for Gorz. Long skeptical of academic

institutions, Gorz had aimed his books at different audiences in the past. His

journalism was directed at the broader French reading public while his books were

addressed to those interested in labor strategy as much as leftist philosophy and

theory. One of the remarkable aspects of his writing was how distinct were his

written voices and personas - the Bosquet of Le Nouvel Observateur was sharp, pithy

and accessible while the Gorz of Les Temps Modernes was polemical, complex, and

deeply immersed in the discourse of French radicalism. As we know, Gorz had been

involved in journalism, the labor movement, and the circle of philosophers and

theorists around Sartre and Beauvoir for decades, but his formal degree, the license in

chemistry from the Lausanne Polytechnic, certainly did not qualify him to participate

in French university life. He was an intellectual, not an academic.

Metamorphoses du Travail was thus surprisingly different in that it was

clearly written for more of an academic audience than any of his previous works; it is

evident from his choice of references and his approach that he hoped to be taken

seriously by academic philosophers and sociologists, not just his fellow leftists. Gorz

cited a broader range of sources in his discussion of the meaning and status of work in

different societies, including for the first time important liberal theorists like Max
321
Weber and Hannah Arendt. While he continued to tie his arguments to developments

in the economics and technological progress of the developed world, Metamorphoses

du Travail was perhaps his most "theoretical" work since La Morale de I 'histoire, and

it marks a watershed in Gorz's thought in dissecting the operation of "economic

reason" itself rather than focusing on "capitalism" as such. The distinctions between

modernity and capitalism that were sometimes implicit in his earlier works were

made explicit in Metamorphoses du Travail, a fact that lent to its clarity and strength

of argumentation.

The use of Arendt and Weber as two of the major sources of inspiration for

Metamorphoses du Travail was tied to another innovation in Gorz's thought and

writing: his growing use of and involvement with German theories and theorists. In

1983, Gorz spent three days discussing his work, particularly Adieux au proletariat

and Chemins du Paradis, with a large group of West German labor activists and

young socialists, most of whom were affiliated with the "Juso," the German

movement of young socialists. According to Bowring, this was the first time since

Gorz's move to France in the 1940s that he used the German language for any

extended period of time. A substantial interview from the conference was published

in the monthly journal of the Confederation of German Unions (DGB),

Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte, and later republished in the French journal

Autogestions as well.551

551
See Finn Bowring, "Obituary: The Writer's Malady: Andre Gorz, 1923-2007," 53. The interview
is available as Andre Gorz, "L'Homme est un etre qui a a se faire ce qu'il est," in Christophe Fourel,
322
 The legacy of Gorz's miserable childhood and the disaster of Nazism had cast

a long shadow over the German language and German thought for him, and it was

really something of a happy coincidence that this visit occurred when it did,

beginning for him a new interest in using German theory. In fact, from then on,

German citations grew in number in Gorz's work, coming to equal or even exceed

those from French or English-language sources by the 1990s. He began to read more

widely in German philosophy and social theory, which in turn directly impacted on

his work of the second half of the 1980s. In another interview, Gorz noted the

immediate influences of Metamorphoses du Travail: "...I was reading Habermas's

Theory of Communicative Action... (and) Max Weber - the question of needs, of

'enough is enough' and 'more is more' grows out of Max Weber."

The occasion for Metamorphoses du Travail, according to Gorz, was that the

goals of "industrial utopianism" had been achieved: there was no longer the need for

the majority of the people in advanced industrial societies to work. The trends he had

noted in Adieux au Proletariat and expanded on in Chemins du Paradis had

continued, and by 1988 (when Metamoprphoses du Travail was published) it was

time that fact was more widely acknowledged. Instead of liberating humanity from

drudgery, however, the end of necessity heralded only new and pernicious class

distinctions in which a small elite of skilled labor enjoyed the benefits of convenience

and wealth while the vast majority lived precariously, performing services for

Andre Gorz, un penseur pour le XXIe Steele, 179 - 197.

552
Gorz in Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: a Critical Introduction, 122.
323
payment that had been hitherto part of private life.

Thus, Gorz's major task was identifying why the industrial work ethic was

still the prevalent ideology of labor, when society itself had become "post-industrial."

The long term trend had been that industrial societies had extended the field of the

ethics of industrialism itself, of hard work, efficiency, and above all the maximization

of both output and profit, even as technological advances freed larger and larger

numbers of former workers from manual labor. The ethics of industrialism, which

Gorz referred to as economic reason, faced a logical impasse when confronted with

the obsolescence of manual labor, because its entire raison d'etre had always been to

grow and produce more. Put briefly, economic reason had no answers for how the

growing surplus of potential workers should occupy their time, even as consumer

society expected them to somehow generate enough income to participate in the

exchange of goods and services. Here, Gorz initiated a critique that he was to use for

the rest of his life: economic reason was no longer applicable because both the

historical setting from which it had emerged and the commodities it explained and
e n

managed had changed beyond its recognition.

Gorz began his discussion with a genealogical explication of the values

associated with work in the western world. As thinkers like both Weber and Arendt

had noted, economic reason in its modern form had been a radical innovation in that it

valorized and celebrated work. To the ancient Greeks, physical labor had been the

553
A point he made forcefully in his introduction; see Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du travail, quite
du sens: critique de la raison economique (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1988), 1 3 - 2 2 .
324
antithesis of human existence; what made one a human, capable of reason and hence

of participating in civil life, was freedom from the demands of physical labor.

Likewise, the drudgery of life-sustaining agricultural labor had been reserved for the

peasantry in medieval Europe, freeing "those who fought" and "those who pray" to

focus their energy on the higher-order demands of warfare, government, and

intercessions before the divine.554

The shift heralded by industrialism and its concomitant demand for an

unlimited and interchangeable labor force had been the emergence of a new ethics of

work, "economic reason," in which the ends of labor were radically divorced from the

act of working. In turn, the proponents of this new ethic blamed the emerging

working class of "laziness" in refusing to accept their complete subordination to the

dictates of economic rationality. The worker, industrialists were horrified to discover,

wanted only enough to survive with a modicum of comfort; he refused to push

himself to the outmost limits of his physical and mental capacity in order to produce

more goods in less time.555

Ironically, given Marx's obvious sympathy for the plight of the working class,

his conception of work itself agreed with the status it was afforded by economic

reason. To Marx, work had to subsume everything, including the state, law, and

leisure, at which point the universal proletariat would be able to seize control since

554
Ibid., 25 - 37. I would also point out the etymological connection between the French travailler, to
work or to labor, and the English "travail," a painful effort. In turn, the Latin root trepalium actually
refers to a torture device.
555
See also Eric Hobsbawm's masterful and sardonic treatment of the "triumphant" bourgeoisie in the
late nineteenth century, particularly in terms of their contempt for the working class. Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 245 - 268.
325
there would be nothing outside of work. In the Marxist conception, the ownership of

the means of production would be claimed by its operators, but the Promethean

quality of industrialism itself would remain unchanged and the ethics of production

would remain intact, at least until communism was achieved. Marx's notorious lack

of specificity about what communism would be, per Gorz, was in part because the

economic rationality Marx himself implicitly endorsed could have no answer to the

ends of work, only the work process.556

In his Ecologica, published posthumously in 2008, Gorz expressed

dissatisfaction with his earlier concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, referring to the

concept of the "sphere of autonomy" as a "huge blunder" (grosse betise).551 In

Metamorphoses du Travail, he was still faithful to his earlier concepts, while trying to

reprise and clarify them. The key idea animating Gorz's concern with the market was

still the complete divorce between the goals and ends of the individual on the one

hand and the overall structure of market forces on the other. There was a "split"

(scission) between the majority, who exercised no control at all over the market, and a

small group of elites who worked to regulate and direct the market through law and

governance. Thus "civil society" existed outside of the market in a sense but

remained embedded within it nonetheless.558

The penetration of an ethics inspired by economic rationality into the realm of

civic virtue was fundamentally irrational, particularly the celebration of hard work

556
Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du Travail, 3 8 - 4 6 .
557
Andre Gorz, Ecologica, 18.
558
Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du Travail, 4 7 - 5 5 .
326
and efficiency as moral virtues. Moral concern for the welfare of others was pushed

aside by economic rationality, whose apologists claimed that its ethics were as

immutable and value-neutral as those of physics. In other words, because markets

did, in fact, operate largely outside of the direct auspices of conscious choice, the

ethical system of economic rationality could be and was camouflaged as equally

eternal and untouchable: if jobs were eliminated in wealthy nations while sweatshops

expanded in poor ones, the apologists of the market cited the inevitability of market

forces and dismissed the possibility of ethical choice and political action. Gorz

suggested that this system had reached an impasse, at least in the wealthy nations of

the west, because the system itself could not provide a goal, a motivation, for the

human cogs in its machine: ".. .the system has entered into a crisis: the functioning of

the bureaucratic-industrial megamachine and the motivation of its "slaves" to

function as cogs pose to it problems of regulation more and more difficult to resolve.

No rationality, no outlook or totalizing vision can assure a meaning, a cohesion, a

directing goal to the ensemble."559

But what about alternatives, historical attempts to break the hold economic

reason had on other forms and fields of ethics? Gorz argued that the historical

socialist hypothesis, the one governing both Marx's writing and subsequent Marxist

political theorists, had been that it was possible to completely integrate the desires of

the individual with the needs of the collective economic project. Historically, this

had led to "The Plan," the quasi-religious trappings of total devotion and sacrifice in

559
Ibid., 55.
327
the name of lofty goals. Like the so-called protestant work ethic, it called for a kind

of faith in the moral value of work outside of work's relation to its goals, a tendency

that reached its perverse reductio ad absurdum in the Soviet campaigns extolling its

workers to achieve superhuman levels of efficiency.560 The "socialist" nations had

thus become dark reflections of their capitalist counterparts: "Sovietism thus presents

a sort of gross caricature of the fundamental traits of capitalism. Pursuing

accumulation and economic growth as the principle goal, it strives to rationalize this

pursuit by substituting the spontaneous heteroregulation of the market (with) a

methodically programmed and centralized heteroregulation of the market apparatus in

its ensemble."561

Likewise, later in the book, Gorz tied some of the problems the socialist

nations had experienced trying to implement socialist theory to Marx's writing itself.

Marx's goal had always been the liberation from the necessity of work, but contrary

to Marx's understanding of technological progress, nothing about economic

expansion and growth actually implied the end of work. In other words, economic

development may allow the possibility of liberation from work, but it does not make

that liberation occur in any naturalistic or inevitable way.562 Here, Gorz insisted on

the primacy of existential choice: if there was to be liberation, it would be through

conscious choice, not just "praxis" buried within material necessity. This choice

560
Gorz's remarks were more general, but the most iconic historical example is the Stakhanovite
system, set up around the (staged) achievements of a superhuman worker. See RJ. Crampton, Eastern
Europe in the Twentieth Century - And After (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2 5 0 - 2 5 1 .
561
Andre Gorz, Metamorphoses du Travail, 59.
562
Ibid., 122.
328
could only be "political" in that the field of politics was itself the field of contestation

over different perspectives: "The task.. .(was to) transform into political energy the

morale requirement and the need to give meaning to the future.'"5

In the Europe of 1988, in both nominally-socialist nations and capitalist ones,

workers at all levels of the production process experienced the same profound social

alienation. Because post-Fordist production required the division of labor into

functional tasks with no immediate relation of the worker to other workers, it

represented an even more pernicious and isolating distinction between human beings

than had industrialism in its classic phase of the mid-nineteenth century. The only

possible incentive to inspire workers to focus their energy on their dehumanizing

labor was to create an ideology that joined the ethics of economic rationality with a

set of consumerist rewards. Workers had to taught not to want their work so much as

to want their salaries, that they might create spaces of relative comfort and autonomy

outside of work. This process culminated in an "asocial socialization" in which the

worker is taught to want to work and earn more rather than to work less and be

content with fewer possessions.564 The ideal lifestyle was one of a private retreat into

a refuge of luxury, rather than engagement in the public sphere. This model

culminated in a Weberian "plebian democracy" in which even political platforms

were sold as commodities and political candidates were marketed along with diapers,

Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 66.
329
racecars and gummy worms.

In the absence of higher aspirations ("the need to give meaning to the future"),

the components of capitalist societies that were able to exercise some degree of

control simply tried to keep the system as a whole from experiencing serious crises.

Gorz had been convinced for decades that the primary role of the state in capitalism

was to reconcile the competing interests of different capitalist industries while

providing a basic set of provisions for the health and safety of the populace of

workers-cum-consumers. In Metamophoses du Travail he emphasized the fact that

this process was always imperfect, contested, and incomplete. Rival claims were

never really reconciled in this system; it was simply supposed to keep stumbling

along without triggering crises big enough to threaten it with an all-out collapse.

Gorz's vocation as a philosopher was clear: when political choice could, in theory,

qualitatively change this banal ongoing semi-collapse into something in which the

majority of a state's citizens had significantly greater autonomy, he felt obliged to

fight for that possibility.

While Metamorphoses du Travail was rich with insights about the changing

composition of the labor force in the advanced capitalist nations, its real raison d'etre

was as Gorz's contribution to the philosophical legacy that sought to explicate and

challenge instrumental reason and its intrusion into the private lives of individuals.

Gorz was deeply read in the work of Husserl, who had been one of his original

inspirations as far back as Fondements pour une morale, and also in the philosophical

565
Ibid., 69.
330
branch of the Frankfurt School. In Metamorphoses du Travail, he cited Adorno,

Horkheimer and Habermas in their respective works on the colonization of the

"lifeworld" by economic reason. Drawing from the work of those thinkers, Gorz

argued that instrumental logic was not morally neutral, but instead that by making the

world and other humans mere calculations, it was the logic of violence itself. Only

non-instrumental forms of reasoning could be non-violent or could potentially repair

the damage done by economic reason.566

While he readily acknowledged the importance of the Frankfurt School, Gorz

was at times critical of their approach. In particular, as his most important

contemporary philosopher of "cognitive-instrumental rationality" Gorz was

unsatisfied with the abstraction of Habermas's work: Gorz pointed out that Habermas

tended to leave the actual definition of instrumental rationality very vague and failed

to interrogate why it succeeds in "colonizing" the life-world so easily. In the writing

of Habermas there was a kind of ideal type set up against instrumental rationality, a

public sphere of rational communication that is also left undefined, or at least under-

defined. In contrast to Habermas, Gorz insisted on the importance of a

fundamentally sociological approach to any critique of economic reason and the

alternatives to it. Philosophy, to Gorz, was not enough: without a grounding in the

changing realities of the labor force, technology, and social organization, leftist

theory would remain fatally abstract and would continue to linger in the margins of

Ibid., 112-116.
Ibid., 135-137.
331
academia and in outcast subcultures. Furthermore, he indicted the approach of

"treating the system as the subject," as a tendency that culminated in being "one of

the roots of totalitarianism and barbarism."

Regarding Habermas, Gorz noted in an interview that "There is a sort of

philosophical and sociological contempt of the way that people experience their life,

because calling the lifeworld all the habits and laws that you inherit from your

ancestors and find normal, familiar, and therefore stick to, does not answer the

question: 'How do you experience them? '...Muslim women who live in total

oppression, who are circumcised in most of Africa, that is their lifeworld. They stick

to it, but it doesn't tell you anything about their quality of life, their experience of

it... The quality of this experience is the foundation of the critique of the lifeworld,

which is never talked about in Habermas or the others who use that notion."569

But if Habermas had left the definition of instrumental rationality vague and

tended to discuss the system and not the individual within the system, how did Gorz

define "economic rationality" in contrast? In a lengthy argument, Gorz posited that

economic rationality was the systematic reduction of all spheres of activity, both

natural and human, to calculability. The implications were diverse and widespread,

among them the fact that the attempt by liberal economists since the late eighteenth

century to monetize every aspect of life was in fact only a symptom of economic

rationality; to be monetized, any good, product, or service had to be first rendered

568
Ibid., 170. See also 212 - 220.
569
Andre Gorz in Lodziak and Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction, 122.
332
quantifiable.™

In turn, as the qualitative aspects of life were formalized and calculated, the

social logic that bound human beings to one another was dissolved. Drawing once

again from Weber, Gorz described the radically destructive effects of economic

reason's actual, historical "colonization" of Europe in the nineteenth century.

Economic reason had slowly but inexorably disintegrated the early-modern

cosmology in which everyone had his or her place in society, and had substituted a

value-system that celebrated the end of such limits. In contrast to a pre-modern

system that celebrated the correspondence of social identity and a certain amount of

wealth, economic rationality championed limitless expansion. There could be no

"sufficient" amount of wealth, profit, or expansion in a system predicated on

economic reason, because economic reason was itself the infinite plane of quantity,

imposed on what had been hitherto various contested systems of quality.

According to Gorz's logic, economic reason was thus an anti-ethics, the

absence of moral imperatives based on the capacities and experiences of human

beings. In turn, economic reason was also the most profound possible anti-

humanism. Against Marx's claims, Gorz insisted that capitalism had never been the

real root of the matrix of economic and social change that had stripped the peasants of

old Europe of their land and crafts and substituted wage labor and the twenty-hour

working day; capitalism was merely the symptom and the setting in which economic

570
Andre Gorz, Metormophoses du Travail, 171-173.
571
Ibid., 138-159.
333
reason had been able to grow, unfettered from pre- and early-modern ideologies that

had posited a place and a position for all people.

Just as there could never be "sufficient" wealth in a system governed by

economic rationality, neither could there be "sufficient" possessions. Consumerism

was this trend taken to its logical conclusion: artificial "needs" were created by

advertising even as a "rising" standard of living no longer represented greater leisure

time, but instead simply greater accumulation. The labor movement was pushed by

this paradoxical situation into an awkward ideological corner; it had to insist on full

employment and on the hard-working character of the men and women it represented,

because to fight instead for extra-economic goals like shorter hours would be to

contradict the governing set of logic and its concomitant ideological apparatus.

In the end, economic reason was the antithesis not only of humanist ethics, but

of existential authenticity. Economic rationality, by rendering everything calculable,

provided an escape from existential dilemmas. One is a worker and is immersed in

work, with the clear goal of limitless money-earning, thereby evading the burden of

choice and hiding from the results of one's actions in the workplace. In a rare note

regarding that poster-child of so-called French Theory, structuralism, Gorz fired a

rhetorical broadside against structuralism for trying to philosophize a "mathematical"

form of thought in which all things are subject to calculation, totally removing the

reflexive possibility of rationality.572 In that, structuralism was the tacit, even

accidental expression and ally of economic reason.

572
Ibid., 158.
334
 It is important to emphasize that while, as ever, Gorz grounded his theoretical

reflections and arguments in Metamorphoses du Travail in empirical data, its primary

purpose was as a formal work of logical philosophy having to do with the status of

labor, society, and remuneration. Having established the principles of economic

reason, Gorz thus sought to establish their limits, the points at which the principle of

calculability could not logically apply. His indignation at the effects of economic

rationality was obvious, but his analysis was an attempt at an immanent critique, not a

moral condemnation.

There were, he wrote, certain criteria for human activities to be subject to

complete subsumption in economic rationality: A. they had to create use value, B.

they had to be subject to market exchange, C. they had to occur in the public sphere,

D. they had to take place in measurable time and subject to efforts to reduce that time

through efficiency measures. Gorz insisted that "Contrary to a widespread

conception, it does not suffice that an activity is undertaken in view of its market

exchange for it to be work in the economic sense. This point is essential for

delimiting the economic sphere."573 Gorz's major point was that there were activities

that were indeed "sold" on the market that nevertheless could not be completely

reduced to calculability - typically, they depended on some factor of human judgment

or reflexivity. While Gorz had long argued that many activities and settings,

education for example, should not be subject to economic rationality, here he insisted

Ibid., 173.
335
that a whole swath of activity could not be entirely accounted for.

