André Gorz

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André Gorz
20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy

André Gorz (French:

May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.[4]

In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the

guaranteed basic income.[5]

Early life

Born in

Pierre Mendès-France's support.[7] He graduated from the École polytechnique at University of Lausanne, now EPFL, in chemical engineering
in 1945.

Working at first as a

L'Express
.

Alongside his journalistic activities, Gorz worked closely with Sartre and adopted an

existentialist approach to Marxism, which led Gorz to emphasize the questions of alienation and of liberation in the framework of existential experience and an analysis of social systems from the viewpoint of individual experience. That intellectual framework formed the basis of his first books, Le Traître (Le Seuil, 1958, prefaced by Sartre[8]), La Morale de l'histoire (Le Seuil, 1959) and the Fondements pour une morale (Galilée, 1977, published fifteen years later), which he signed for the first time as André Gorz, from the German name of the now-Italian city (Görz
), where the eyeglasses that were given to his father by the Austrian Army had been made.

1960s–1980s

Gorz also was a main theorist in the

Il Manifesto newspaper, the photographer William Klein, younger intellectuals such as Marc Kravetz or Tiennot Grumbach,[7] and Ronald Fraser of the New Left Review
.

He strongly criticised

CFDT (in particular, Jean Auger, Michel Rolant and Fredo Krumnow) as a theorist of workers' self-management, which has been recently embraced by the CFDT.[citation needed] His term "non-reformist reform" refers to proposed programs of change that base their demands on human needs, rather than those of the current economic system.[11]

He directly addressed himself to trade unions in Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Le Seuil, 1964) in which he criticized

Le Nouvel Observateur
weekly and used the pseudonym Michel Bosquet.

Deeply affected by May 1968, Gorz saw in the events a confirmation of his existential Marxist posture, which joined the students' criticisms towards institutional and state organisations: state, school, family, firm etc. Ivan Illich's ideas on education, medicine and the abolition of wage labour then became the focus of his attention. Gorz published one of Illich's speeches in Les Temps Modernes in 1961 and met him in 1971 in Le Nouvel Observateur at the publishing of Deschooling Society (Une Société sans école). Gorz later published a summary of Illich's Tools for Conviviality (1973) under the title Libérer l'avenir (Free Future). His links with Illich was strengthened after a trip to California in 1974, and he wrote several articles for Le Nouvel Observateur to discuss Illich's thesis.[12]

Gorz's evolution and political and philosophical stances led to some tensions with his colleagues on Les Temps Modernes for which he had assumed the chief editorial responsibilities in 1969. In April 1970, his article Destroy the University (Détruire l'Université) provoked the resignations of

autonomist group Lotta Continua. He was also forced to the periphery of Le Nouvel Observateur since he was replaced by more classically oriented economists, and he supported a campaign against nuclear industry to which EDF
, the state electricity firm, replied by withdrawing advertisements from the weekly. After it refused to let him publish a special issue on the nuclear issue, he published it in the Que Choisir? consumers' magazine.

Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology, with his ideas being popularised particularly by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage, which had been founded by Alain Hervé, the founder of the French section of the Friends of the Earth. In 1975, Gorz published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic".[13]

Gorz was also influenced by

social ecology that opposes deep ecology. Gorz's ecologism, however, remained linked to a critique of capitalism, as he called for an "ecological, social and cultural revolution that abolishes the constraints of capitalism".[14]

1980s–2000s

A year before the

French left
, it received attention from younger readers.

Soon after Sartre's death that year, Gorz left the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes. In Les Chemins du paradis (Galilée, 1983) Gorz remained critical of the Marxist orthodoxy of the time, and he used Marx's own analysis in the Grundrisse to argue for the need of the political left to embrace the liberatory potential that the increasing automation of factories and services offered as a central part of the socialist project. In 1983, he fell out with

pacifist movements by refusing to oppose the deployment of Pershing II missiles by the United States in West Germany
. The same year, he resigned from Le Nouvel Observateur.

In the 1990s and the 2000s, the journals Multitudes and EcoRev' published his last article in French, La fin du capitalisme a déjà commencé ("The End of Capitalism Has Already Begun"),[15] and Entropia published his articles.