The implications of this set of arguments were far-reaching. There were

activities, from medicine and law to childcare, that simply violated one of these four

principles. Even law enforcement was outside of the reach of pure economic reason,

since police officers (as well as rescue workers, firefighters, etc.) were primarily

reactive; they had to be available to respond to problems and could not be held

accountable to the criteria of a given amount of work in a measurable time. Likewise,

in a lengthy discussion Gorz insisted that medicine was fundamentally based on a

relationship between doctor and patient directed toward healing, not on standardized

tasks, and that it necessarily lost its efficacy if pushed toward standardization.575

These arguments put Gorz in a difficult position vis-a-vis the arguments of

certain feminists. In particular, Gorz was relentlessly hostile to the idea that

reproductive labor, including childbearing, child-raising, and housework, should be

remunerated. He noted that, first, reproductive labor was not in the public sphere and

that it could not be set in measurable time, thereby placing it outside of the criteria of

economic reason. Second, if the principle of market exchange in the public sphere

were somehow applied to reproductive labor, it would entail the permanent erasure of

the affective connections between, for instance, mothers and their offspring, since

societal payment for children would carry with it the demand for good citizens for

society, which amounted a fundamentally eugenic approach. Finally, Gorz claimed

574
Ibid., 172-173.
575
Ibid., 173-211.
336
that the sale of bodies in the sphere of sex and reproduction could never be carried out

"neutrally:" as he had argued ever since Fondementspour une morale, the experience

of embodiment carried with it fundamental, constitutive elements of being-in-the-

world, and no one could dissociate entirely from what their body was doing.576

Far from endorsing some kind of retrograde domestic imprisonment for

women, however, Gorz saw himself as fighting against the further encroachment of

economic reason and defending the possibility of human "tendresse" in the private

sphere. To him, feminism was an unfinished project which entailed bringing men

into the domestic and an equal sharing of reproductive labor, insofar as that was

possible. Likewise, he was a proponent of social welfare for mothers in every

possible way, but he insisted that the ideology associated with that welfare was of

paramount importance: childbearing and parenthood had to be treated as sovereign

ends, unaccountable to the criteria of creating useful future workers.577

Another of Gorz's concerns was the neoliberal argument that the service sector

could and should provide employment for former manual workers whose positions

had been eliminated by automation and overseas manufacturing. Gorz made two

points in this regard. First, service did not "produce" anything, it merely substituted

the labor of the servant for that of the master. Thus, society did not benefit from

service in any measurable or meaningful way. Second, the expansion of the service

sector necessarily led to the "South-Africanization of society" in which a small elite

Ibid., 186-190, 192-205.

Ibid., 205.
337
enjoyed relatively large spaces of autonomy and leisure and the growing majority

catered to that elite and its interests.578

The analysis of Metamorphoses du Travail was meant to indicate "a possible

meaning" for the changes in technology and demography that had reshaped work in

advanced industrial nations since World War II.579 Again, and as he would continue

to argue until the opening years of the twenty-first century, the constant increase in

total social wealth had created the possibility of a new social organization and

governing set of ethics than those embedded in economic reason. There was nothing,

however, that was inevitable about that change - the achievement of those

possibilities was a question of politics, of choices and strategies.

Here, Gorz launched an outright attack on the prevailing ideological apparatus

of liberalism, an attack all the more interesting in that it anticipated the liberal

triumphalism that would emerge in Europe and the United States after the collapse of

the Soviet Union a few years later. Gorz claimed that the welfare state was

fundamentally a "substitute for society," a bureaucratic apparatus that maintained the

requisite social order of a capitalist economy while also insuring a minimum level of

what was a fundamentally humanitarian concern for essential human needs. What

(neo-) liberals, so-called "conservatives," failed to appreciate was that the welfare

state was a necessary part of the economic structure in an advanced capitalist nation,

benefiting society even as its regulations sometimes impeded the ability of individual

578
Ibid., 175-180.
579
Ibid., 225.
338
capitalists to maximize profits.

Whereas the existing leftist parties simply fought to retain the provisions of

the welfare state, Gorz argued that they should instead reorient themselves to fight for

social aims explicitly against, or at least not defined, by market aims. In other words,

they needed to adopt offensive strategies aimed toward a lasting break with economic

reason in law and policy, not just a defensive strategy of holding on to worker's

protections, pensions, and so on. The problem, of course, was that as national

economies became global economies, market liberalizers had the ideological

ammunition to blackmail the Left into accepting the "imperatives" of the market itself

in terms of keeping wages low enough to be "competitive," slashing benefits like

pensions and worker's compensation, and so on.581

Gorz's response was twofold. First, he insisted that the Left had to reach

beyond the national frame and coordinate regional and international responses to the

blackmail of capital; it had to fight for policy protection at the level of the Europe

and, ultimately, the world market. Second, the Left had to draw its strength from the

common social needs of its constituent elements, from actual industrial workers to

Gorz's "non-class" of the semi- and unemployed. That common project should be, as

he had argued throughout, freedom from the demands of work itself. In short, the

Left should rally around the legally-mandated and protected shortened working

580
Ibid., 2 2 5 - 2 3 1 .
581
Ibid., 230. Here, Gorz neatly summarizes the argument still being made in 2009 about the claim as
to the essential obsolescence of the Left; see the opening of Chapter 1.
339
week/"

As an aside, it would be fair to criticize Gorz for a lack of serious

consideration regarding the "internationalization" of the Left. He had been cognizant

of the threat posed to the (French) labor movement by capital's ability to seek out

more accommodating labor markets for decades, addressing precisely this issue in his

1963 Les Temps Modernes article on the European Common Market.583 Besides an

exhortation for the labor movements of Europe to join forces, however, he did little to

propose a meaningful political strategy against what would soon be known as

globalization.

One of the empirical conditions underpinning Metamorphoses du Travail was,

as we have seen, that despite attacks on the welfare state and the growth of neoliberal

theory, as of 1988 in France material conditions still suggested the existence of

enough social wealth to go around. Thus Gorz's fundamental answer to the question

of "what is to be done" in the context of an increasingly opulent society and its

contrast with the precariousness and meaninglessness of work as it was experienced

by actual workers was the shortened working week. The immediate logic of this

proposal should be clear: by reducing the amount each worker was obliged to work,

the total amount of work could be distributed to a greater number of people. At the

same time, more time would be available to each worker for his or her own

autonomous pursuits, pursuits that Gorz identified as being the sphere in which

582
Ibid., 230-232.
583
Andre Gorz, "Strategie des monopoles et strategie ouvriere dans le Marche Commun," Les Temps
Modernes 211 (December 1963): 1090-1136.
340
economic reason should not be allowed to intrude.

The logistics of this proposed system were very complex. Gorz was

completely cognizant of the arguments against the very idea of the shortened working

week: individuals should not be prevented from working more for more money if

they wanted to, it would be impossible to fairly distribute desirable positions, many

skilled workers continued to identify with their jobs and would jealously defend

them, etc. While he countered each argument with points of his own, Gorz's

fundamental retort was that the regulation of work was and always had been an

essential element of the oversight exercised by the modern state. Nothing about a

thirty or thirty-five-hour working week and a system of job distribution was more

intrusive or illogical than existing regulations that mandated a forty-hour working

week, regulations on pollution, bans on child labor, and so on.585 To Gorz, the

shortened working week and state oversight in the distribution of jobs was merely an

extension of the existing arrangement between society and state in the regulation of

the economy.

Along with the shortened working week, Gorz reiterated his support of the

guaranteed minimum income. His conception was that the minimum income should

instead supplement the income earned from a guaranteed right to work. It could and

should denote a set of shared responsibilities between citizen and society, ones that

were (in fact) no more intrusive than the existing arrangements of the welfare state.

584
His extended discussion of the reduced working week is Andre Gorz, Metormophoses du Travail,
233-256.
585
Ibid., 246-247.
341
And, again, Gorz insisted that the question of what kind of society would come into

being in the near future was a pressing one, brought about by fundamental changes in

the material conditions of work. He wrote "you cannot elude, in the name of realism,

all debates on the future society (which will no longer be a society of work), without

accepting that this last (society of work), in its disintegration, engenders misery,

frustration, irrationality and violence."586

There were thus two distinct arguments at work in Metamorphoses du Travail:

one ideological and the other logistical. First, Gorz argued that empirical conditions

necessitated a major shift in the prevailing ideology of work in the advanced

industrial nations of the West. Economic rationality had to be demarcated, cordoned-

off, from the ethics of quotidian life, exposed for what it was: a heartless, brainless

framework of thought that negated human needs in the name of calculation. Second,

he insisted that there was more than enough wealth for each individual to live at a

comfortable standard of living and enjoy a significant increase in personal autonomy

if that wealth was more equitably distributed. The number of jobs, particularly

desirable jobs of inherent interest, was shrinking, along with the aggregate number of

hours of total labor worked each year in nations like France. His proposed solution

was better job distribution, and redistribution, along with a guaranteed income.

The originality of Metamorphoses du Travail was not in its treatment of the

shortened working week and the guaranteed minimum income. As Gorz emphasized

repeatedly, those ideas were very old indeed, and versions of them were alive and

586
Ibid., 262.
342
well in the discourse of the leftist political parties and unions in Europe as he wrote.

Instead, it stands out as one of his most important works in defining a new

problematic of work and life disinterred from the dichotomy between capitalism and

socialism. As he had noted, capitalism was merely the setting in which economic

rationality had been able to spread most rapidly; the issue was no longer to defeat or

overcome capitalism, but to contain economic rationality in the spheres in which it

was appropriate: strictly limited areas of calculability within economics.

As we have seen, one of the central themes of Gorz's thought over time was

his insistence on the necessity and efficacy of consciously-chosen political efforts, of

praxis, in opposing the patronat and the other agents of capital. In Metamorphoses du

Travail, that project took on a new significance: praxis was not only opposed to the

representatives of capital in the sense of rightist political parties, business

management, and so on, but it became the very identity of human choice against the

inhuman exigencies of the market. While he did not use the term itself, the concept

underwrote his entire analysis -praxis was everything in Gorz's account since it

alone could potentially redirect social energy toward the more just distribution of

wealth and more effectively address human needs. At the heart of his argument were

two related phenomena: existentialism's focus on the irreducible kernel of choice

present in the human consciousness and a belief in the absolute autonomy of political

action.

At times, Gorz expressed some frustration with the question of logistics or of

how his proposed solutions could be enacted. At several points in the concluding
343
chapters of Metamorphoses du Travail, his prose took on a slightly exasperated tone

in fending off anticipated objections to the shortened working week and the

guaranteed minimum income. According to Gorz, politics did not happen in books, it

happened in public debate and decision-making, and hence he had a tendency to

simply allude to a future political process that would have to occur in bringing about

his proposed changes. He outlined the reasons he believed these changes should, and

in some sense had to, take place, and he walked through various points of relevant

data, but the actual implementation was outside the scope of his work.

Some of the loose ends of Gorz's theory were considered in a public meeting

of the Cercle Condorcet in Paris in 1990. The Cercle Condorcet is an contemporary

intellectual salon in the tradition of the enlightenment, albeit one that invites public

attendance at its meetings. Members of the Cercle are invited to participate in

specific discussions and debates, on a topic proposed and explained by a guest

(typically an author and intellectual.) Following the publication of Metamorphoses

du Travail, Gorz was invited by the Cercle to lead a discussion on the topic of

"Economic Rationality and Social Cohesion," the debate on which was held on

March 6, 1990. Gorz was joined in the discussion by a distinguished panel of

politicians and academics (along with a token industrial worker), from Madeleine

Reberioux, a professor of history at the University of Paris VIII to Stephane Hessel, a

diplomat and one of the original drafters of the UN Universal Declaration of Human

Rights. In the list of attendees in the published transcript of the meeting, Gorz is

listed simply as "writer" (ecrivain.)

344
 The transcript is one of the relatively rare examples of Gorz in a position in

which he had to publicly defend his views. Given his deliberate exit from the

Parisian intellectual scene ten years earlier, it is particularly illuminating to witness

Gorz with interlocutors who, while largely sympathetic to his outlook and who

admired his work, were not necessarily partisans of Gorz's ecological outlook nor

from the same radical background. Perhaps most importantly, several of the

participants in the debate asked Gorz to provide answers as to how his vision of a

society disinterred from its obsession with hard work and efficiency could be

achieved, given the historical ability of capitalism to absorb and convert different

modes of thought into economic rationality.

Gorz began his introduction by noting that all societies had been forced to

confront the question of "in what measure is economic rationality compatible with the

minimum of social cohesion a society needs to survive?"587 In the history of

European capitalism, where work had once been the heart of social identity and, in

that sense, had tied economic rationality more directly to social cohesion itself,

changes in the patterns of labor and production in the late twentieth century were

undermining that connection, or, more to the point, should be undermining it. Gorz

pointed out that a twenty year-old worker in 1946 could expect to spend one-third of

the rest of his life at work, a figure that had dropped to one-fourth by 1975 and, in

Andre Gorz in Cercle Condorcet: rationalite economique et cohesion sociale, debat introduit et
anime par Andre Gorz (Paris: Cercle Condorcet, 1990), 3.
345
1990, to one-fifth.588 His initial argument was not surprising for those familiar with

Metamorphoses du Travail: "this incapacity of our societies to found a civilization of

free time brings about an absurd and scandalously unjust distribution of work, of

available time and of wealth."589

Gorz based his arguments both on a high-level analysis of total social wealth

and on the focus on the subjective experience of workers. His overall point was that

instead of freeing most people from the egregious demands of work, the decrease in

demand for labor had instead made full-time positions more desirable, scarce, and

difficult to attain. Per Gorz, the excuses of the patronat were predictable: new jobs in

emerging fields like micro-electronics were exciting for workers and served to

balance out those manual-labor positions that were overtaken by automation.

Likewise, the apologists of the system claimed that rapidly changing environment of

the labor market encouraged "flexibility" among workers. Gorz was quick to point

out that, first, only a small percentage of workers could aspire to highly-skilled

positions in the new tech industries and, second and more importantly, "this that the

patronat calls "flexibility" is translated for workers by precariousness." New jobs

were being created, but as often as not, they were unskilled, low-paying positions;

60% of new jobs created in the United States in the 1980s were at the poverty level of

590
wages.
Gorz's high-level analysis of what had happened was based at least in part on

588
Ibid.
589
Ibid., 4.
590
Ibid., 5.
346
classical economic theory. In the industrial society of the twentieth century,

machines came to make and do things that had hitherto been done by hand, creating

more and better products, which could be purchased by workers earning wages. The

net effect was that more people could afford more of the "riches" of society because

everyday objects were less costly than they had been. The would-be solution

proposed by neoliberal economic theorists for the shrinking industrial labor market

was "tertiarization," a shift to service-sector jobs that might not have existed before

(professional dog-walkers and shoppers, nannies, in-home care for the elderly, etc.)

but which would still provide employment. As Gorz had argued in Metamorphoses

du Travail, however, the problem was that service sector jobs were merely

"substitution equivalent," one person doing work that a different person would have

done, thereby introducing no net gain in efficiency. Gorz was quick to point out that

no less a figure of liberal economics than Adam Smith had already categorically

rejected substitution as a means to create wealth in a society.591

Gorz was not primarily concerned with the lack of new wealth created by

substitution; after all, he was deeply skeptical of the model of continual growth and

had been arguing for decades that enough wealth already existed to care for everyone

in France (issues of global distribution notwithstanding.) What he was truly focused

on in his outline to the Cercle Condorcet was the social consequences of the "South-

Africanization" of society represented by a shrinking elite of highly-skilled job-

holders on the one hand and a mass of semi-employed, part-time, and service

591
Ibid., 6 - 8 .
347
personnel on the other. "Personal services develop thanks to the pauperization of a

growing mass of people, a phenomenon recorded in North America as well as

Western Europe..." The result was a kind of internal colonization of the wealthy

nations of Europe and North America.

According to Gorz, the contradiction in this situation was essentially political:

most of human history had seen a small elite control most of the wealth and power in

a given society while the majority struggled to survive with precarious access to

employment and social resources. But, the last time that situation had held sway in

Europe, particularly in terms of a huge number of servants attending to the whims of

the elite, was before mandatory mass-education and universal suffrage. "Today, on

the other hand, we live with this explosive paradox: our government wants 80% of

the youth to pass the Baccalaureate but by virtue of the ideology of employment that

develops an enormous under-class of servants to embellish the lives and the leisure of

the wealthy classes."

Gorz was also troubled by the potentially limitless horizons of

"monetization," the effort to transform every human activity and need into a source of

employment, if not of actual productive wealth-generation. In its most macabre

manifestations, this could lead to the traffic of organs, embryos, and reproduction

itself, a situation about which Gorz asked "are we not already in the process of

transforming ourselves into merchandise and of treating life like a means (for the

592
Ibid., 9.
593
Ibid., 9.
348
creation of wealth) among others, and not as the supreme end that all other means

must serve?" He concluded by identifying and defining the task of left as being to

actively oppose the forces that would continue to disintegrate and reconstitute human

life and activity in terms of economic rationality: "the supreme task of a left, if a left

there must be, consists of transforming this liberation of time in to a new liberty and

into new rights: the right of each to earn his or her life in working, but in working less

and less, better and better, (and) in receiving his or her part of socially-produced

wealth."594

The ensuing discussion was cordial, although substantive objections were

raised to some of Gorz's points. Robert Fossaert, a sociologist, criticized Gorz for

being too schematic in dismissing the entire service sector as a "colonized" and

useless part of the economy, considering that it included education, medicine, and

justice. He also pointed out that "in the beginning of industrial society, when the

question was to bring respect to labor and to give it dignity, an entire body of ideas,

of practices and of organizations was built: the workers movement, to coin a phrase.

For an innovation of society as fundamental as that for which Andre Gorz would be

the prophet, there would need to be a mobilization of forces at least equal to that of

the worker's movement, by its body of ideas, by its social initiative, by its

institutionalization, by its forces put into movement. For now, I don't see it."595

Fossaert also questioned Gorz's geographical scope; the assumptions that Gorz had

1U1U., 1 1 .

Ibid., 18.
349
predicated his argument on, that wealth was increasing, that the need for full-time

employment was obsolete, that the model of industrial civilization itself had been

surpassed, were all staunchly Eurocentric in their outlook.

Gorz answered by insisting that the bases of his arguments were, at least in the

European context, empirically accurate: the market as it was in 1990 could not

provide full employment for a growing number of people, but the social ideology of

labor still posited full employment and identification with work as the norm to be

aspired to and adhered to by everyone. Thus, while he admitted that he was unable to

provide a detailed blueprint for how to bring about the kind of changes he envisaged

as necessary, Gorz argued that the issue demanded a response, and that it was the

political and theoretical task of the left to come up with one. Here, he cited the

integration of political ecology and the women's movement into the leftist parties of

Europe, particularly that of the West German SDP, whose concerns about individual

autonomy were fundamentally opposed to economic rationality as Gorz characterized

it. He did not, however, answer the charge of Eurocentrism, except to claim vaguely

that global consumption would have to fall in order to bring about the possibility of a

more equitable distribution of wealth, an issue he had taken up in other essays, but

did not consider in any length at the Cercle Condorcet debate.596

The historian Madeleine Reberioux objected that Gorz had idealized older

forms of workers and their identification with their jobs, pointing out that the struggle

over forms of personal identification was as old as the labor movement itself. In

596
Ibid., 2 0 - 2 1 .
350
addition, she cited examples of teachers in the Third Republic who were shot through

with the same kind of ennui that Gorz used to describe disaffected workers, including

in education and other highly-skilled professions, in postindustrial society. Thus,

Gorz had drawn a simplistic dichotomy between workers in various fields who, in the

past, could and did tie their identities directly in with their vocation, and the

postindustrial worker who could not and did not.597

Gorz's response was that, in a sense, he had left out an important element of

his own analysis: "the loss of identity in work, for me, was never the loss of an

identification of the worker with his work, but the loss of a class identity... all of these

people (various kinds of workers), the same if they are unqualified, (carry) the

economy on their shoulders. They could believe in a political mission of the working

class that they incarnate. And likewise, "the loss of meaning isn't the loss of a

meaning that work (itself) has, it's the loss of a historical meaning, of a historical

identification of the working class as the possible subject of society and of history."598

Behind his sociological argument about the non-identification of workers and their

work, then, Gorz's true point was that there was no self-understanding available to

workers comparable to class identity, and that the lack of that identity was a profound

political problem for anyone who questioned the justice or efficacy of economic

rationality as the guiding principle for French, and possibly global, society.

Rather abruptly, at the end of the discussion, Gorz brought up the subject of

597
Ibid., 29 - 30.
598
Ibid., 30.
351
ecology. "The definition of a politics in the long term, for reorienting the activity and

way of life toward other priorities and according to other values than those of

salability and of maximum performance, must however, to avoid being an empty

wish, correspond to material requirements and constraints... I speak of ecological

constraints and requirements, especially the necessity of other agricultural techniques,

other system of transportation, (and) other sources of energy."599 It is not clear from

the transcript if Gorz had intended to emphasize ecology elsewhere in the discussion,

but it did not make its way into the body of his argument in this context.

The 1980s and Beyond: Conclusion

In his 1983 meeting with the young German socialists who visited him in

Vosnon, Gorz explained elements of his intellectual paradigm that underlay his work

in Adieux au Proletariat and Chemins du Paradis:

"In Europe, the conception of man as a tool of tools, that is to say of a great
machine, is relatively recent; the victory of technocratic despotism is
therefore not completely inevitable. But to oppose it the individual (must)
interrogate himself as to the meaning, the goal and the value of advanced
technologies and reject the conception of the world that postulates that there
is, beyond each of us, an absolutely superior subject who knows better than
we do, who decides good and evil, of what to do and that which his
forbidden. It's of little importance what one calls this superhuman subject;
state, party, people, God or nature. In every case, it has to do with
totalitarian negations of the true subject, that is to say, of the individual
subject."600

599
Ibid., 35.
600
Andre Gorz in Christophe Fourel, Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe siecle, 189.
352
 The importance of Gorz's work of the 1980s was the defense of the individual

subject, one carried out within a remarkably broad understanding of Gorz's

contemporary social context. Gorz's major works of the decade are difficult to

classify; are they works of philosophy, or political theory, or sociology? The question

is legitimate in that, despite his own insistence that he was a "stowaway philosopher

who, within essays that appear to be political.. .tries to smuggle in original

philosophical reflections," Gorz's work was as much genuine political and

sociological theory, based on empirical evidence, as it was philosophical reflection.601

The intellectual hybridity that had always set him apart truly came into its own in his

writing of the 1980s.

Once again, it is fruitful to consider Gorz's work alongside that of Sartre; as

Beauvoir emphasized in her Ceremonie des adieux, Sartre's last project, his

unrealized collaborative book with Pierre Victor, was to have been a philosophical

answer as to how the individual subject could unite with others while retaining his or

her freedom. This had been one of the major impulses behind Sartre's Critique as

well, but it was left unfinished. Gorz, however, endeavored to answer precisely that

question, armed with the full breadth of his understanding of social, economic, and

technological change, and even if his answers beg analysis or even rebuttal, they are

at least complete and are often compelling. Ultimately, he insisted that:

601
Ibid., 180. Note that, to this day, Gorz's work ends up in widely different categories within French
bookstores.
353
 "It is impossible to desire one's own freedom without recognizing that of
others and wanting to be recognized by them as free, that is to say, as the
author of my own actions. Reciprocity is always the generalized valorization
of freedom (in which) we all pursue a common objective that each has
recognized as his or her own but that cannot be attained without the
voluntary action of each. Each will be recognized and regarded as freedom
by all and vice versa. This can only be in the context of social being.'"

In fact, the strength of Gorz's work of the 1980s was in defining "social

being" in precise, historical terms, not just abstract philosophical ones. Gorz wrote

Adieux au proletariat because, historically, the proletariat was no longer a valid

revolutionary subject within western Europe. His considerations of the shortened

working week and the guaranteed minimum income were not just tedious exercises in

potential political policy, they were practical answers to effect what he hoped would

be a social and philosophical break with capitalist society. His definition of

economic rationality came at a time when, he hoped, the confluence of social wealth

and the obsolescence of full-time employment could lead to an escape from economic

rationality as the guiding principle of French (and, perhaps, global) society.

As it turns out, whether or not that potential did exist at the time, the moment

passed soon after, and Gorz went from being an advocate of new innovations in social

policy to a defender of existing ones under fire from the new ideological order:

neoliberalism. From the early part of the 1990s until his death in 2007, Gorz was a

vocal critic of the triumphalist rhetoric of global capital precisely during the period

when its traditional opponent, socialism, disintegrated as an actual political project.

602
Ibid., 190. Italics added.
354
 Chapter 6: The Contemporary Gorz

Late Work

The last phase of Gorz's work lasted roughly seventeen years, from 1990 until

2007. The events that defined that period were the collapse of the Berlin Wall and

the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union on the one hand and Gorz's death in

September of 2007 on the other. As argued in the conclusion of the last chapter,

Gorz's writing shifted from a relatively optimistic stance regarding the possibilities of

escape from capitalism's social and economic formations to a much more defensive

and pessimistic formulation, against the backdrop of the end of the great communist

experiments of the twentieth century.

In France, the Left, in the form of the Socialist Party and its president,

Francois Mitterand, had been in power since his election in 1981.603 Mitterand's

election was almost unprecedented; not since the election of Leon Blum and the

Popular Front government of the 1930s had a leftist candidate and government held

power in a French republic.604 As the years of Mitterand's tenure went by, however,

See Julius W. Friend, The Long Presidency: France in the Mitterand Years, 1981 - 1995 (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1998), George Ross and Jane Jenson, "France: Triumph and Tragedy," in Perry
Anderson and Patrick Camiller, Mapping the West European Left, 158 - 188, Gordon Wright, France
in Modern Times, 426 - 433, and Tony Judt, Postwar, 551 - 557. Note that despite extensive coverage
of the Mitterand campaign in Le Nouvel Observateur, Gorz did not pen any articles on the election or
the PS until after Mitterand's victory (see below.)
604
On the Popular Front, the four-year alliance between the communist and socialist parties in Third-
Republic France, see Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy 1934 -
1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Karl G. Harr, Jr., The Genesis and Effect of
the Popular Front in France (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987). See also Tony Judt's
355
the "leftist" government abandoned almost all of their most ambitious social reforms.

Major industries were not, in fact, nationalized, and while the French welfare state

was still comparatively large and comprehensive, France did not achieve anything

like actual "socialism." As early as February 6, 1982, Gorz published a disparaging

article in Le Nouvel Observateur noting that far from representing genuine

democratic decision-making, the PS was just a new kind of autocracy under

Mitterand, one all too willing to abandon its socialist ideals; in so many words, "the

socialist party no longer exists."605

Thus, in France, the identity and goals of "the Left" were put in question

during the decade of its supposed triumph. A much more crushing blow came in the

form of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Even though practically every self-

proclaimed leftist in France had long since come to regard Soviet communism as a

farce and a failed experiment, the existence of the USSR still held out the hope that

an alternative to capitalism could at least be envisaged and attempted on a large scale.

In his 1979 autobiography, Gorz's colleague Jean Daniel wrote

"As criminal as it (i.e. the USSR) was, and God knows that each of us had
often denounced its crimes... in the depths of our hearts or of our
unconscious, the Soviet Union remained the site chosen by history for the
first successful revolution of the worker's movement; the nation that had paid
the bloodiest price in the war against Nazism; the victim of all the coalitions
of the Cold War; the sanctuary, finally, of all of the downtrodden of the
Third World."606

laudatory biographical sketch of the socialist president Leon Blum in Tony Judt, The Burden of
Responsibility.
605
Michel Bosquet, "Le P.S. n'existe plus," Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 February 1982, 26 - 27.
606
Jean Daniel, L 'Ere des Ruptures (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1979), 19.
356
Likewise, Perry Anderson recalled what had passed when he wrote "Politically, a

third of the planet had broken with capitalism. Few had any doubts about the

enormities of Stalin's rule, or the lack of democracy in any of the countries that

described themselves as socialist. But the Communist bloc, even at its moment of

division, was still a dynamic reality.. ."607 After the fall of the Berlin Wall and,

subsequently, the Soviet Bloc as a whole, without that "dynamic reality" in real

geopolitical space, it became all too easy to conclude not only that there were no

longer any extant alternatives to capitalism, but that there never could be alternatives

at all.608

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

With characteristic intransigence, Gorz would battle against that conclusion

for the rest of his life. The collection Capitalisme, Socialisme, Ecologie {Capitalism,

607
Perry Anderson, "Renewals," New Left Review, January - February 2000.
f.(\Q
The iconic work in English celebrating the end of the communist "alternative" to democracy and
capitalism was Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992.) As noted in the literature review of chapter 1, the French equivalent was Francois Furet, Le
Passe d'une Illusion: essai sur I'idee communiste au XXe siecle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995.) Both
shared the argument that capitalism and democracy were naturally linked and that the end of the
illusory promise of a communistic perfect society would herald a new, "post-ideological" order of free
markets and human rights. In the realm of economic history, see the comparable work by Niall
Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700 - 2000 (New York: Basic
Books, 2001). In the cultural sphere, this new world order was tied to the diffuse category of
postmodernism; see Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1979), and the critiques by Fredric Jameson and Perry Anderson: Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991),
Perry Anderson, The Origins ofPostmodernity (London: Verso, 1998).
357
Socialism, Ecology), a group of articles published as a slim volume in 1991, initiated

the orientations and arguments that Gorz would address in the last phase of his

writing, from the collapse of the Soviet Union until his death in 2007. Accepting

both the collapse of socialism as "real and existing" in the USSR and the urgent need

for the reconfiguration of the Left in the face of a triumphant and rampant capitalism,

Gorz's abiding question was "how can the development of the economy be oriented

in a social and ecological sense?"609 From this question, Gorz worked to elaborate

the idea of an "eco-social rationality" whose purpose would be to hold economic

rationality in check, both to protect the lives and the existential possibilities of human

beings and to insure that the biosphere did not suffer a catastrophic collapse.

There was a new sense of urgency in Gorz's writing beginning in 1991. He

recognized that the collapse of nominally socialistic political regimes would

undermine leftist politics worldwide. He also began his strongest and most sustained

effort to combine the two separate threads of his earlier work: ecology and the

philosophy of work, concerned as he was with the terrifying pace of environmental

degradation. He watched as the great opportunity he had identified in the 1980s, the

unlikely confluence of social wealth and a dearth of jobs that might prompt a

reconfiguration of society, became increasingly unlikely in the face of neoliberal

triumphalism. He warned of the disasters to come, to both the world economy and

world ecology, if economic rationality continued to expand unchecked.

609
Andre Gorz, Capitalisme Socialisme Ecologie: disorientations, orientations (Paris: Editions
Galilee, 1991), 33.
358
 It is worthwhile to quote Gorz at length from his introduction to the volume,

as his points would frame much of his intellectual labor to follow for the next sixteen

years. He wrote

"As a system, socialism is dead. As a politically organized movement and

force, it agonizes. All of its recently proclaimed goals are peripheral. The
social forces which carried it are disintegrating. Socialism has lost its
prophetic dimension, its material base, its "historical subject"; its philosophy
of work and of history is refuted by History and by the technical changes
which are driving to extinction, if not the proletariat, at least the working
class... Every thing passes as if the industrial working class has moved back
in favor of a post-industrial proletariat, in large part feminine, which, because
of the precariousness of its condition and of the nature of its tasks, can derive
from its work neither social identity nor a vocation to exercise economic,
technical or political power."

And yet, while socialism as it had been was no longer applicable, Gorz

immediately recognized the profound threat represented by the collapse of the USSR

and the celebration of the West's "victory" in the Cold War. Simply put, "capitalism

does not accommodate itself to a stable social order."611 As he had demonstrated

with such force in Metamophoses du Travail, Gorz argued again that "work" as such

could not provide social identity, nor could it provide an ethics beyond the relentless

pursuit of profit. As a result, Europe had entered into an identity crisis, attacking its

own internal "others" and embracing nostalgic systems that fundamentally harkened

back to pre-modern societies in which, it was imagined, social identity was stable and

obvious. Hence, among other things, the rise of the new Far Right like Le Pen's

610
Ibid., 9-10.
611
Ibid., 20.
359
National Front.612

Gorz was also interested in the activities of the German Green Party, which he

identified with a parallel longing for a stable identity, albeit one of a completely

different kind than the crude, racist nationalisms of Europe's new extreme Right. The

Greens instead predicted a catastrophic ecological apocalypse that would wipe away

the unsustainable lifestyle of the first world. In fact, some Green theorists welcomed

such a scenario, as the post-apocalyptic world might finally usher in small, self-

sustaining communities in harmony with the natural world. The problem with this

concept for Gorz was less its questionable set of priorities, but that it was merely the

inversion of the Far-Right's nostalgia for an imagined social identity tied directly to

land and place. More importantly, the Green's conception of ecological Armageddon

followed by the possibility of rebirth reduced politics to a waiting game for the

collapse to come.

Gorz insisted that it was from within the newly triumphant capitalism that the

socialist movement could and should embark on a new set of priorities: the

reorientation of society toward eco-social logic while erecting bulwarks against the

encroachment of economic rationality into the social sphere. Against the backdrop of

the collapse of the large-scale systematic attempts to create some imagined "socialist

state," Gorz sought to redefine the very concept of socialism. Socialism was an

unfinished and interminable process, a set of logics guiding political action, not a set

612
Ibid., 1 8 - 2 2 .
613
Ibid., 2 6 - 2 8 .
360
social structure or political order to be achieved. He wrote "It will never be achieved,

this perpetual action of orientating, of modeling, of subjecting the system to a

rationality - that of the epanouissement of individuals... Socialism can not and must

not be conceived as an alternative system; it is nothing more than the place beyond

capitalism towards which social movements orient themselves when they struggle for

development modeled according to the lived needs (besoins vecus) of people...this

struggle is never definitively won nor lost. It continues and it will continue."614

To an extent, then, Gorz tried to use the collapse of the Soviet Bloc as an

opportunity to clarify precisely what socialist politics was all about, particularly in

view of their evident failures in the East. There was some comfort to be found in the

notion that socialism was an impulse, albeit one that was sometimes inchoate or

merely latent, coterminous with modern social development itself. In that, it could

not be vanquished, just put on hold for a time. Gorz could not ignore the fact that the

global political realignment of the late 1980s and early 1990s did pose a major threat

to the gains of the Left in the short term, even if socialism would live on in the hearts

of minds of self-understood leftists.

Thus, much of Gorz's energy in the 1990s was directed toward the pernicious

effects of neoliberalism. His primary target was the obfuscating ideology that

claimed that the operation of markets was a universal balm, that untrammeled

markets themselves were the path to prosperity for the vast majority. He wrote "The

neoliberals always reason as if capital invests itself spontaneously where unsatisfied

614
Ibid., 3 7 - 3 8 .
361
needs are the greatest. This is never the case. Capital invests itself where it can

anticipate the highest profits, and this is never in produces that which addresses the

most pressing needs of a destitute population that one can hope would earn the most

money; it is in the production of goods or services likely to be desired by the most

solvent classes."615 Against the idea that market mechanisms somehow self-regulated

in accordance with human needs, not just profit-making opportunities, Gorz noted "If

the price of agriculture products or the level of salaries were determined by the law of

the supply and demand, we would for the most part have been dead of hunger for a

long time. In every industrial nation, the relative prices of goods and services are

regulated by the state, without which society would not be livable. Everything that is

vital is subsidized: agriculture production, lodging, health, transportation, libraries,

research, museums, theaters, etc."616

Likewise, the intervention, of the state in the economy had always been

necessary, even in the era of so-called "heroic" capitalism in the late nineteenth

century. "In what measures must the mechanisms of the market operate freely? This

question has been at the center of political conflicts for two hundred years.. .the

history of capitalism is that of a continual extension of legal restrictions..." a fact

that, Gorz was quick to point out, had ended legal slavery, child labor, and so on.617

Thus, it was utterly bogus to claim that state intervention was somehow antithetical to

"capitalism" - capitalism had always been managed by the apparatus of the state.
615
Ibid., 41.
616
Ibid., 45. It is characteristic that Gorz would include his own predilections (libraries, research,
museums) among "vital" social needs.
617
Ibid.
362
Socialism, on the other hand, had always been the defense of civil society against the

market, which as he had been arguing for years, tended to disintegrate social bonds.

"(Socialism) demands that the forces of the market be contained, mastered and

controlled by society, while capitalism presents the inverse demand."618

As Gorz sought to chart a course for the Left against the rise of the neoliberal

consensus, he was quick to point out the danger posed by outdated leftist hypotheses.

In particular, he was relentlessly critical of those strains of leftist theory that still

sought in work itself the source of a possible social transformation. As of 1990,

many leftist thinkers in Europe still argued that the task of the Left was to transform

work as it was experienced in the workplace into the "appropriation" of the world.

Summarizing the arguments of the German leftist theorist Oskar Negt, Gorz wrote

"Work, therefore, must, as it was for Hegel, be understood as the activity by which

the human being externalizes his being - that is to say the product as existing being

objectively outside of the self- as "practico-sensorial activity," as "the appropriative

formation of the objective world," in the sense of Greek "poeisis."619

That task, however, was doomed in the modern workplace. "If one

understands "work" in the sense of "poeisis" or, as does Negt at times, in the sense of

"praxis," the term "work" must not apply to the immense majority of truly existing

jobs and of vocations.. ."620 As he had demonstrated so exhaustively in the last two

decades of his writing, Gorz repeated that there was no possibility for most workers

618
Ibid., 46.
6,9
Ibid., 115-116.
620
Ibid., 117.
363
to achieve autonomy within their work: tasks were too specialized and limited, jobs

were too precarious, and the results of work, production itself, had nothing to do with

the intentions of the worker. Furthermore, as Gorz pointed out regarding thinkers like

Negt who hoped the left might reorganize work into a form in which the worker could

recognize him or herself, there was an implicit assumption that the workers would be

capable of creating a new culture of work despite having spent their entire lives as

part of a ruthless, soulless hierarchy. "This was already, but along different lines, the

thesis of Herbert Marcuse when he argued that the alienation of individuals is so

profound, in opulent societies, that they can no longer be conscious (of

alternatives.)"621

In fact, Gorz claimed, there was a culture that escaped from work already, the

period offormation and education that preceded work, and the one that existed (at

least for some, and at least potentially) during free time. Those examples, of time

given over to forms of epanouissement outside of economic rationality, should serve

as models for equivalent spaces of autonomy. In turn, the reduction of the working

week was a "necessary but not sufficient" condition for personal growth and relative

autonomy, since there was no practical way to envisage the transformation of work

itself. Gorz rejected the term "work" (or "labor") itself as being capable of

appropriation by the Left to mean "poeisis" or personal growth, since it was so

inflected with its connotations of heteronomous activity: "I therefore call work only

those activities inserted in the social process of work and recognized as an integrated

621
Ibid., 122.
364
part of it. It can have to do with socially-useful and necessary activities, but also of

unproductive work, of paid work or non-paid work."622

Following a restatement of his critique of the demand by a sector of the

women's movement for compensation for reproductive labor, Gorz made an original

point regarding the whole idea of "work," this time among feminists and ecologists.

Some radical members of both movements had claimed that "true work" was in fact

reproductive labor, the labor necessary for the constitution and continuation of life,

not work whose goal was participation in the market. While Gorz may have been

sympathetic to this idea in theory, for him it was not useful in terms of practical

politics: "The implicit model is the ancient village community, the ashram, the self-

sustaining kibbutz: that is to say a form of society in which the economy and culture,

the community sphere and the private sphere, work and life are confounded,...this

radical critique remains purely abstract, it only refers to medieval or exotic models of

society, it cannot, in our societies, touch on practical experiences or possibilities

which would make possible the actual transformation of society. It is content to

oppose to existing industrial systems cultural models (that are) fundamentally

different. This opposition remains non-dialectical, inoperable, "utopian" in the bad

sense of the word."

This was a concise and powerful demand for realism on the part of Gorz. "To

exist politically, an ecological left has, by consequences, an urgent need for

Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 132-133.
365
mediations between the existing industrial system, its salaries and tasks, for one part,

and, for the other part, post-industrial forms of society which respond to ecological

requirements as well as the aspiration of individuals to liberate themselves from work

as it exists and to find in work the possibilities of auto-determination as much as

possible."624 A new socialist politics, predicated on eco-social logic, had to abandon

the epochal vision of a totally remade society and pursue incremental changes toward

a better one. In a sense, this was an updated version of Gorz's much earlier concept

of revolutionary reforms.

But, as Robert Fossaert had objected during the Cercle Condorcet debate, who

or what was the potential subject of a new socialist movement, when class identity

could no longer fit the bill? Gorz provided two original points on this issue in his

contribution to Sozialismus in Europa. Bilanz und Perspektiven, a West German

publication in tribute to the German socialist politician Willy Brandt. First, he argued

that there were, in fact, a myriad of social identities that could serve as a basis to

resist economic rationality:

"The important point is that the critique of capitalist rationality and socialist
sensibility does not result, among workers in modem sectors, from their
working life and their class consciousness but overall from the discovery of
what they do as citizens, parents, consumers, inhabitants of a neighborhood
or a city that capitalist development dispossess them from their lifestyle, as
much social as natural. It is not in their professional competence nor in their
identification with their vocation that they take their motifs of their resistance
against this dispossession, but in their extra-professional life and
,,625
experiences.
Ibid., 134.
Ibid., 144.
366
 That being said, "It is nevertheless impossible to be content with the cultural

resistance of these new social movements to that which J. Habermas calls "the

colonization of the life-world. "...The social movements are, certainly, anti-

technocratic, that is to say, as noted by A. Touraine, directed against the cultural

hegemony of the directing class of the dominant class, but they do not attack the

domination of that class but in its cultural foundations and in its social consequences,

not in its material base: its economic matrix."626 For that, Gorz argued, the "cultural"

anti-capitalist movement would have to ally with the "post-industrial proletariat" that

Gorz had first identified in Adieux au proletariat, particularly the millions who

worked at precarious or part-time positions or were chronically unemployed. His

political vision amounted to a new leftist culture that transcended class divisions,

toward the aim of a pervasive regulation of economics and the expansion of free time.

To Gorz, it was pointless to bemoan the centrality of the labor movement's

struggles; that loss was an empirical fact. "We must not evidently conclude that there

is no longer class unity or solidarity and that labor conflicts have lost interest from the

point of view of a strategy of social change. The labor front, of the union struggle,

remains decisive, but it is no longer the central front...the central conflict is situated at

a deeper level than the conflicts of labor."627 As he had several times in the past,

Gorz cited studies and statistics that demonstrated that most adult Europeans did not

Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 159.
367
identify themselves primarily in terms of their jobs. Furthermore, around half of

Europeans did not have access to full-time employment, whether or not they actually

wanted it, and thus fell into the category of "precariousness and unemployment" that

Gorz saw as the defining feature of the "non-class of non-workers."628

Throughout Gorz's writing, particularly in the period of the 1980s and 1990s,

there is a sense of frustration at what could be with what already exists and occurs

within the economy. "If we could adjust are time of work to the needs that we truly

feel, how many hours would we work? But that possibility of a "chosen time" is not

offered to us. This is why available time is always the little time to rest after work, a

time defined by the constraints of work....With the auto-limitation of the duration of

work, "chosen time" would render possible the auto-limitation of revenue and of

consumption, according to the needs and desires really felt by each."629 To work less,

to consume less, to shift one's focus from consumption to, really, anything else, were

not per Gorz to be thought of as "sacrifices" but as "renouncements.'''' Part of the

new leftist culture had to revolve around the recognition that limitless consumption

was not only impossible, but undesirable.

In turn, that recognition hinged on one's attitude toward the natural world.

This was the whole purpose of political ecology: "ecologism does not limit itself to

trying to diminish the impact on the environment of the existing system of

production. It contests the reasons for which a certain number of techniques, of

Ibid., 165.
Ibid., 170.
368
production and of consumptions were developed in the first place." Political

ecology was a break with economic rationality, whereas "Anglo-Saxon

environmentalism" was merely a capitalistic safety valve whose purpose was really

the preservation of the existing system, albeit one that was forced to accept certain

restraints. Ecologism was an element of the larger movement that Gorz identified

with post-Soviet socialism itself; environmentalism, meanwhile, was simply a kind of

capitalistic self-preservation. What Gorz called ecologism was thus a constituent and

necessary element of a new socialism, one that insisted on a break with economic

rationality.

In short: to Gorz, as of 1990, the need for a major shift away from capitalism

was evident, the experience of work had already changed, and the means to realize a

reduced working-week and the imposition of forms of logic fundamentally different

than economic rationality were already present. The inevitable opposition of

capitalism's defenders could be overcome when the force of anti-capitalist logic was

brought to bear on them and public opinion shifted to the Left. Only the inertia of the

past and the thoughtless acceptance of the social and cultural status quo kept

capitalism intact, not its much-vaunted "laws of the market."

As we have seen, much hinged in Gorz's thought on the viability of the

reduced working week (again, as the "necessary but not sufficient" condition of a

better-organized economy.) Some French labor strategists objected to the idea of the

reduced working-week for the simple reason that to reduce the number of hours

630
Ibid., 171-172.
369
worked per person would seem to reduce each worker's share of the total wealth

distributed through wages. Gorz countered that, first, the reduction of hours worked

per worker had not historically reduced buying-power or lifestyle standards, and

second, the national economy as a whole could afford to distribute more wealth per

worker if economic growth was anticipated in the overall schema. "Don't we work

half as much as (we did) at the start of the century while enjoying a real revenue not

half as much but at least give times higher? Why can't we conserve in the future out

current buying power, while the gains in productivity are far from being dried-up."631

The crux of Gorz's argument was that from existing economic conditions, the

restructuring of the working week and a more equitable distribution of national

wealth could occur if productivity gains were earmarked in specific ways. The

reduced working-week with a concomitant preservation of existing buying-power and

standards of living "becomes possible if we reason ex ante on the best way to

distribute the fruits of development to come. This redistribution, thus, is an affair of

political choice, it is to realize in the limit of this that it is reasonable to anticipate and

desire."632

For the time being, Gorz argued that the politically efficacious thing was to

accept the continued growth of the economy as a given, since any attempt to restrict

its growth would be far more radical, and threatening to the majority of those in

political power, than the introduction of the reduced working-week. This was a rare

1
Ibid., 190.
2
Ibid., 191.
370
rhetorical concession on Gorz's part; he normally insisted on the necessity of

economic changes based on ecological imperatives and equally rarely concerned

himself with the pragmatic need to win over converts from the Center or Right.633

While Gorz had certainly addressed the logistical questions arising from a

potential limitation of the working-week in the past, in his "La Reduction de la duree

du travail" ("The Reduction of the Duration of Work") he went into considerably

greater detail. Here, he argued again that the goal was, among others, to escape from

the polarization of society between an elite of skilled workers and a mass of unskilled

workers in service positions. "A politics of RDT will necessarily be selective in

terms of the types of services of which it favors the development. It will distinguish

in particular between cultural services in the larger sense, tending to the expansion of

personal faculties and of the capacity to autonomously take charge by individuals of

their own life, existential problems, health, etc."634 In other words, a concomitant

goal of the reduced working-week was the reduction and exclusion of mindless,

oppressive jobs in the service sector.

That would be achieved through selective funding. Gorz proposed, following

the sociologist Guy Aznar, that society provide a supplementary income to all

workers in the amount that their position had been reduced; Gorz combined the

existing logic behind selective tariffs, subsidies, and "sin taxes" in his proposal for a

radically expanded "societal" (read: state) intervention into the economy. While Gorz

Ibid., 196-197.
Ibid., 202.
371
confidently outlined how a large-scale program of the reduced working-week and its

attendant alterations to the economy could be accomplished at the national level, he

noted that the actual mechanics of wealth-redistribution accompanied by a

continuation of productivity increases were simply too complex to specify completely

ahead of time. This was, however, a blessing in disguise: "it signifies that the

economy and society will not let purely technocratic criteria manage (distribution and

productivity) and that the choice of a reduced working-week will be first of all a

political choice." Like the existing 40-hour week and 8-hour day, the 35 or 30-hour

week would be adapted to each company and each industry according to an active

debate and active social experimentation.635 Indeed, "one of the goals of a politics of

the reduced working-week is precisely to oblige this genre of collective

negotiations." Gorz insisted that the relative autonomy of the labor movement,

social interests, and even of the patronat had to remain intact, that the political

process by which RDT might be implemented and elaborated would be one of

genuine politics.

There are two important points implicit in Gorz's insistence. First, he was

opposing the idea of a restructured economy based on RDT to the existing mode of

French technocratic government and of economic dirigisme; whereas highly-trained

bureaucrats made decisions by fiat in the existing system, the political heart of Gorz's

proposal was the call for an actual debate between groups outside of the state itself.

Ibid., 206.
Ibid., 208.
372
Second, this was also the major distinction in Gorz's proposal to the broader notion of

state capitalism or the pseudo-socialism of the eastern bloc. It was a rallying cry for a

new practical politics of work, but one beholden to the standards of democratic

government.

What the articles in Capitalisme, Socialisme, Ecologie were not were practical

guides or interventions in the actual contemporary politics of early-1990s France.

Gorz did not address the PS, nor did he offer warnings about UMP strategy. Clearly,

his journalistic interventions were in the past, and his work was now confined to the

plain of political theory on a slightly more abstract level. Nevertheless, he remained

committed to a critique of political economy, and political possibility, that was tied

very closely to the rapid changes occurring in the French economy. His work of the

late 1970s and 1980s had certainly been critical of existing politics, but it had also

been fairly optimistic; the necessary conditions for widespread prosperity and the

expansion of autonomy were, he argued, already present, By 1991, he was less

sanguine about the present and increasingly concerned that the future would see a

reversal of the fortunes of the Left, not further progress.

Miseres du Present

Of course, he was right to be worried. By 1995, the neoliberal crusade was in

full swing around the globe. The French presidency was back in the hands of a

Gaullist, Chirac, and the muted gains of the Mitterand years were already under
373
 attack. As numerous scholars have pointed out, while the Reagan - Thatcher years

initiated the neoliberal economic realignment, it truly came of age in the 1990s. A

decade of relative peace, the Balkans notwithstanding, and the end of the Cold War

saw a kind of blind optimism that included even the former champions of the welfare

state like the American Democratic Party buy the rhetoric of the free market under

Clinton. The last remaining "socialist" nations either moved aggressively to embrace

state-managed capitalism (China) or simply stagnated (Cuba.) Regulations were

gutted, a small nucleus of bankers and traders became very rich, and massive income

stratification set in across Europe and the United States.637

Gorz's reaction to neoliberalism was passionate and polemical. Behind the

veil of tech bubbles and IPOs, Gorz saw clearly the pernicious effects of neoliberal

ideology on the vast majority of working people in the so-called advanced industrial

nations. Even as the total social wealth produced in the West (and, increasingly, the

East) climbed dramatically, it was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and the

unprecedented prosperity of the few was thus an even more grotesque contrast with

the growing precariousness of the many. Gorz's essential argument from his work of

the 1980s and early 1990s, that work was not and should not be the basis for social

identity, was still applicable. In his Miseres du Present, Richesse du Possible

(translated as Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society; a literal translation

would be Miseries of the Present, Richness of the Possible), however, he wrote with

f.'l'j
In addition to the literature on neoliberalism itself, noted in the literature review section of Chapter
1, see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from
Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945 - 2005 (New York: Verso, 2006).
374
renewed urgency against the force of neoliberal ideology.

Per Gorz, neoliberalism was first and foremost an attack on the global

working class. In the advanced industrial nations of the West during the postwar

period, capital had endorsed a tacit set of compromises with the working class in the

name of social stability. In the context of the economic growth of the trente

glorieuses, capital had been willing to bargain with labor, always driving as hard a

bargain as possible, but accepting the necessity of the bargaining process itself. In the

late 1960s, however, the new social movements emerged and challenged the authority

of the state and the desirability of consumerism, even as economic growth faltered,

leading the ideologists of capital to reconsider the necessity of their compromises

with labor. Thus began the lengthy crusade of the Right to dismantle the welfare

state, the power of collectivized bargaining, and market regulation in general, a

crusade that reached its promised land in the era of globalization after the fall of the

Soviet Union.639

In fact, by celebrating the virtues of the free market, neoliberalism dissolved

the very notion of "society" itself: whereas "societies" were tied to place, usually in

terms of nation-states, "the market" was unrestrained, its partisans thus freed from

any sense of social obligation even in terms of the "patriotism" that most on the Right

had long claimed as their own defining virtue. Against the backdrop of globalized

labor, companies could now insist on the dissolution of worker benefits, high wages,
638
To be clear: Gorz claimed that the Right had deliberately sought to pacify the working class through
bargaining, and it regarded the cultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s as a kind of betrayal.
Andre Gorz, Miseres du Present, Richesse du Possible (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1997), 24 - 26.
639
Ibid., 2 3 - 4 8 .
375
workplace safety, and so on, all in the name of "competitiveness" on the global

market. This was, of course, another smokescreen in that capital had not only shifted

to global labor pools, but had shifted its distributive focus to the reward of high-level

executives and shareholders at all costs.640

So-called "emergent markets" were no better off. Historically poor countries

like India and China were assigned roles as workshops and reserve armies of labor,

sites to attract wandering financial capital but not full partners in the global network

of capital. Statistically, workers in both India and China were worse off in terms of

real buying power and standard of living in the 1990s than they had been in their

hitherto-socialist or at least left-leaning societies of the 1960s and 1970s.641 Thus, the

celebrated explosion of the Indian and Chinese economies as they joined the global

market in earnest was another illusion, predicated on the real prosperity of what was

really a small minority in each nation.

The challenges facing the Left in the West were utterly daunting. Even as he

had at times disparaged the French Left's tendency to look to the state as the arbiter of

social conflict, Gorz recognized in Miseres du Present what a profoundly effective

gambit globalization was for capital: no longer could the working class of a given

nation call on its national identity and the patronage of the state to protect its interests,

as capital could simply blackmail both labor and government by threatening to move

to a more accommodating national or regional space.

640
Ibid., 26 - 36.
641
Ibid., 45 - 48. See also Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First
Century (London: Verso, 2007).
376
 The only possible solution was a large-scale rejection of the centrality of work

as the site of identity-formation. Gorz was not content with the somewhat vague

notion of a "new culture" or a "cultural break," notions that he himself had often

engaged with since the early 1980s. In fact, Miseres du Present represents a

radicalization of Gorz's positions regarding precisely how advanced industrial society

as of the late 1990s could and should remake itself. Here, Gorz tried to work through

the actual logistics of a new society as it could come about in the context of a nation-

state, in shifting from a society of work toward a society of what he called "multi-

activity."

The originality of Miseres du Present was not Gorz's reconsideration and

restatement of the need for the guaranteed minimum income, nor was it his insistence

that work ought not to be the central focus for personal identity. Instead, its

importance was in his powerful restatement of a humanistic, existential, and

universalistic vision of politics against the disintegration of core leftist beliefs. In

other words, Gorz was convinced by the mid-1990s that it was the absence of a

coherent large-scale alternative to the capitalist order that undermined the Left.

Clearly, the most important impetus behind his own analysis of economic rationality

was to provide such a global alternative, one that had reached its mature form in

Miseres du Present. But here, too, Gorz saw the need to argue not just against the

pernicious and disingenuous claims of neoliberal ideology, but against what he

perceived as the destructive influence of identity politics on the coherence of the Left.

The need for the guaranteed minimum income and the shortened working
377
week was for Gorz related directly to the need for political projects of universal social

applicability. In other words, everyone, regardless of sex, race, and background

would be subject to and benefit from these policies. In the process of agitating for

them, the Left could, potentially, cohere once again, and from that restored cohesion

it could segue into other political battles, including those against racism, sexism, and

discrimination against immigrants. The obvious structural problems of his concrete

proposals like the guaranteed minimum income, such as the profitability of businesses

were, in a sense, secondary to the goal, since the society-wide desire for the income

would drive the search for logistics to make it come about. The culture of the Left

would be "both the motor and the goal of the exodus" away from work-based forms

of identity toward a new kind of "multi-activity."642

Miseres du Present was not only a radicalized manifesto of sorts in favor of

the guaranteed minimum income. It was also the work in which Gorz most clearly

defined his view of the definition and role of politics. The key issue to Gorz was the

autonomy of the political process occurring at the level of the state, where the

inevitable conflicts between the various constituent "communities" within the larger

"society" might be resolved through compromise.643 Politics in this sense had to be

universalistic; if a community fought only for its own prerogatives there could be no

larger dialogue and politics was thus negated. In turn, the forms of identity used

642
Andre Gorz, Miseres du Present, 133. Gorz's updated discussion of the guaranteed minimum
income is pages 133 - 178.
643
Gorz framed this discussion terms of the sociological distinctions between the terms "community"
and "society," citing Jean-Marc Ferry, Serge Latouche, Alain de Benoist, and Alain Touraine. See
ibid., 185-197.
378
within communities Gorz came down starkly on the side of "society" versus that of

"communities," which he saw as defining themselves in terms of pre-constituted

identities and pre-determined systems of values.

A member of community in Gorz's analysis was something, as a member of a

religion, a race, an ethnicity, a certain kind of citizen, and so on, with all of the

accordant Sartrian bad faith inherent in trying to "be" a thing. Furthermore,

membership in a community was not subject to choice: "The members of a

constitutive community belong to it from birth, independent of all deliberate choice:

by the fact of being subject to their familial, then formal education, to cultural,

historical, and spatial references and costumes common to all inhabitants of their

"country." The membership of the constitutive community is anterior to the union of

its members. From the familial community to the "national community" (the

Volksgeimenschaft or unity of a people, who may or may not be politically unified by

a nation-state)..."644

Gorz acknowledged that most people longed for this kind of community, this

unchosen and irrefutable membership in something larger than themselves, and that

the tie between a sense of community and nationalism was a powerful political

motive. The problem, however, was that no one in a modern society was part of just

one "community": every facet of identity was forced to coexist with others, whether

they were chosen or imposed from without. Ultimately, the very notion of

community was antithetical to real politics:

644
Ibid., 188-189.
379
 "In other words, the national - communitarian ideology has a radically anti-
political signification: to the division and conflicts of modern society, it
opposes the original community. It imputes the disintegration of the original
community to the sinister influence of foreign elements (international Jewry,
international finance, the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, etc.) and cannot
envisage the restoration of unity but by the repression of everything that
expresses political conflict, social divisions and struggles - political, ethnic,
and cultural pluralism, freedom of association and expression, the right to
strike. No independent identity of native belonging will be allowed."

While Gorz's model here was clearly fascism, he insisted that the same impulse

lurked within every form of communitarian ideology.

In contrast, the very definition of a "society" had to do with the divergent

identities contained within the social field, and in the politics that united them in

debate. Different systems of values were supposed to clash within a society, but in

genuine politics those clashes were "resolved," at least in the public sphere, through

democratic debate. "In a mobile and complex world, every rooted community is

obliged to interrogate itself regarding the breadth and the limits of the validity that

can conserve its traditional values. It is obliged to confirm or reject them, to put them

in question or to reexamine them in the light of unanticipated situations. It is the

practical necessity of these choices... (that) revive the capacity of (the individual) to

choose by himself: that revives their autonomy as the ultimate and necessary

foundation of values."646

The important point to emphasize is the continued relevance of existentialism

Ibid., 191.
Ibid., 196-197.
380
to Gorz and his insistence on a kind of universalistic humanism as the basis for his

own politics. Gorz was not ignorant or dismissive of the importance of social

movements like feminism, the gay movement, or the struggles of immigrants in

France. What was important to Gorz, however, was the universalism of the

implications of those movements; when they ceased to campaign for the rights of a

particular self-understood group to be accepted into the larger society and to be

politically integrated and protected, and instead championed their own right to

exclude others, Gorz accused them of being politically retrograde. In other words, it

was because movements like feminism had broadened the field of access to women in

a larger portion of the social field that Gorz supported feminism.

The Immaterial

In addition to his updated universalism, Gorz began what would be his last

significant area of analysis in Miseres du Present, one he would greatly expand in his

last book, 2003's L 'Immateriel (The Immaterial). This was the changes being

wrought to the productive base of the world economy. Ever since the classical liberal

economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars had focused

on the production of physical commodities as the wellspring of wealth itself. Marx,

of course, had predicated the entire critique of Capital on the idea that labor was the

"magical" activity with the ability to generate new wealth above and beyond the
381
inherent cost of materials. The bottom line was the same for most economists,

liberal, Marxist, or otherwise: the exchange of physical commodities, with traceable,

quantifiable costs of production, was the basis of economics.

By the 1990s, and particularly after the dot-com explosion of the late 1990s,

the situation had begun to change dramatically. Physical commodity exchange still

comprised the majority of the economies of the industrialized nations, but a growing

segment of those economies was overtaken by the sale of ideas: software, media, and

financial speculation, the latter increasingly disinterred from the actual fate of the

commodities to which prices were nominally tied. Whether it was an Initial Public

Offering of stock in a computer anti-virus company or sales of prepackaged sets of

thousands of consumer mortgages, exchange was shifting to a new model in which

the costs of production were no longer traceable and quantifiable. Gorz referred to

this new incorporeal economy as "the immaterial," and he presciently anticipated the

problems it posed for the global economy.

In an interview in Le Monde that followed the publication ofMiseres du

Present, Gorz defined precisely the global issue facing the Left and the terrible

weight of the possibilities inherent in the conjuncture of the mid-late 1990s. It is

worth quoting him at length:

"The dream of capital has always been to make money with money without
passing through labor and to remove the economy from the political power of
states and of peoples. Deregulation permits capital, in "financial markets," to
turn the tables {prendre a revers) on states and to advance itself as the
supreme power at the planetary level. This power does not know its own

382
 laws, it has no social or territorial base. This is also why it cannot be fought
but at the planetary level, in opposing (to it) another globalization at its heart.
This must be the task of the European Union. Insofar as it (the European
Union) is the primary economic and commercial power of the world, it
would have the means to impose, for the greatest benefit for all, new
regulations. But the European Union must have a common vision and it
must create political institutions which are based on a popular will and
control. Without that, it will disintegrate in the market under American
hegemony."647

This was, incidentally, the only time Gorz referred to the EU specifically as

a model of the supra-national governmental body that might check the ensuing

disaster brought about by the hybrid of neoliberal ideology and the globalized

economy through new, equally globalized regulations. That its effects would be

disastrous was not, to Gorz, in question: "What could produce and sell big and little

(versions of) Bill Gates? Intangible products depend on the success of assuring a

monopoly for a time, (since) their cost is impossible to establish.. .But how does an

economy function that creates wealth but almost no one is regularly paid to produce

it? It functions poorly. Created wealth no longer diffuses."648 As he had been

warning, the old model of production, supported by salaries, simply did not match the

new conditions of work, nor did it fit commodities like software that had no physical,

material basis.

Likewise, in separate interview published in the leftist journal Les

Peripheriques Vous Parlent {Outsiders Speaking to You), Gorz was asked to clarify

his treatment of work from Miseres du Present. After distinguishing again between

647
Andre Gorz, ""Nous allons surement vers l'entreprise sans salaries permanents et a plein temps,
entretien avec Andre Gorz," Le Monde, January 6, 1997.
648
Ibid.
383
the anthropological and philosophical treatments of work - basically, work as

reproductive labor in anthropology and work as either drudgery (Greek ponos) or as

creation (Greek poesis) - Gorz reiterated the novelty of the variety of work at the

heart of capitalism. Capitalism had stripped work of purpose, of finality, since profit

was its only goal rather than the ends of any specific task within the larger economic

field. However, speaking of Marx's concept of the worker "reappropriating" work

and consciously choosing its ends, Gorz noted that,

"This reappropriation was practically impossible until now, because the

subdivision of productive work into closed specialties. It became technically
possible with informationization and automation. Through these, the
creation of wealth requires less and less (salaried) work, distributed to fewer
and fewer employees. Those (products) produced through automation can
only be distributed, sold, and purchased if the distributed power to buy is no
longer (tied to) the salary of a job. The idea of "social revenue" or the
unconditionally guaranteed social minimum moves in this direction. The
emphasis by the movement of the unemployed and precarious of a
guaranteed minimum equal to three quarters of the SMIC (the French state's
minimum salary) is a very important step in this direction."649

Not only was this re-appropriation finally truly possible, but it was all the

more necessary given mass unemployment and the growing rejection of the model of

consumer society. Gorz insisted that "In Europe the rejection of the "only thought"

(pensee unique) and of the unique politics imposed by globalized financial power has

gained a great deal of ground in the last two years. I believe that a new Left can only

be a new extreme Left, but plural, non-dogmatic, transnational, ecological, (the)

Andre Gorz, ""Oser l'exode" de la societe de travail, vers la production de soi," interview by
Yovan Gilles, Les Peripheriques Vous Parlent (Spring 1998): 8 - 9.
384
carrier of a project of civilization." Aligning himself with his interviewer, who

noted the journal's workshops surrounding the creation of new social spaces and non-

work-related activities in the banlieue of Saint-Denis, Gorz repeated that it was

precisely the emphasis on new forms of culture and life outside of work distinct from

mere consumerist "leisure time" that would define the new Left.

Despite the setback represented by the rise of neoliberalism during the 1990s,

at the end of his life, Gorz still sought out possibilities of transcending capitalism

within contemporary changes in technology and patterns of labor. Thus, he looked to

immaterial commodities as both a problem for capital and a potential liberator for

workers. He was inspired and excited by the growth of the open source software

movement, in which a global voluntary network of software engineers lent their spare

time to the creation of computer operating systems and software. In the open source

movement, Gorz saw both a potential model for collective projects of creation at

radical variance with economic rationality and proof that collective action could

result in results that were in fact superior to commercial alternatives. 51

Likewise, Gorz saw in the rapid growth of the so-called knowledge economy

reasons to hope that the encroachment of economic rationality into civil society could

be held in check. In L 'Immateriel, Gorz explored the implications of the knowledge

economy in terms of both the potentials it held for liberation from work and capital's

attempts to subsume it within economic rationality. What excited him most was the

650
Ibid., 15.
651
Andre Gorz, L 'Immateriel: connaissance, valeur et capital (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2003), 92 - 95.
385
fact that, according to his own analysis of what economic rationality was and how it

operated, the knowledge economy could never be completely colonized, creating

spaces in which he hoped could emerge a new radical sensibility at odds with the

reconfigured capitalism of the twenty-first century.

One of Gorz's arguments about post-Fordist labor, dating back to his writing

of the 1960s, was that "scientific management" techniques had systematically

stripped workers of their skills, rendering them interchangeable and replaceable. The

knowledge economy, on the other hand, depended on not only a high level of

technical skill, but on creativity and initiative on the part of workers, as well as

advanced technical education. Software engineers, graphic designers, even many

forms of customer service representatives were not as easily replaced as post-Fordist

industrial workers. Capital's response had been to encourage the notion of

"partnerships" within companies between employees and management, of a rhetoric

and ideology that maintained that employees were privileged and valued members of

the corporate team, rather than glorified wage-earners.652

This phenomenon was, per Gorz, just the latest salvo in the endless struggle

by capital to assimilate every branch of human activity, in this case the requisite

technical mastery and creative thinking involved in software engineering. At the

same time, within the technical industries, capital made every effort to outsource its

production to emerging economies that offered the strange combination of advanced

technical education and lower costs of living (as of the early twenty-first century,

552
Ibid, 1 1 - 2 9 .
386
India and China.) And, finally, against the backdrop of outsourcing, capital

encouraged the growth of contract labor in the technical fields, a kind of reserve army

of programming labor, which could be paid for the equivalent of piece-work and did

not have to be cared for within the semi-reciprocal context of full-time employment.

The knowledge economy spoke directly to Marx's dreams, in the period in

which he wrote the German Ideology, that work could someday become an extension

of human ingenuity and creative thought, fully transcending the drudgery of labor as

it had always been before. If the potentials within the knowledge economy could be

grasped, Gorz argued, there was an unprecedented opportunity to break away from

the patterns of capitalism that had dominated for the last two hundred years.653

According to Gorz, for a variety of reasons, the products of the knowledge economy -

first and foremost "intellectual property" - could not be assimilated by economic

rationality. Here, Gorz took advantage of the distinction in French between

connaissance, knowledge of a subject, and savoir, factual knowledge. Connaissance

was the foundation of the knowledge economy, the confluence of training and

initiative that enabled workers to innovate in their respective fields. Savoir was the

basis of technical education, of the mastery of programming languages, chemistry,

applied physics, or simple computer literacy.

The problem from capital's perspective was that connaissance and savoir both

defied translation into exchange value with anything approaching the same precision

as the products of conventional production. Nothing produced within the knowledge

653
Ibid., 2 1 - 2 2 .
387
economy, from a marketing campaign to a software program to a pharmaceutical,

could be directly compared to one another in the same manner as two physical

products; the cost of the actual physical production of the transmitting medium of

intellectual property (a pill, a CD with a software program) was usually negligible,

while the time investment varied according to the skill and efficiency of the people

who produced it. Likewise, the training necessary to produced savoir varied

according to the intelligence, aptitude, and predilections of the trainee. Ultimately,

the production of intellectual property could not be formalized in the same way that

the production of physical products could be.654

Gorz's approach to the importance and the revolutionary potential of

connaissance as an economic issue was tied to an ongoing debate between him on the

one hand and the well-known Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri on the other.

Negri, originally one of the most important theorists of operaismo in the late 1960s

and early 1970s, had fled to France in 1979 to escape charges of terrorism. There, he

was offered a position in the Parisian university system, along with editorship of the

radical French journal Futur Antetieur. Negri wrote several polemical articles

directed against Gorz, whom he accused of over-simplifying the differences between

autonomy and heteronomy and of underestimating the importance of what Marx had

called the "general intellect" - the role of knowledge as a direct productive factor,

one of equal or even greater importance than actual machines.655

654
Ibid., 33 - 39.
655
See the interview with Gorz in Francoise Gollain, Une Critique du Travail, 225 - 230.
388
 Gorz had no difficulty refuting Negri's accusations. "Autonomy" was, and

always had been in his writing, a relative concept, always entwined with heteronomy

in real life but still useful as an abstract idea in discussing the subject's attempts to

refuse instrumental logic in the workplace and the social plane. Further, in Negri's

writing, including his well-known jointly-authored book Empire, the "general

intellect" took on a subjectivity that was quite impossible, according to Gorz. "In

reading Negri, one has the impression that with the "intellectuality of the masses" an

anti-capitalist subject will create itself within productive activity... the only thing

missing is the revolutionary will."656 In other words, Negri was still trapped in the

revolutionary waiting-game of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which Gorz had spent

almost twenty years proving was naive and unrealistic.

On the other hand, what was important about the "general intellect" was that

connaisance had indeed taken the place of fixed capital, machines, in a growing

swath of modern industry. Intelligence, creativity, adaptability, and so on were traits

that could not be calculated and mastered by capital in the same way that machines

could, and there was thus a greater potential for autonomy in those industries than in

traditional manufacturing.657 While software and pharmaceuticals were the products

that best fit Gorz's discussion of the knowledge economy, the problems the

knowledge economy represented to capital went much further. In fact, even physical

products whose exact cost-per-unit could be determined had long since fallen into a

Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 236-237.
389
much more amorphous field of value, a shift that occurred with the emergence of

consumer culture in the twentieth century. Once basic scarcity had been eliminated

for the majority of the population in the "core" capitalist nations, the expansion and

growth of profits depended on the continued (and continual) consumption by their

populations of products that were not "necessary" in any strict sense. Capital had

invented branding for just this reason, as a shifting set of symbols that suggested the

in-comparability of products to one another, of imagined differences and hierarchies

of desirability, and thus inspired consumers to keep buying.658

Branding was a symptom of something larger: the loss of a stable and

measurable foundation to capitalism as a whole. A major manifestation of this issue,

which Gorz did not hesitate to describe as a crisis, was the shift starting in the 1980s

and accelerating in the 1990s and early 2000s away from manufacturing and toward

financial speculation. Writing in 2003, Gorz presciently described the attitude among

many economists that the endless growth of the stock market could somehow itself be

the basis of capitalistic growth, even though the material base those stocks

represented were always growing more remote from their value. Of course, as Gorz

pointed out, this pattern could not hold forever, since the actual conditions of the

material world would eventually intrude.659

Gorz was less concerned about the potential economic catastrophe of a global

financial meltdown than he was about the effects that twenty-first century versions of

658
Ibid., 6 7 - 7 1 .
659
Ibid., 8 1 - 8 7 .
390
consumer culture had on social identity and values. Consumerism was not just a ploy

by capital to sell "ultimately" useless products, it systematically broke down the

bonds of community identity. The creation of consumer identity encouraged

individuals to create themselves in terms of brand identification, which was always

necessarily hierarchical. Shared identities arising from common experiences,

pursuits, or location became secondary in this scheme. "The consumer, individual by

definition, has thus been conceived originally as the opposite of a citizen, as the

antidote of a sort, of the collective expression of collective needs, of the desire for

social change, of concern for the common good. Publicity.. .does not promise to

potential buyers the improvement of their common condition. It promises, on the

contrary, to each to escape the common condition and become the "happy privileged"

who can offer himself a new, rare, better, distinctive product."660

Consumerism was a secondary phenomenon to capitalism's larger project to

reduce all sectors of life to calculable standards. Gorz insisted that knowledge could

never be completely assimilated in this way, since creative thought arose as much due

to cultural context as to formal training. The attempt, however, to make knowledge-

producers think of their own productive capacity as being fundamentally tied to the

production of marketable goods was still deeply troubling, since it was nothing less

than the latest serious effort to colonize civil society with economic reason. The

point was that connaisance could be but is not limited to operation within capitalism;

capitalism was not knowledge's "exclusive destination" and capitalism's hostile

660
Ibid., 66.
391
takeover was an "external predation" akin to its abuse of the natural world.

Following Marx in the Grundrisse, Gorz noted that the goal of socialism had

always been to shift the emphasis from the human creative potential's ability to

generate profit and toward the celebration of creativity for its own ends. Gorz used

the example of the Free Software movement, a subset of the larger open source

movement, as an encouraging indication that the richness of creative intelligence

might be in the process of escaping from the hold of economic rationality. Gorz cited

statistics demonstrating widespread dissatisfaction among the most highly-educated

young people in the advanced industrial nations with the career options open to them.

Likewise, the fact that thousands of the best software engineers on Earth chose to

spend very substantial amounts of time creating software explicitly designed to be

free and freely distributable (Gorz enjoyed reminding his Francophone readers that

the word "free" in English meant both litre and gratuit in French) indicated that

cultural breaks with economic reason had already taken hold.662

For Gorz, the free software movement actually represented a kind of "real

existing anarcho-communism," a model that might be applied to other spheres of

intellectual labor and in turn create oases of collaborative work that defied economic

rationality's attempts to colonize them.663 This culminated for Gorz in an updated and

661
Ibid., 77.
662
Ibid., 8 7 - 9 8 .
Gorz based his discussions of open source software and the Free Software Movement on a fairly
limited selection of books, articles, and interviews, not any first-hand knowledge of how the software
worked or how it was created. In that, he tended to overstate its socialistic overtones and under-
emphasize the political libertarianism of many self-proclaimed "hackers." Note also that, despite his
long-standing interest in advanced technology and its effects on social and cultural change, Gorz
392
reframed version of the great hope of the New Left of the 1960s between intellectuals

who envisaged a new way of life on the one hand and the millions who were openly

oppressed and exploited by capitalism on the other. In this version, of course, the

cafe-dwelling intellectuals of the postwar era were replaced by free software

engineers, while the wretched of the Earth stayed more or less where they had been in

the 1960s.

While he was thus excited about the prospect of a certain high-tech movement

spreading to other areas, Gorz remained deeply cautious about the "technocratic"

outlook in general, in particular of the field of cybernetics.664 Gorz had been hostile

to the field of cybernetics for as long as he had known of its existence. In

cybernetics, processes of communication and control in biology were studied in terms

of their reducibility to controllable, machine-based, models. The most immediate

example of cybernetics was the quest for artificial intelligence, but from Gorz's

perspective an even more threatening one was the effort (stretching back to the

nineteenth century) to control "aberrant" behavior through scientific intervention.

The ultimate, explicitly-stated goal of many of the scientists in the field of cybernetics

was to "understand" the workings of the human brain to the point that every decision

himself never owned a computer; he continued to use a typewriter for his manuscripts and
correspondence until his death. Gorz's major source on free and open source software was Pekka
Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random House, 2001).
For background on the free and open software movements (note also the distinction; the Free Software
Movement is not the same as the open source movement), see Free Software Foundation, <
http://www.fsf.org/>, Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter, Decoding Liberation: the
Promise of Free and Open Source Software (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Joseph Feller, ed.,
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
664
Here meant as the intersection of biology and engineering: the attempt to "improve" physical bodies
through applied science as well as efforts to render human intelligence codifiable and calculable.
393
could be predicted with complete accuracy.

To Gorz, cybernetics were the ultimate expression of the drive by humans to

dehumanize themselves. In a powerful analysis that drew heavily from his lifelong

project to understand human life and thought in terms of existential phenomenology,

Gorz described both the inherently terrifying and destructive nature of cybernetics

itself and why, according to the precepts of existential phenomenology, it was

destined to fail. Put briefly, cybernetics was the ultimate attempt to render human

intelligence calculable, which would in term deny the very thing that makes us

human: our existential attempt to give our lives meaning. At the same time,

cybernetics could only fail since our awareness was always of an external thing in

relation to our consciousness and the meaning that we projected onto or into that

external object. A machine could not "care" about its surroundings in the same
666

way.

The founding ethos of cybernetics was hatred of the natural world, including

the human body and mind, for its refusal to submit to calculability. The scientists

who created the field of cybernetics were often quite explicit about their disgust at the

contingency of thought and the messiness of the mind's embodiment. Gorz quoted

the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minksey: "He displayed his disgust for

this meat machine that is the brain and this bloody mess that is the human body. The

mind, according to him, can be separated from the body and from the "se//": "The
665
Ibid., 105 - 150. Note that Gorz first launched a rhetorical attack on cybernetics in the epilogue of
Miseres du Present: see Andre Gorz, Miseres du Present, 179 - 184.
666
Andre Gorz, L 'immateriel, 126 - 127.
394
important thing in the refinement of our thought is to attempt to depersonalize our

interiority...Brains are machines...Our capacity to build (fabriquef) the mind could

permit us one day to build artificial men of science, artists, composers, personal

companions.""667

Of course, if a cybernetic engineer were to "succeed" in "transcending" the

mind's roots in the body and its physical existence, there would be nothing to live for.

Thought cannot operate in a vacuum. Citing Sartre, Gorz insisted that human life is

at its most fundamental the confrontation between consciousness and physical reality,

and to "liberate" the consciousness would be nothing less than to disintegrate the

reason to live itself. Furthermore, when cybernetic engineers made statements like

"we will perfect ourselves," Gorz noted that the identity of the "we" was left

unexamined - in fact, the "we" was always an authority of some kind, and the

decisions made in guiding the "perfected" humans were themselves governed by

existential choice. In other words, the whole matrix of values that determined what a

"perfect" human specimen looked like, acted like, and thought like was always

culturally-embedded and culturally-determined. Not surprisingly, in practical terms,

those decisions would be made by those rich enough and powerful enough to have

access to cybernetic technology, perpetuating the value systems of the elite.668

Invoking Husserl and Sartre once again, Gorz argued against the violence inherent in

instrumental rationality, here manifested in the perverse desire to transform the

667
Ibid., 123, quotes in original (Gorz's translation from the English.)
668
Ibid., 126-141.
395
mercurial and situated thing that was human intelligence into a mere thinking

machine. To be human was to be an un-rooted being trying to appropriate the world

in which it lived, and to try to change those founding conditions was to kill the being.

Ecologica

Gorz continued to write in the last years of his life. His last book, the aptly-

named Ecologica (Ecologica), was published posthumously in 2008. It was a

restatement of familiar themes concerning both the reasons and methods the Left

might use to check economic rationality, but it was also the most successful fusion of

Gorz's philosophical, economic, and ecological analyses into one coherent piece. In

other words, in clear, concise language Gorz outlined his vision of a global alternative

to capitalism against the backdrop of early twenty-first century political and

economic circumstances, and he made his final argument as for why changes had to

come about in the short term for nations like France to avoid catastrophe.

The idea that capitalism is or is at least on the verge of crisis, of course,

stretches back to Marx, and even earlier in the case of the so-called Utopian socialists.

Gorz himself had claimed at various points from the 1960s on that French, European,

and global capitalism were all on the verge or in the midst of a crisis that might spell

a radical social transformation if the Left seized the opportunity. That vision, of a

major qualitative break thanks to the system's vulnerability to collapse, was of a kind

with the traditional Marxist outlook, even if Gorz nuanced and updated it over time.
396
His version of the transformation as of the 1980s, for instance, had been one in which

existing social wealth were simply distributed more equitably by some kind of state

apparatus, against the backdrop of the reduced demand, and availability, of jobs.

As we have noted, the 1990s and early 2000s purged Gorz of that kind of

(relative) optimism. The transformation of society would come, he wrote, but the

form it took could well be much worse than it was in the present. The moment of

opportunity had passed, and instead of new opportunities were newly imminent

disasters: the generation of real wealth had utterly stagnated and the state of the

natural world had never been worse. Capitalism was eating itself, and the future

world order was as likely to be a kind of technocratic tyranny trying to maintain the

system as it was one in which the experience of life for the majority could match the

comfort of that of the previous generations.

The crux of the crisis was the creation of new wealth. Capitalists had been too

effective at squeezing every iota of efficiency from production in the last decades,

particularly following the successful neoliberal assault on unions and workplace

regulation starting in the 1980s. Bereft of high-profit options elsewhere, capitalists

turned to the financial sphere, betting on commodity futures, risky stocks,

prepackaged sets of mortgages, and so on. As the decades-long Japanese recession

demonstrated, however, any financial system based on speculation could, and no

doubt would, eventually collapse.

Meanwhile, consumer markets were almost entirely shaped by marketing -

the use value of a product was hardly measured in terms of its real utility. Instead,
397
prices were set according to the elaborate and shifting commercial warfare between

firms in the realm of advertising. By and large, however, most industries and

businesses created no new value, even if they generated income. Gorz wrote

"Income, however, is not of the same nature as profit: it does not correspond to the

creation of a surplus of value, of a plus-value. It redistributes the total mass of value

to the profit of profitable businesses at the expense of others; it does not augment that

mass." He added in a footnote:

"Labor value (valeur travail) is an idea of Adam Smith which saw in labor
the common substance of all merchandise and thought that it was exchanged
in proportion to the quantity of labor each contained... Marx refined and
reworked the theory of Adam Smith. To simplify to the extreme, one cannot
summarize the economic notion of value in saying: a business creates value
to the degree to which it produces a salable merchandise...If its activity does
not increase the quantity of money in circulation, it does not create value. If
its activity destroys jobs, it destroys value."

In sum, Gorz argued that the labor theory of value was still essentially

accurate, despite the smokescreens and confusion introduced by marketing,

advertising, and speculation. The base of the economy was still the creation of

commodities, and for those commodities to increase total social wealth, there had to

be a direct link between the labor invested and the price on the market. As long as

growth, in the terms measured by GDP, was instead predicated on speculation, any

significant disruption to the system could topple the entire edifice. Gorz did not live

to see it happen, but the financial crisis of 2008 fit this pattern precisely.

669
Andre Gorz, Ecologica (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2008), 33. Italics in original.
398
 The question for Gorz was no longer how the Left could take advantage of the

surplus of social wealth, nor was it the most viable form of the guaranteed minimum

income. It was instead how the Left might try to remodel local economies in the face

of large-scale collapse. Gorz called for exchange on the model of the free software

movement, extended to its maximum possible breadth and penetration of the

economy. Already, millions of people exchanged information, music, and media via

the internet. In Brazil, a country about which Gorz became intensely interested in his

last few years, cooperatives in the favelas manufactured their own goods and

exchanged them at the local level. Gorz wrote "High-tech tools exist or are in the

course of development, generally comparable to computer peripherals, (which) point

toward a future where practically everything necessary and desirable could be

produced in local or communal workshops; where the activities of production could

be combined with apprenticeship and teaching, with experimentation and research,

with the creation of new tastes, smells and material, with the invention of new forms

and techniques of agriculture, of construction, of medicine, etc."670

This new Utopian vision reached its zenith with "fabbers": digital fabricators,

relatively small machines that built three-dimensional objects based on digital

designs. While still expensive and limited to industrial applications as of the early

2000s, Gorz approvingly cited their partisans who sought to make them smaller and

more affordable. Ultimately, "They could be installed in a garage or a workshop,

transported in a truck, using fine resin or metal powders as their primary material, and

670
Ibid., 41.
399
their use depends only on the conception of software which manages the fabrication

by the intermediary of a laser. They would permit excluded populations, fated to

inactivity or underemployment by the "development" of capitalism, to regroup to

produce in communal workshops everything that they and their commune need."671

"It has to do here, necessarily, with a Utopia. But a concrete Utopia. It is situated

within a movement of free software that understands itself as a germinal form of a

free economy and of a common exchange, that is to say of a communism." 7

Capitalism had undermined its own survival with its three-decade assault on the

global working class, leaving fewer and fewer who could afford its products, even as

technology now promised at least the potential for new forms of local self-

sufficiency.

Gorz was not naive about these potentials. "I am not saying that these radical

transformations are coming about. I am saying only that, for the first time, we can

hope that they will come about...It is probably that it will be South Americans or

South Africans who, the first, will recreate in the disinherited suburbs of European

cities the workshops of autoproduction of their favelas or their townships of

origin."673 Gorz cited developments in Brazil specifically, not only the actual

existence of local manufacturing outside of the purview of legal industry, but of

actual government officials who supported those efforts, recognizing that it would be

impossible to "catch up" to the nations of the first world and favoring instead a large-

671
Ibid., 117.
672
Ibid., 119-120.
673
Ibid., 4 1 - 4 2 .
400
scale shift to local production and exchange.

Gorz's message was essentially that the mass of people disenfranchised by

capitalism was growing globally, but that technology could allow them to remake

their lives outside of the global system. Once again, the key to his argument was the

idea that individuals had to choose to pursue those ends, in defiance of consumer

culture and the hegemonic influence of capitalist ideology. Here, however, Gorz was

de-emphasizing state capitalist solutions like the guaranteed minimum income and

instead returning to themes he explored in the 1970s: the possibility of local

community economies operating (mostly) outside of the global system. This new

emphasis was due to changed circumstances; he was now aware that the moment of

possibility for state capitalist solutions to work might have passed.

In sum, capitalism was in the process disintegration already, and Gorz sought

to suggest possibilities inherent within that collapse for individuals. Along with that

collapse, the other set of empirical conditions had to do, not surprisingly, with

ecology. Nothing had fundamentally changed since Gorz began writing about

ecology in the early 1970s: resources were dwindling, pollution was growing, and the

pace of overall degradation of the planet's ecosystem had only accelerated. Global

warming was simply the most evident symptom of the larger issue. Since the 1970s,

states had made various concessions to the environmental movement out of a sense of

necessity, culminating in ineffective panaceas like the Kyoto Protocol, but the

674
Ibid., 38. Specifically, Gorz cited Claudio Prado, a Brazilian official in the Ministry of Culture,
who was spearheading efforts to support "the appropriation of technologies by users in the goal of
social transformation."
401
planet's ecology was worse off than ever nevertheless.

Gorz's essential point was that ecological politics should coincide with a

larger shift to the local. When the ecological movement had arisen, he noted, it was

always originally in terms of local issues: the right of communities not to breath

poisoned air or drink poisoned water, the right of individuals to seek alternative forms

of medicine, the right of regions not to play host to nuclear plants, and so on. The

great intellectual and ideological breakthrough of ecology was when those local

movements realized that they had common cause: the necessity of environmental

protection coincided with the choice to pursue self-sufficiency and to reject the

endless growth model of capitalist economics. In short, the right to govern one's life

at the local level was related to the desire to break with economic rationality's

rapacious powers of colonization.

Political ecology was thus born of the recognized need for self-limitation:

"Political ecology thus makes ecologically necessary changes in the manner of

production and consumption the lever of normatively desirable changes in a form of

life and social relations. The defense of the milieu of life in the ecological sense and

the reconstitution of a lifeworld conditions and supports one another." Political

ecology had to join its campaign to protect the natural world with other demands that

supported the same fundamental forms of logic. Sharpening his language further,

Gorz wrote that since economic rationality could have no meaning but to expand

endlessly and try to dissolve other forms of thought and life, "Left to itself, it leads to

675
Ibid., 68.
402
the extinction of life and thus of itself. If it must have a meaning, it cannot be but to

create the conditions of its own suppression."676

Ecologica closed with an interview Gorz had given in Brazil in 2005. It is

most interesting in demonstrating the breadth of Gorz's knowledge about the state of

the global economy and its intricacies. His major point was that the so-called global

economic boom then taking place was based on smoke and mirrors, and that it was

only experienced as a time of prosperity by those who were already rich. The

measure of growth, the GDP, was itself an absurd metric unless it was qualified by an

investigation of where and how that growth was occurring. Gorz noted that if

100,000 of the already-poor were dispossessed from an illegal favela, charged rent for

their hovels, and paid a pittance for brute agriculture labor, the capitalist responsible

had indeed created economic "growth," but at the cost of massive human suffering for

which he was the only beneficiary.677

Likewise, growth on the global scale was essentially an aggregate of capitalist

speculation and human suffering. China's economic "miracle" was based on the

destruction of its formerly widespread small-scale industries and workshops; in many

areas over 20% of the population was jobless and in poverty. Japan and South Korea

were the last nations able to join the world economy as equals. The only effect each

subsequent nation made as it tried to globalize was to provide yet another redundant

source of cheap labor and materials. Gorz's interest in Brazil was motivated by this

Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 124-125.
403
predicament and the response of both slum-dwellers and politicians in exploring the

potential for local economics in defiance of the global system.678

The situation in the so-called first world did not lead to optimism, either.

From 1948 to 1973, a temporary conjuncture of circumstances led to a fairly stable

environment in the US and Europe. Consumer society was born in the midst of the

world's first sustained surplus of goods, and the labor movement fought for a larger

portion of that "extra" wealth. By the 2000s, however, labor costs only amounted to

roughly 15% of most capitalist industries' total operating expenses thanks to the

massive increase in automation. With cheaper labor available abroad thanks to

globalization, labor had few weapons with which to fight against further layoffs and

cuts in benefits. The net effect was that, even in the relatively prosperous nations of

the global North, full employment became the privilege of the lucky, educated

minority, while the majority scrambled to accept any positions they could get under

any conditions and for any wages.679

Gorz concluded by noting that his own ideas about the guaranteed minimum

income had always been inspired by its philosophical status as much as its potential

logistical or political viability. The minimum income would serve not only to protect

the sphere of human epanouissement, but to break in the most visible and ongoing

fashion possible with the rule of economic rationality. By the early twenty-first

century, the need for that break was of a new kind; capitalism was on the brink of

Ibid., 126-129.
Ibid., 139-145.
404
catastrophe, that catastrophe would come soon enough, and it was only through a

politics that chose a new way of living could human beings achieve and maintain a

minimum standard of dignity and protect the natural world from destruction.

How, then, are we to evaluate Gorz's thought at the end of his life,

particularly in its most overtly Utopian mode? Was, and is, the alternative really

between a kind of apocalyptic landscape like that in areas of Africa "dominated by

warlords, by pillage and the ruins of modernity, massacres and trafficking in human

beings, against the background of famine," of which "The three Mad Max (films)

were stories of anticipation" or, on the other hand, local communities armed with

"fabbers," producing their own goods and living at a sustainable, ecologically sound

standard of living?681 Was the choice truly between socialism and this stark a form of

barbarism?

There is no question that Gorz tended to exaggerate his imagery at times, but

it is also important to bear in mind that he was always concerned with the lived

experience of individuals, especially workers, in capitalist societies. Destitution,

despair, and precarity were and remain the fate of billions around the globe, even

amidst the phantom economic boom of 2003 - 2007. The most noteworthy

contributions of Ecologica to Gorz's body of work, besides the fact that it was his last

book, were that it truly expanded its gaze beyond Europe in a sustained manner and

that the last vestiges of Gorz's (relative) optimism of the 1980s were gone. It testifies

"Ibid., 151-154.
1
Ibid., 30.
405
to his deeply-felt pessimism about the likelihood of large-scale change, but neither

does it give in to despair. It continued to insist that, despite everything, humans had

in their capacity to choose the ability to break with their own destructive behavior. In

that sense, it is an affirmation of that peculiar species of optimism Sartre claimed as

existentialism's natural outlook in Existentialism Is a Humanism so many years

earlier.

Aging

When Claude Lanzmann asked Gorz how things were going the last time they

spoke on the phone, Gorz told him "Bad. Very, very bad." Living in relative

seclusion with Dorine, Gorz was surprised to hear someone address him as "Gerard"

on the phone, a mark of his oldest friendships in Paris, heard a quarter-century after

retiring from journalism and his circles of friends and fellow intellectuals. Lanzmann

also reported that something seemed wrong at their subsequent luncheon. In turn,

some of the obituary notices and tributes to Gorz after his death noted that the suicide

of Gorz and Dorine was anticipated by the closing ofLettre a D., in which Gorz

wrote to Dorine "I do not want to attend your cremation; I do not want to receive an

urn with your ashes.. .we hoped that neither of us would survive the death of the

other."682

Decades earlier, Gorz had written an essay, Le Viellissement (Aging), which

682
Andre Gorz, Lettre aD.,75.
406
was published first (in two parts) in Les Temps Modernes in 1961 and 1962, then later

reissued as a postface to Le Traitre. There, Gorz had discussed the essential

existential conundrum posed by aging: growing older truncated one's horizons of

choice in a different manner than did the myriad mundane restrictions of the physical

world. Where the latter might be overcome through praxis, opening new obstacles

and possibilities in turn, aging could not. Aging was the ultimate demonstration of

the impossible paradox of human existence: to be human was to desire infinite

freedom, but human life was defined by insuperable barriers and restrictions.

Aging was not, however, just a biological fact. Gorz argued that aging was

above all else a social fact, another example of a social practice of naming,

categorizing, and ranking whose purpose was the maintenance of class society and

existing power structures. Writing in the early 1960s, he welcomed the possibility

that the postwar generational "wave" might overwhelm the establishment of the old

and, as it had in Algeria and Cuba, and bring about a young (read: revolutionary)

political order. Adolescence, he wrote, was a category that only existed in societies

in which the young were systematically kept in a state of tutelage. In that sense, one

of Gorz's points was that the Europe of the 1960s was itself in a state of adolescence,

that the cultural revolution of students and young workers was ready to seize its

political birthright.683

Like Le Traitre, Le Viellissement was both personal and political, an

683
This concept bears comparison with the "Young Europe" movements of the nineteenth century that
were instrumental in the growth of nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era. See Eric Hobsbawm, The
Age of Capital, 1 4 - 1 5 . On the twentieth-century postwar generation gap, see Tony Judt, Postwar,
390 - 396.
407
autobiographical reflection on Gorz's unhappy realization that he was no longer

"young" and a broader critique of how the phenomenon he was experiencing was the

product of a class society. At 35, Gorz found himself to be the product of his own

past decisions, which now took on the character of immutable facts; he was a

journalist even though he had never set out to become one, an accidental member of

the adult world that, as a child, he had been convinced he would never be allowed to

join. His parents and his teachers had always faulted him for failing to "grow up"

properly, and yet, somehow, he was no longer a child.

Ultimately, Le Viellissement was an affirmation of the Sartrian project of

authenticity. Gorz's purpose was to demonstrate that it was still possible to seize his

own unlikely, unlooked-for adulthood, his status as a journalist "par hasard," and act

on it. In his conclusion, Gorz still insisted that 'We must accept ourfinitude: to be

here and nowhere else, to do this and not something else, now and always; only here,

only that, only now - to have only this life." Just as Albert Camus had claimed, in

his "existential" works of the immediate postwar period L 'Etr-anger {The Stranger)

and Le Mythe de Sisyphus {The Myth of Sisyphus), one could always find meaning in

one's choices, even against the most beastly circumstances and odds, Gorz insisted

that it was only by accepting the limitation of aging but pursuing one's choices and

projects anyway that one could be happy and, in a word, authentic.

Of course, The Myth of Sisyphus had begun "There is but one truly serious

Andre Gorz, "Le Viellesement," in Le Traitre, 405.

408
philosophical question, and that is suicide." Gorz and Dorine faced that

"philosophical question" out of necessity by the early part of the twenty-first century

as Dorine's condition worsened. According to Finn Bowring, the couple had long

since agreed to die together, using Derek Humphrey's well-known guide to suicide

Final Exit as their reference, when they felt it necessary.686 It is difficult not to sound

cavalier in writing about the death of two people I did not know, unlike many of the

other scholars who have written and continue to write about Gorz today, but so far

every posthumous tribute to them has emphasized this fact: Gorz and Dorine's suicide

was their final choice together, one prompted by Dorine's chronic suffering, but not

determined by it. That choice should be regarded with a requisite degree of respect,

and not be considered a tragic error of judgment.

Conclusion

What are the most important conclusions to reach regarding Gorz's life and

thought? First, Gorz stands alongside Sartre and Beauvoir as one of the major figures

of French existentialism. It is absolutely true that he was inspired by Sartre's work

and that he never fundamentally questioned its central premises or conclusions, but

neither was Gorz's work merely derivative. It was Gorz, not Sartre, who authored the

685
Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays," trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage
Books, 1960), 3. Note also that an ongoing joke between Gorz and Dorine was the (pompous and silly,
when taken out of context) opening to L 'Etranger, which they had read together as Dorine learned
French early in their relationship. See Andre Gorz, Lettre a D., 28.
686
Finn Bowring, "Obituary: The Writer's Malady," 56.
409
most important works of existential politics. La Morale de I 'histoire is a work of

political theory proper, comparable to Sartre's Critique, but concerned with Gorz's

contemporary political reality, not iconic moments from the past (i.e. the French and

Russian Revolutions.) All of Gorz's later works were political interventions whose

theory was articulated in terms of that political world: whether it was labor movement

strategy, ecology, the post-Marxist political realignment, or the battle against

neoliberalism, Gorz's writing fused its existential inspiration with insight into his

present. Gorz cast no thunderbolts from on high; he wrote about the world outside his

door.

The second major conclusion to reach about Gorz's work is that we should be

cautious in describing a neat narrative of French intellectual history. Gorz reached

thousands of the French reading public every day in his capacity as editor and

journalist, and he remains a major reference for all manner of radical political

thinkers and activists today. It does not matter that many of his readers could not care

less about existentialism by the time Gorz entered the sphere of public debate in the

1960s; his interventions lucidly championed individual choice and dismantled the

pretentions of capitalism, while the existential values behind those projects often

remained implicit. By the time he returned to a proper work of theory, in

Metamorphoses du Travail, Gorz had honed his understanding of capitalism's logics

and tactics through the decades of his journalism. In short, radical thought did not

end after 1970 in France, and it still had a wide audience and a major impact.

The third conclusion is related to the second, and is slightly more parochial.
410
Who is a worthy figure of intellectual history? For French subjects, the answer is

almost always someone who wins official renown through the elaborate and brutally

difficult system of education, examination, and critique centered on the few blocks up

and down the Rue des Ecoles and the Rue d'Ulm in Paris. To be a normalien is to be

invested with all of the weight of the massive institutional edifice of French

education, not just the Ecole Normale itself. Contemporary work on French
7
intellectual history continues to orbit the highest towers of that edifice.

By those standards, Gorz is not a valid subject of intellectual history. This

may explain some of the relative neglect in the relevant fields of historical literature,

along with the conceit that he was a merely secondary figure to Sartre. Yet it should

be quite clear that, in fact, Gorz was a major intellectual, one with a wide public

reception and who stands at the crossroads of several of the most important fields of

postwar French thought and cultural change: labor history, ecology, and radicalism as

a whole. His life and thought invite a broader approach to French intellectual history,

one that factors in the importance of potential influence, audience, and innovation in

the work of a thinker or a group of thinkers, not just their academic rank.

One of the problems with studying Gorz's thought is that he defied

classification. He was, in fact, a philosopher: he write major original works of

philosophy, such as Fondements pour une morale and La Morale de I'histoire, and he

also integrated serious philosophical reflection in his works of political theory.

687
On this issue, see Alan D. Schrift, "Is There such a Thing as "French Philosophy?" or, Why do We
Read the French So Badly?" in Julian Bourg, ed., After the Deluge. Schrift traces the links between the
(always changing) subjects of the major examinations within the French educational system and
subsequent developments in "French Theory."
411
Because of his vocation as a journalist, however, and the incredible breadth of

subjects he addressed in his writing, any approach to Gorz that merely considers him

within the lineage of the history of philosophy is inadequate. One must be prepared

to grapple with the entire political history of France in the postwar era, the rise and

fall of leftist radicalism in the cultural history of the same time period, technological

change and the attendant shifts in the composition of labor, the trente glorieuses and

their aftermath, and the vexing question of where ecology fits in with economic,

cultural, and intellectual history. In short, a truly adequate consideration of Gorz's

life and thought would require a scholar with a command of all of the fields that Gorz

himself was an expert in - no small task!

In a recent essay on Gorz's concept of autonomy and heteronomy, the French

scholar Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld wrote "Gorz's thought is extreme, radical, often

excessive. But it has a great merit: it obliges you to try to determine precisely how

and why it is excessive. One is led to nuance one's response.. .Gorz is an awakener
/TOO

(eveilleur), someone who prevents circular thinking." It is true that Gorz

frequently invoked the trope of crisis, sometimes to the point that he seemed to take

pleasure in the prospect of some kind of major economic collapse forcing a wider

recognition of the limits of capitalism. Likewise, while his ecological writing was

based on the empirical facts associated with environmental degradation, he still had a

habit of predicting abrupt catastrophes, sometimes leading to hyperbolic assertions or

688
Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, "Gorz et le temps choisi, un debat inacheve," in Christophe Fourel, ed.,
Andre Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe siecle, 157.
412
championing scientific theories that later turned out to be utterly incorrect (as he did

in one article in the 1970s in which he claimed that climate change was going to make

the world colder.)6*9

There are two points to be made regarding Gorz's tendency to invoke extreme

examples of crisis and collapse. First, Gorz might have been right about an imminent

crisis in the economy or the biosphere, we just have not yet witnessed its fulfillment.

As the contemporary philosopher Slavov Zizek pointed out in a recent work,

regarding the purported death of the North American bee population, "This is how

one should imagine a possible catastrophe: a small-level interruption with devastating

global consequences."690 Likewise, regarding the challenge of intuitively anticipating

a true crisis, "the problem is much deeper. It resides in the unreliability of our

common sense itself which, habituated as it is to our ordinary life-world, finds it

difficult to really accept that the flow of everyday reality can be perturbed."691 In

short: just because our quotidian existence sputters along more-or-less as it has for the

last thirty years, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so indefinitely.

Second, Gorz's use of the language of crisis was as much a rhetorical device,

a call to arms for the Left, as it was an ingenuous cry of alarm. Alongside Gorz's

rhetorical reveille, he rarely failed to include more commonplace suggestions for

689
Michel Bosquet, "Alerte au climate," Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 May 1976, 56 - 58.
690
Slavov Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 457. Note that the chapter from
which this quote is drawn, "Unbehagan in der Natur," is shot-through with Gorzian themes: a political
concern with ecologism, the incalculability of the value of immaterial commodities, and the search for
a new leftist politics. Unfortunately, Zizek does not appear to be aware of the fact that Gorz made
major contributions to all of these questions.
691
Ibid., 445.
413
what was to be done. We should remember that he was the champion of the

American cultural revolution during the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s,

precisely because he saw in it the possibility of small, local changes among

individuals and communities that did not need a national or global revolution to

succeed. Likewise, his constantly-repeated refrain of the shortened working week

and the guaranteed minimum income were ways to start to dissolve the hold of

economic rationality on the lives of everyone within capitalism, ways that were not

tied to a total collapse or revolutionary change.

In short, Gorz was prescient in anticipating the global financial crisis of 2008,

a crisis that remains "unsolved" as of this writing despite all of the attempts of the

capitalist world's economists, bankers, and politicians to "reboot" the system. We

can only hope that Gorz was not equally prescient about a true ecological catastrophe,

despite the ongoing continuation of environmental destruction. In terms of Gorz's

contributions to political theory, one that speaks directly to the threat of both species

of catastrophe, I would argue that the most important was Gorz's effort to define the

terms of ideological debate; in defining economic rationality while remaining

extremely sensitive and attentive to its impacts on the actual life-experiences of

individuals, not just an abstraction like "lifeworlds," Gorz made a potentially lasting

contribution to the understanding of what radical politics might consist of in the

absence of a potential revolutionary subject.

692
On this point, see also Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American. Schor's work, published in the
early 1990s but still timely and relevant, traced the enormous rise in working hours among Americans
414
 Finally, Gorz's defense of the subject as the necessary starting-point and

referent of both philosophy and political theory should stand as a major contribution

to the modern history of ideas. The most famous and important movement of thought

to emerge from France in recent history (at least in the Anglophone world) was

poststructuralism, with its celebrated attempts to de-center and problematize the

subject, or even dissolve it outright. The most iconic statement of this project was

Michel Foucault's claim that the human subject would be "erased, like a face drawn

in sand at the edge of the sea." While the subsequent accusations of intellectual

nihilism directed at "French theory" were largely unproductive, it is still true that the

chronology of French intellectual history ends with that erasure, and with Foucault.

Gorz rarely referred to Foucault, or to any of the other structuralists. In his

interview with his friend Francoise Gollain, however, he offered what was perhaps

his most concise and cogent defense of the subject, citing Foucault's own intellectual

development as an example. Speaking of critics who had accused him (Gorz) of

positing an unrealistic "absolute autonomy of the subject," he noted,

"The absolute autonomy of the subject? That, that has the air of a reproach
which comes from sociological positivism: it is concerned with, as it was
with the early Foucault, among others, to demonstrate that the subject is
built, structured, constituted by the exteriority of things, that it is spoken by
the dominant discourse...the only subject is therefore the sociologist, or the
historian, who formulates regarding the subject the truths that the subject
ignores...The later Foucault... discovered the subject as the rapport of self,
and ethics as the task, always unachieved, to make oneself subject, to

in the postwar era and the absence of an effective resistance to that trend. What makes Schor
important is that she was not a "radical" - she reached her conclusions based on an empirical social-
scientific approach as a sociologist and economist.
415
 produce subject; and not simply to be subject....of the subject as the rebellion
against assigned roles and identities, as the requirement of auto-
determination and of autonomy..."693

Gorz went on to note that, just as there was no such thing as a "real" triangle or circle,

that they were mathematical abstractions that nevertheless allowed the practical

realization of triangles and circles in reality, autonomy was a working idea, a concept

realized only in its manifestations. "It only exists as the capacity to distinguish

oneself from otherness... what it is for others and in the social plain."694 Insofar as the

subject was interchangeable, just another member of the workforce, the team, the

student body, or the unit, it was obliged to negate that hetero-determination. In turn,

since capitalism always demanded that the worker be interchangeable, at its very

core, existential subjectivity was set in opposition to the capitalist system.

693
Interview with Gorz in Francoise Gollain, Un Critique du Travail, 230 - 231. Italics added.
694
Ibid., 231.
416
 Bibliography

Works by Andre Gorz (alias Michel Bosquet): Books

Gorz, Andre. Le Traitre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959.

. La Morale de I'histoire. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959.

. Strategic ouvriere et neocapitalisme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964.

. Reforme et Revolution. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.

. Le Socialisme difficile. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967.

Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz). Critique du capitalisme quotidien. Paris: Editions

Galilee, 1973.

Andre Gorz. Critique de la division du travail. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973.

Michel Bosquet (Andre Gorz). Ecologie et Liberte. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1975.

Andre Gorz. Ecologie et Politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.

. Fondements pour une morale. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1977.

Adieux au proletariat: au dela du socialisme. Paris: Editions Galilee,

1980.

Les Chemins duparadis: Vagonie du capital. Paris: Editions Galilee,

1983.

Metamorphoses du travail, quete du sens: critique de la raison

economique. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1988.

. The Traitor, trans. Richard Howard. London: Verso, 1989.

. Capitalisme, Socialisme, Ecologie: disorientations, orientations. Paris:

Editions Galilee, 1991.

. Miseres du present, Richesse du possible. Paris: Galilee, 1997.

. L Tmmateriel: connaissance, valeur et capital. Paris: Editions Galilee,

2003.
417
 . Lettre a D., histoire d'un amour. Paris: Galilee, 2006.

. Ecologica. Paris: Galilee, 2008.

Articles, Le Nouvel Observateur

Bosquet, Michel. "Une Europe americaine." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 November

1964,6-7.

. "Les Marins en couleur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 Decembre 1964, 9.

. "Pas Seulement pour des sous." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 December

1964,6-8.

. "L'Europe des syndicats." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 December 1964,

12.

. "Les Americains lachent Tschombe." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24

December 1964, 11.

. "Belgique: un aile genant." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 December 1964, 9

-10.

. "Les Raisons de sauver "Concorde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 January

1965,2-3.

. "Le Tournant de Rambouillet." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 January 1965,

13.

. "Faut-il choisir Pompidou?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 January 1965, 3

-4.

. "Le Prix d'une victoire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 February 1965, 4.

. "Le Grand Evasion." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 February 1965, 6.

. "Les Fregates de Nantes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 February, 1965, 9.

. "Etes-vous un Francais normal?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 March 1965,

1-2.
. "Les Communes enchainees?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 March 1965, 8.
418
 . "La Greve des patrons." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 March, 1965, 4.

. "La Faim du monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 March 1965, 13.

. "Les Dividendes du chomage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 April 1965, 6.

. "Economie: la marche sur Paris." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 April 1965,

8.

. "Comment vivent les etudiants?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 April 1965,

9 - 10.

. "Collaborer avec les communistes?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 April

1965,8.

. "Economie: bull et l'independance." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 April

1965,11.

. "Reponse au directeur des usines Peugeot." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6

May 1965, 32.

. "La Fin du "charme Wilson." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 May 1965, 32.

. "Economie: le secret de Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 May 1965,

13.

. "La Beure et la petanque." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 May 1965, 6 - 7 .

. "L'Evenement le plus important de l'annee." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

June 1965, 2.

, Krief, Claude. "Que faire avec la "Federation." Le Nouvel Observateur,

10 June 1965: 2 - 3 .

. "Les Heritiers de Togliatti." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 July 1965, 2 - 3 .

. "Le Ve plan ne merite pas son nom." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 July

1965,6-7.

. "Les Privileges d'abord." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 August 1965, 5.

. "Le Droit aux vacances." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 August 1965, 8.

419
 La Democratic de l'autoroute." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 August 1965,
9.

. "Loisirs a huis clos." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 August 1965, 6.

. "Rentree: ce qui attend les francais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1

September 1965, 6.

__. "La Plan manque du Pakistan." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September

1965,2-3.

. "Affaires: a quoi sert Renault?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 September

1965, 6 - 7 .

. "Economie: les astuces du ministre." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 Octobre

1965, 13.

. "Angleterre: le prisonnier de la livre." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27

October 1965, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Italie: le congres du "mea culpa."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 November

1965, 19.

. "Italie: le grand debat." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 November 1965, 14 -

15.

. "Qu'en pense la base?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 November 1965, 6 -

7.

. "Cela vaut tout de meme un vote!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 November

1965, 8.

. "Logement: la loi du marche." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 December 1965,

10-11.

. "Ce qui revele 1'affaire Zamansky." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 December

1965,2.

. "Italie: une operation en bourse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 December

1965,16-17.

. "La Ligne de clivage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 December 1965, 6 - 7 .

420
 . "Apres Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 January 1966, 8 - 9 .

. "Italie: les sirenes centristes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 January 1966,

14-15.

. "La Plus Grande Poudriere d'Amerique Latine." Le Nouvel Observateur,

9 March 1966, 1 4 - 1 7 .

. "La Plan "calculatrice 68."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 March 1966, 13 -

14.

. "Syndicats: la fin de la deroute." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 March 1966,

12.

. "L'Inde ne meurt pas seulement de faim." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 April

1966,12-13.

. "La Croix de Lorraine." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 April 1966, 1 1 - 1 2 .

. "Le Match Fiat - Renault." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 May 1966, 7 - 8 .

. "La Socialisme et la bagnole." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 May 1966, 16

-17.

. "La Greve "tous ensemble."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 May 1966, 4 -

5.

. "Reportage: la grande reve scandinavien." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25

May 1966,15-17.

"Consume et tais-toi!..." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 June 1966, 1 4 - 1 6 .

"L'lle sans marins." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 June 1966, 8 - 9 .

"La Proie pour 1'ombre." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 June 1966, 1 0 - 1 1 .

"La "Gorille" de Buenos Aires." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 July 1966, 11.

"Le Nouvel Front." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 July 1966, 15.

"Le Prisonnier de 1'empire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 July 1966, 12 -

14
421
 . "Pour les maitres de forges." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 August 1966,10.

. "Les Chomeurs de la relance." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 August 1966,

10-11.

. "Commerce: les marchands de mousse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31

August 1966, 1 2 - 1 3 .

. "Et si on nationalisait la bourse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 October

1966,10-11.

. "Pas assez d'impots." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 November 1966, 6 - 7 .

. "L'lllusion du "planisme."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 November 1966,

9-10.

. "Autopsie d'une enquete." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 November 1966,

24-25.

. "Les Chomeurs de l'expansion." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 November

1966, 5.

. "Decolonisez la province." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 December 1966, 4 -

5.

. "L'Economie malade de chomage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14

December 1966, 12.

. "Une Crise profonde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 December 1966, 8 - 9 .

. "La Locomotive deraille." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 December 1966,

12.

, Norbert, B., Kaupp, Katia. "La Maladie des hopitaux." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 4 January 1967: 1 7 - 2 4 .

, Gilbert, Marc. "Les Ordinateurs en folie." Le Nouvel Observateur. 11

January 1967: 1 0 - 1 1 .

. "Sortir du guepier." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 January 1967, 14.

, Krief, Claude, Mornand, Jacques. "A qui profite le Gaullisme." Le

Nouvel Observateur, 15 February 1967: 1 5 - 2 2 .

, Mallet, Serge, Kaupp, Katia. "Cinq Francais sur dix ont peur de
chomage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 March 1967: 1 7 - 2 4 .

, Mornand, Jacques. "Une Republique de mal-loges." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 1 March 1967: 1 9 - 2 5 .

. "Un Enjeu de trente milliards des dollars." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22

March 1967, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Les Pieges des salaires." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 March 1967, 13 -

14.

. "Un "Couac" dans le concert." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 1967, 4 -

. "Enseignement: la France malade du bac." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31

May 1967, 1 9 - 2 1 .
;
Le Retour de Colbert." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 July 1967, 4.

. "La Malade imaginaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 July 1967, 6 - 7 .

. "Des Proprietaries de vent." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 August 1967, 4 -

. "Economie: si j'etais patron." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 August 1967, 6.

. "La Seconde mort de Staline." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 August 1967,

. "Le Fascinant pouvoir des petrolieres." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21

August 1967, 11.

. "Mort de la charrue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 August 1967, 19.

. "L'Echec du Bull-General Electric." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 September

1967,7.

. "Une Faiblesse atavique." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 October 1967, 15 -

17.

423
 . "Le Plus mauvais moment de leur vie." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11
October 1967, 2 2 - 2 3 .

. "L'Assassin de "Che" Guevara." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 November

1967,5-12.

. "Enseignement: reponse a Laurent Schwarz." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8

November 1967, 2 6 - 2 8 .

. "Riches et pauvres en Europe." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 November

1967,21.

, Mornand, Jacques. "Pourquoi la devaluation de la livre sterling nous

concernent tous." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 November 1967: 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Devaluation: les assieges de Fort Knox." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29

November 1967,20-21.

. "Economie: l'affaire des 16.66%." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 December

1967, 18.

. "45,000 chomeurs." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 December 1967, 1 3 - 1 4 .

. "Debat: faut-il supprimer les examens?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

January 1968,20-22.
. "Castro ouvre un nouveau front." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 January
1968,20-21.

. "Au pays du "mort glorieuse."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 February

1968,18-20.

. "Fidel Castro est-il un fou?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February 1968,

14-16.

. "Economie: un plate-forme "indefmissable?"" Le Nouvel Observateur, 13

March 1968, 1 4 - 1 5 .

. "Europe: la bataille du lait." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 March 1968, 16 -

17.

. "Universite: la victoire du Doyen Zamansky." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10

April 1968, 26.
424
 . "Recherche: les demi-soldes de la decouverte." Le Nouvel Observateur,
17 April 1968, 2 5 - 2 6 .

. "Decentralisation: les pinceaux secouent paris." Le Nouvel Observateur,

24 April 1968, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Pouvoirs etudiants et pouvoirs ouvriers." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22

May 1968,6-10.

. "Pourquoi les ouvriers ont refuse les accords." Le Nouvel Observateur,

30 May 1968,7.

. "Enterprise: ce que reste acquis." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 June 1968, 12

-13.

. "Economie: la regie du jeu." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 June 1968, 18 -

19.

. "Les Dossiers du "N.O.", le coup de la participation." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 22 July 1968, 1 1 - 1 3 .

Au poigt et a l'oeil." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 July 1968, 14.

. Economie: un deficit stimulant." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 August 1968,

14.

. "Economie: les clefs du budget 1969." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 August

1968,9-10.

. "Une Sante de fer." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 September 1968, 1 1 - 1 2 .

. "Budget: la restauration et les phrases." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9

September 1968, 2 0 - 2 1 .

. "Une Histoire pour tout le monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 September

1968,18-19.

. "Les Italiens vont tres loin." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 September 1968,

24-25.

. "Un Vrai Patron." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 September 1968, 16.

425
 . "Les Demons du froid." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 September 1968, 16 -
17.

. "I.N.S.E.E.: le coquant millionieme fran9ais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7

October 1968, 2 2 - 2 3 .

. "Des Cartes truquees." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 October 1968, 14.

. "Affaires: que peut-on faire avec cinq cents milliards de lires." Le Nouvel
Observateur, 21 October 1968, 16.

. "Italie: Pheresie vient de Rome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 November

1968,22-23.

. "L'Europe subventionne les Etats-Unis." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11

November 1968,25-26.

. "Les Responsables." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 November 1968, 18 -

20.

. "La Prime a la speculation." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 December 1968,

26 - 27.

. "Peut-on eviter la hausse de prix?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 December

1968,20-21.

. "Agriculture: la terre sans paysans." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16

December 1968, 2 6 - 2 7 .

. "Cuba: le dixieme anniversaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 December

1968,12-13.

. "Que reste-t-il du socialisme?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 December

1968,14-17.

. "Hopitaux: le grand gachis." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 January 1969, 14

-15.

. "La Defaite du consommateur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 January 1969,

15.

. "Le Grand gachis des hopitaux." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 February

1969, 15.
426
 , Rioux, Lucien. "Syndicats: le mauvais terrain." Le Nouvel Observateur,
10 February 1969: 1 0 - 1 1 .

. "Communisme: le "mai rampant" italien." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17

February 1969, 17.

. "Italie: la ligne Berlinguer." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 February 1969,

19.

, Rioux, Lucien. "Les Ides de mars." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 March

1969: 1 3 - 1 4 .

. "L'Alerte du 11 mars." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 March 1969, 12 - 14.

. "Greves: une question de regime." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 March

1969, 20.

. "Impots: moins egale plus." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 March 1969, 24.

. "Le Saur etier et les financiers." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 April 1969,

18.

. "Ce que ni Pompidou ni Polier n'arriveront a resoudre." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 9 June 1969, 1 0 - 1 1 .

. "Entre la Suede et la Texas." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 July 1969, 11.

. Le Baron se fait prier." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 July 1969, 1 0 - 1 1 .

. "Les Deux geants." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 July 1969, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Le Pari de Chaban-Delmas." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 July 1969, 3 -

4.

. "L'Histoire des quatre freres Aillot." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 August

1969,3-4.

. "Le Dossier noir de l'industrie francais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11

August 1969, 3 - 5 .

. "Devaluation: les dessous de la bataille des prix." Le Nouvel Observateur,

18 August 1969, 4 - 5 .
427
 . "La Fin de reve suedois." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 August 1969, 12.

. "Le Style ne suffit pas." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 September 1969, 6 - 7 .

. "Au Bord de la faillite." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September 1969, 10 -

11.

. "De Singulieres revelations." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 September

1969,12-13.

. "Le Moment du reve." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 September 1969, 14 -

15.

. "Comment ils tuent le marche commun." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13

October 1969, 1 6 - 1 7 .

. "La Grand debandade." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 October 1969, 19 -

20.

. "La Selection des survivants." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 November 1969,

24-25.

. "Ces Greves qu'on appelle sauvages." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10

November 1969, 1 8 - 1 9 .

Le Droit a l'asphyxie." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 December 1969, 22.

. Comment l'esprit vient aux patrons." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 January

1970,16-17.

. "Le Test du 14 Janvier." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 January 1970, 17.

. "La Bataille des maternelles." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 January 1970,

25 - 27.

. "Sante: des malades qui rapportent." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 February

1970,28-31.

Les Ambitions de Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 16 February 1970, 2 0 - 2 1 .

. "Un Recession contagieuse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 February 1970,

428
24-25.

. "Les Meilleurs planificateurs du monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2

March 1970, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "Dix Milliards a trouver." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 March 1970, 26.

. La Bataille de la mensualisation." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 March

1970,25.

. "La Morosite silencieuse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 April 1970, 22.

. "La Mort des "petite."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 May 1970, 24.

. "Etats-Unis: le "sixieme front."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 May 1970,

26.

. "Informatique: le second mort du bull." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 May

1970, 28.

. "Pouvoir: le charme use." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 July 1970, 8.

. "Finances: le dollar contre l'Europe." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 July

1970, 14.

Gouvernement: la reforme de la securite sociale." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 27 July 1970, 10.

. "Economie: la guerre du petrole." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 August 1970,

10.

. "Amenagement: l'incroyable Floride." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 August

1970, 9.

. "Economie: un Europe allemande." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 August

1970, 17.

. "Les Surprises de Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 August 1970, 6.

. "Capitalisme: l'argent americaine en France." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1

September 1970, 11.
. "Impots: la "bonne nouvelle" de Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21
429
September 1970, 18.

, Dreyfus, Catherine. "Dossier: quand la voiture rue la voiture." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 28 September 1970: 51.

. "Industrie: la fin de l'atome francais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12

October 1970, 20.

. "L'Occident est-il mur pour la revolution." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23

November 1970, 5 7 - 6 9 .

__. "L'Annee des otages." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 December 1970, 48 -

52.

. "Etats-Unis: mille milliards de dollars." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11

January 1971, 21.

. "L'Insolence du tiers monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 January 1971,

22-23.

. "Un Match truque." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 February 1971, 23.

. "Le Piege de Jacques Delors." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 February 1971,

18-19.

. "Les Trois visages du regime." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 February

1971,31.

. "Le Fiasco du "national-petrolisme." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 March

1971,24.

. "L'Epicier et l'ordinateur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 March 1971, 31.

. "L'Imperatif industriel." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 March 1971, 25.

. "Les Astuces de l'indice des prix." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 April 1971,

30-31.

'Un Moteur a changer." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 April 1971, 24.

. "Eglise: les aumoniers de la subversion." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19

April 1971, 2 7 - 2 8 .

430
 . "Education: des annees qui comptent triple." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26
April 1971, 44.

. "Gouvernement: le meilleur plan du monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

May 1971,28-29.

. "Travail: le temps de vivre." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 May 1971, 28 -

29.

. "Societe: comment peuvent-ils etre O.S.? Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 May

1971,30-31.

. "Polemique: l'epicier et l'ordinateur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 May

1971,30-31.

. "Reportage: revolution a l'italienne." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 June

1971,36-37.

. "Economie: l'accord secret Brandt - Pompidou." Le Nouvel Observateur,

12 July 1971,14-15.

. "Nation: les parvenus de l'immobilier." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 July

1971,12-14.

. "Finances: mort dans l'apres-midi." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 August

1971, 13.

. "Des Hausses "raisonnables." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 August 1971,

13.

. "Capitalisme: apres le coup de force de Nixon." Le Nouvel Observateur,

21 August 1971, 2 1 - 2 3 .

. "Emploi: la journee de quatre heures." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6

September 1971, 18.

. "Marche commun: l'agonie de l'Europe verte." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4

October 1971,33.

. "L'Evenement: les "sauvages" du metro." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18

October 1971, 2 4 - 2 5 .

. "Notre epoque: les provocations de Ralph Nader." Le Nouvel

431
Observateur, 25 October 1971, 47 - 50.

. "Informatique: un geant au Rabais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1

November 1971,25.

. "Economie: chomage: la grande peur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15

November 1971,28-29.

. "Economie: le sursis de 1972." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 December

1971,16-17.

"Prix: une devaluation lucrative." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 January

1972, 22.

. "Socialisme: la vraie conquete." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 January

1972,32-33.

. "Economie: pourquoi le steak monte." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1

February 1972,22-23.

. "Impots: si Giscard avait ose." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 February 1972,

14-16.

. "Impots: le coeur du probleme." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 February

1972,20.

. "Economie: une histoire de piscine." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February

1972,36-37.

. "Les Patrons decouvrent "Pusine-bagne."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 20

March 1972,64-72.

. "Etats-Unis: le putsch manque de 1'I.T.T." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

April 1972, 3 5 - 3 6 .

. "Economie: le "petit livre rouge" de Sicco Mansholt." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 10 April 1972, 36 - 37.

. "Syndicalisme: l'Europe des francs-tireurs." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8

May 1972,40-41.

. "Les Deux visages du patronat." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 May 1972,

36-37.
432
 . "Nation: la republique du "tout va bien." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 May
1972,32-33.

. "Ecologie et Revolution." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 June 1972, v.

. "Reponses a quelques militants C.G.T." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 July

1972,57-60.

. "Economies: l'agonie d'un empire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 July

1972,20-21.

. "Emploi: marchands d'esclaves." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 July 1972,

16-17.

;. "Impots: plainte contre Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 August 1972,

14-15.

Hommes a louer." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 August 1972, 1 2 - 1 3 .

. "L'Ecole pour quoi faire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 October 1972, 50 -

52.
. "Debate: au-dela des elections." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 November
1972,38-39.

. "Les Mirages de 1'inflation." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 November 1972,

31.

. "Condition ouvriere: la tactique "suedoise."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 20

November 1972, 44.

. "Femmes: un chiffon de plus." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 November

1972,44

. "Inflation: l'intendance n'a pas suivi." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4

December 1972, 3 6 - 3 7 .

. "Economie: les cadeaux de Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11

December 1972, 33.

. "Societe: mort dans les regies." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 December

1972,55.
433
 . "Economie: la sauve-qui-peut des capitaux." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23
December 1972, 21.

. "Economie: les premiers de la classe." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 January

1973,25-27.

. "Notre epoque: les jeunes prophetes d' Amsterdam." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 22 January 1973, 46 - 49.

. "Capitalisme: les financiers misent sur Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur,

29 January 1973,28-29.

. "Economie: mieux vaut moins mais mieux." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12

February 1973,34-35.

. "Entretien: que faire dans les trois ans qui viennent." Le Nouvel
Observateur, 19 March 1973, 38 - 39.

. "Le Document de la semaine: quoi servent les immigres." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 16 April 1973, 78 - 108.

. "Societe: cinq ans apres mai." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 April 1973, 38

-39.

. "Economie: prix: la bataille est perdue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 July

1973,28-29.

. "Le Scandale d'un ete." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 August 1973, 18 -

20.

. "Le Vrai visage de la France." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 August 1973,

21.

. "Economie: les ecueils de 1974. Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 September

1973,25.

. "Le Mur des diplomes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 September 1973, 23.

. "Economie: la quinzaine d'un speculateur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1

October 1873, 29.

. "Le Pouvoir c'est elles." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 October 1973, 70 -

434
102.

. "Monnaie: pourquoi Pompidou choisi 1'Amerique." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 22 October 1973, 26.

. "Petrole: la peur du rationnement." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 November

1973,35-36.

. "Prix: un tierce inattendu." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 November 1973,

37-38.

. "Gouvernement: le pourrissement." Ze Nouvel Observateur, 19

November 1973,31-32.

. "Economie: la fin de l'opulence." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 November

1973,31-32.

. "Crise: ce n'est qu'un debut." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 December

1973,30-32.

. "Civilisation: profiter de la crise." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 December

1973,22-23.

. "L'Evenement ce qui va changer." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 January

1974,22-23.

. "Economie: le pari de Giscard." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 January 1974,

23.

. "Economie: reinventer l'avenir." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 March 1974,

46-48.

. "Economie: un situation prerevolutionnaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25

March 1974, 2 6 - 2 7 .

. "Election: la victoire ne suffit pas." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 April 1974,

32-33.

. "Economie: crise: les solutions de la gauche." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22

April 1974, 4 4 - 4 5 .

Energie: le soleil au detail." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 May 1974, 62.

435
 . "Si Giscard gagne." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 May 1974, 49 - 50.

. "Extreme gauche: la revoke selon Sartre et les gauchistes." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 10 June 1974, 5 2 - 5 3 .

. "Elysee: un president a l'americaine." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 June

1974,28-29.

. "Gouvernement: 1'imagination en baisse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24

June 1974,20-21.

. "Economie: la fin de la belle epoque." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 July

1974,28-29.

. "Energie: 1'inevitable rationnement." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 July

1974,29-30.

__. "L'Evenement: crise: la grande couleur du patronat." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 29 July 1974, 29 - 30.

. "Elevage: la viande empoisonnee." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 July 1974,

20-21.

. "Population: douze milliards d'hommes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2

September 1974, 3 0 - 3 2 .

. "Quand la medecine rend malade." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 October

1974,84-118.

. "Quand la medecine rend malade II." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 October

1974,90-130.

. "Energie nucleaire: francais, si vous saviez." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

February 1975, 6 4 - 7 6 .

. "Energie: les cinq illusions de l'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10

February 1975, 24.

. "Economie: le spectre des annees trente." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17

February 1975, 24.

. "Atome: on peut se passer des centrales nucleaires." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 24 February 1975, 24 - 26.
436
 ''Nucleaire: un dossier truque." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 March 1975,
33.

. "La Relance pour quoi faire?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 March 1975, 23

-24.

"Le Midi ivre." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 April 1975, 35 - 36.

"La Facade liberale." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 April 1974, 4 1 - 4 2 .

46 "Mensonges par omission." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 April 1975, 45 -

"La Fin des experts." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 May 1975, 34.

"Les Doux mensonges du VVIe plan." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 June

1975,25.

. "Du Bon usage de la crise." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 June 1975, 58 -

59.

'Les Mecomptes de Jean-Pierre Fourcade." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12

July 1975, 1 6 - 1 7 .

. "Energie: le repli de l'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 July 1975, 17 -

18.

. "Washington: le nouvel ordre mondial." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4

August 1975, 1 8 - 1 9 .

. "La Boussole perdue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 August 1975, 24.

'Elysee: a qui profite la "relance."" Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September

1975, 24.

"Le Coup de foudre du 4 sept." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 September

1975,30-31.

. "La Maladie inavouable." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 September 1975, 27

-28.

"Les Mensonges sur le chomage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 October

437
1975,40-41.

. "Deux regards sur une pyramide." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 November

1975,60-61.

. "Sante: cancer: le choix des armes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 December

1975,40-49.

. "Travail sur ordonnance." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 December 1975, 45

-46.

. "Nucleaire: la seine aussi." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 December 1975,

26.

. "Ecoute, chomeur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 January 1976, 37 - 38.

. "Energie: les deserteurs de 1'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 March

1976,40-41.

. "L'Adieu a Cuernavaca." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 March 1976, 56.

. "La Revolution americaine recommence." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10

May 1976, 102-146.

. "Alerte au climat." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 May 1976, 56 - 58.

. "La dictature du plutonium." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 June 1976, 36 -

38.

. "Quand la "salete" tue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 July 1976, 40 - 41.

, Daniel, Jean. "Opinion: occupons le terrain." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30

August 1976: 2 2 - 2 3 .

. "Nucleaire: le mensonges officiels." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 September

1976,27-28.

. "Lettre ouverte a quelques futures ministres de gauche." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 13 September 1976, 33.

. "Les Damnes de 1'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 October 1976, 42.

. "L'Ecologie est-elle reactionnaire?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 October

438
1976,44-45.

. "Valse-hesitation nucleaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 October 1976,

26.

. "Les Poubelles de l'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 November 1976,

45 - 46.

. "Nucleaire: la longue marche d'E.D.F." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13

December 1976, 38.

. "Une Maison a histoires." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 December 1976, 39

-40.

. "Nucleaire: les eaux "chaudes" de Grenoble." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

January 1977,51-52.

. "Une Bombe dans la mare nucleaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 January

1977,30-32.

. "Les Socialistes et l'esprit d'entreprise." Le Nouvel Observateur, 14

February 1977, 23.

. "Le Soleil en faillite." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28 February 1977, 30.

. "Pour qui travaillent les "verts"?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 March 1977,

22-23.
. "Ce que les ecologistes pensent d'eux-memes." Le Nouvel Observateur,
22 March 1977, 3 0 - 3 1 .

. "Des Employes sans patrons?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 April 1977, 34

-35.

. "Plutonium: le "diktat" de Jimmy Carter." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18

April 1977, 5 4 - 5 5 .

. "Les Economistes communistes ont-ils raison?" Le Nouvel Observateur,

23 May 1977,48-49.

. "Sartre et les sourds." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 June 1977, 39.

. "Des Centrales incasables." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 June, 1977, 50 -

439
51.

"Le Progres devenu fou." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 July 1977, 34.

"Faut-il briiler super-phenix?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 July 1977, 26 -

28.

"Un Racisme tres ordinaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 August 1977,

25.

"LaNebuleuse ecologique." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 August 1977, 31.

"Des Dossiers a peine entrouverts." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 August

1977,31.

. "Les Hauts fourneaux en veilleuse." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26

September 1977,49-50.

. "La "Mobilisation" du patronat." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 October

1977, 45.

. "Nucleaire: la revision des socialistes." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24

October 1977, 59.

. "Atome: le verdict des commissaires." Le Nouvel Observateur, 28

November 1977, 57.

. "Plaidoyer pour l'entreprise." Z,e Nouvel Observateur, 19 December

1977,38-39.

. "L' Atome est-il rempla9able? Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 January 1978, 31

-32.

. "La Chute de la maison chaslin." Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 January

1978,36.

. "Un Pillage exemplaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 January 1978, 23.

, Mornand, Jacques. "Ceux qui jouent avec le franc." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 13 February 1978: 2 2 - 2 3 .

. "Le Soleil dans vos cheminees." Le Nouvel Observateur, 13 February

1978,56-57.
440
 . "Le Cancer dans le metro?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 February 1978,
71.

. "Une Pastille contre le travail." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 April 1978, 66

-67.

. "Le Plus grand moulin du monde." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 April

1978,66-67.

. "L'Amiante qui tue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 May 1978, 48.

. "Quand l'ordinateur regenera." Le Nouvel Observateur, 22 May 1978, 43

-45.

. "Nous voulons tout!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 June 1978, 4 4 - 4 5 .

. "Du Soleil pour l'hiver." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 June 1978, 56 - 57.

. "Consommateurs: grand mensonge." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 June

1978,20-21.

. "Un Mensonge tricolore." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 June 1978, 2 0 - 2 1 .

. "La France des freres Willot." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 August 1978,

22-23.

. "Ce Qui nous manque pour etre heureux." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11

September 1978,30-31.

. "Les Moustiques contre-attaquent." Le Nouvel Observateur, 18

September 1978, 75.

. "La Mort a petites doses." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 November 1978, 68

-69.

. "L'Age d'or du chomage." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 December 1978, 80

-85.

. "La Vengeance du tout-electrique." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 December

1978,44-46.

, Alain, Jacques. "Un Entretien avec Jacques Delors." Le Nouvel

441
Observateur, 8 January 1979: 38 - 39.

. "Alain Touraine: la revolution culturelle que nous vivons." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 8 January 1979, 62 - 68.

. "Vive le froid!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 January 1979, 48 - 49.

. "Fiscalite: Dupont et Dupon chez le percepteur." Le Nouvel Observateur,

22 January 1979,27-28.

. "Civilisation: comme des nomades." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 February

1979, 54.

. "Energie: petrole: vers les restrictions." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 March

1979,46-47.

. "Siderurgie: le face-a-face Robert Boulin-Jacques Chereque." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 19 March 1979, 3 0 - 3 3 .

. "Beaucoup mieux que l'atome." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 April 1979, 56

-57.

. "Les Protestants du marxisme." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 May 1979, 33

-34.

Debat: la campagne pour les trente-cinq heures." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 21 May 1979, 44 - 47.

. "Universite: ce chercheur est dangereux." Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 June

1979, 52.

. "Quand le soleil fait de 1'ombre au nucleaire." Le Nouvel Observateur, 25

June 1979,48-49.

. "Herbert Marcuse, professeur de liberte." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6

August 1979, 1 6 - 1 7 .

. "Opinion: lettre ouverte au president de la republique." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 27 August 1979, 1 6 - 1 7 .

. "La Petrole revient!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 September 1979, 28 - 29.

. "Des Milliards au vent." Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 September 1979, 29

442
-30.

. "Energie: un "totem" pour chacun." Le Nouvel Observateur, 24

September 1979, 7 1 - 7 3 .

. "Nucleaire: le syndrome francais." Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 October

1979,50-51.

. "On ne recharge plus!" Le Nouvel Observateur, 8 October 1979, 54.

. "Nucleaire: dix questions graves sur les "fissures." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 15 October 1979, 6 0 - 6 1 .

. "Automobile: l'etat au volant." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 October 1979,

81.

. "Le Droit de desobeir." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 November 1979, 64 -

66.

. "Petrole: la penurie en pourra etre evitee." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17

December 1979, 5 1 - 5 2 .

. "Ecologie: l'archipel de la convivialite." Le Nouvel Observateur, 31

December 1979,43.

. "Economie: des restrictions avantageuses." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7

January 1980,26-27.

. "Histoire: rehabilitation du peuple allemand." Le Nouvel Observateur, 17

March 1980,31-33.

. "Plaidoyer pour les medecines douces." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 April

1980,31-37.

. "Medicine douces: la science avec nous." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21

April 1980, 88.

. "Le Chemin de la liberte." Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 June 1980, 4 0 - 4 1 .

. "Dossier: l'etonnent plebiscite pour l'energie solaire." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 21 June 1980, 2 2 - 2 5 .

. "Energie: le butoir de 1990." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 August 1980, 22

443
-23.

. "Societe: objecteurs: le demi-tour du conseil d'etat." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 9 August 1980, 24.

. "Prehistoire: la longue nuit des brachiosaures." Le Nouvel Observateur,

16 August 1980, 42.

. "Scenario pour un autre bonheur." Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 September

1980,10-12.

. "Nucleaire: les ailes noires de super-phenix." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6

October 1980, 2 6 - 2 7 .

. "Tiers monde: ces enfants qui meurent pour rien." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 29 December 1980, 46.

. "La Dynamite d'Edgar Morin." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 January 1981,

16 - 20.

. "Nucleaire: le choix socialiste." Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 January 1981,

19.

. "Alimentation: overdose dans le potager." Le Nouvel Observateur, 12

February 1981,49-50.

. "L'Etat hors la loi." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 March 1981, 32 - 36.

. Tiers monde: les multinationales de la faim." Le Nouvel Observateur, 9

March 1981, 3 2 - 3 6 .

. "Nucleaire: OSIRAK: le dossier noir de la France." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 22 June 1981, 3 2 - 3 3 .

. "Atome: les secrets de la Hague." Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 August

1981, 19.

. "Travailleur moins et vivre mieux: la loi des robots." Le Nouvel

Observateur, 22 August 1981, 48 - 51.

. "Travailleur moins et vivre mieux (II): les terres vierges du temps

liberee." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 August, 4 8 - 5 1 .

444
 . "Tribune: le monde de 1'injustice absolue." Le Nouvel Observateur, 5
September 1981, 35.

. "Emploi: tous au bois." Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 September 1981, 25.

. "Debat: nucleaire: virage manque." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 October

1981,30.

. "Notre epoque: la grande bouffe des affameurs." Le Nouvel Observateur,

17 October 1981, 3 6 - 3 7 .

. "Architecture: demain la terre?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 November

1981, 1 5 - 1 7 .

. "Opinion: plutot rouge que mort." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 November

1981,40.

. "Sante: "tais-toi et mange!"" Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 December 1981,

48.

. "Sciences: l'esprit de boutique." Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 January

1982,46-47.

. "Opinion: le P.S. n'existe plus." Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 February

1982,26-27.

. "Nucleaire: OSIRAK: les dangers de "caramel."" Le Nouvel Observateur,

20 March 1982, 28.

. "Social-democratie: Pimagination en panne." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

April 1982, 28.

. "Societe: le temps partiel suspend son vol." Le Nouvel Observateur, 3

April 1982, 26.

. "Energie: des leviers pour le changement." Le Nouvel Observateur, 30

April 1982, 27.

. "Vacances a la carte." Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 May 1982, 15.

. "La "Finlandisation" de 1'Europe?" Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 June

1982,35-36.

445
 . "Economie: travail: requiem pour le "plein temps."" Le Nouvel
Observateur, 31 July 1982, 2 2 - 2 3 .

. "Industrie: les secrets de la fee qualite." Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 August

1982,30-31.

. "Sante: l'ecole des magnetiseurs." Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 August

1982,44-45.

. "Comment rouler en commun." Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 September

1982,47-48.

Articles: Les Temps Modernes:

Andre Gorz. "Les Etats-Unis et Cuba." Les Temps Modernes 181 (May 1961): 1627
-1632.

. "Donnees et problemes de la lutte ouvriere: avant-propos," Les Temps

Modernes 196 - 197 (September - October 1962): 385 - 402.

. "La Greve des mineurs." Les Temps Modernes 203 (April 1963): 1836 -
1846.

. "Le Debat sino-sovietique: introduction." Les Temps Modernes 204

(May 1963): 1923-1942.

. "Strategic des monopoles et strategic ouvriere dans le marche commun."

Les Temps Modernes 211 (December 1963): 1090 - 1136.

. "Le Test vietnamien." Les Temps Modernes 228 (May 1965): 1921 —
1924.

. "Reforme et Revolution." Les Temps Modernes 249 (February 1967):

1345-1388.

. "Un Socialisme a refaire." Les Temps Modernes 263 (April 1968): 1779 -
1781.

. "Un Commencement." Les Temps Modernes 264 (May - June 1968): i -

viii.

. "Reflexions Provisoires sur la revolution de mai 1968." Les Temps

446
Modernes 265 (July 1968): 104 - 110.

. "Limites et potentialities du mouvement de mai," Les Temps Modernes

266 - 267, (August - September 1968): 231 - 264.

. "Detruire l'universite." Les Temps Modernes 285 (April 1970): 1553 -

1558.

. "La Bataille d'lvry, I." Les Temps Modernes 284 (March 1970): 1338 -
1393.

. "Technique, techniciens et lutte des classes." Les Temps Modernes 301 -

302. (August - September 1971): 141 - 180.

. "Le Despotisme d'usine et ses lendemains." Les Temps Modernes 314 -

315 (September - October 1972): 428 - 437.

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