Gorz also opposed the post-structuralism and the postmodernism of thinkers like Antonio Negri. Gorz's point of view was rooted in the thought of early Marxist humanism. Liberation from wage slavery and social alienation remained some of his goals, even in his later works.[16]

He never became an abstract theorist since his reasoning usually concluded with proposals for how to act to make changes. In Métamorphoses du travail (Galilée, 1988 – "Metamorphosis of Labour"), Gorz argued that capitalism used personal investments from the worker that were not paid back. As such, he became an advocate of a

guaranteed basic income independent from work. He made such a proposal in his book, Critique of Economic Reason
in 1989 and argued:

"From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work. In practice, this means that in the future we must receive our full monthly income every month even if we work full-time only one month in every two or six months in a year or even two years out of four, so as to complete a personal, family or community project, or experiment with different lifestyles, just as we now receive our full salaries during paid holidays, training courses, possibly during periods of sabbatical leave, and so forth...".[17]

He pointed out that in

"contrast to the guaranteed social minimum granted by the state to those unable to find regular paid work, our regular monthly income will be the normal remuneration we have earned by performing the normal amount of labour the economy requires each individual to supply. The fact that the amount of labour required is so low that work can become intermittent and constitute an activity amongst a number of others, should not be an obstacle to its being remunerated by a full monthly income throughout one's life. This income corresponds to the portion of socially produced wealth to which each individual is entitled by virtue to their participation in the social process of production. It is, however, no longer a true salary, since it is not dependent on the amount of labour supplied (in the month or year) and is not intended to remunerate individuals as workers".[18]

Death

Gorz and his wife, Dorine, committed suicide by lethal injection together in their home in Vosnon, Aube. His wife had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and they had already said that neither wanted to survive the other's death.[4] Their bodies were found on 24 September 2007 by a friend.[8][19]

His book Lettre à D. Histoire d'un amour (Galilée, 2006) was dedicated to his wife and was in fact a way for him to tell of his love for her.[4]

Bibliography

Books

  • La morale de l'histoire (Seuil, 1959)
  • Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Seuil, 1964)
  • Socialism and Revolution (first published, Seuil, 1967, as Le socialisme difficile)
  • Réforme et révolution (Seuil, 1969)
  • Critique du capitalisme quotidien (Galilée, 1973)
  • Critique de la division du travail (Seuil, 1973. Collective work)
  • Ecology as Politics (South End Press, 1979, first published, Galilée, 1978)
  • Écologie et liberté (Galilée, 1977)
  • Fondements pour une morale (Galilée, 1977)
  • The Traitor (1960, first published, Seuil, 1958)
  • Farewell to the Working Class (1980 – Galilée, 1980, and Le Seuil, 1981, as Adieux au Prolétariat)
  • Paths to Paradise (1985 – Galilée, 1983)
  • Critique of Economic Reason (Verso, 1989, first published, Galilée, 1988, as Métamorphoses du travail, quête du sens)
  • Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (1994 – Galilée, 1991)
  • Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999, first published, Galilée 1997 as Misères du présent, richesse du possible)
  • The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital (Seagull Books, 2010, first published, Galilée, 2003)
  • Letter to D : A Love Letter (Polity, 2009, first published 2006 – extract on-line Archived 14 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine)
  • Ecologica (Galilée, 2008)
  • Le fil rouge de l'écologie. Entretiens inédits en français, Willy Gianinazzi (ed.) (Ed. de l'EHESS, 2015)
  • Leur écologie et la nôtre. Anthologie d'écologie politique, Françoise Gollain & Willy Gianinazzi (eds.) (Seuil, 2020)

Essays

Audio

Interviews

Documentary

  • Charline Guillaume, Victor Tortora, Julien Tortora and Pierre-Jean Perrin, Letter to G., Rethinking our society with André Gorz,[20][21] autoproduction.

References

  1. ^ "Andre Gorz — RIP | MR Online". mronline.org. 26 September 2007. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  2. ^ a b "Verso". www.versobooks.com. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  3. ^ "Questioning the Centrality of Work with André Gorz". Green European Journal. Retrieved 3 April 2022.
  4. ^ a b c d "André Gorz's Non-Reformist Reforms Show How We Can Transform the World Today". jacobinmag.com. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  5. ^ André Gorz, Pour un revenu inconditionnel suffisant Archived 26 April 2020 at the Wayback Machine, published in TRANSVERSALES/SCIENCE-CULTURE (n° 3, 3e trimestre 2002) (in French)
  6. ^ Willy Gianinazzi, André Gorz. Une vie, La Découverte, 2016, p. 69.
  7. ^ a b Michel Contat, André Gorz, le philosophe et sa femme, Le Monde des livres, 26 October 2006, mirrored by Multitudes (in French)
  8. ^ a b Le philosophe André Gorz et sa femme se sont suicidés, Le Figaro, 25 September 2007 (in French)
  9. ^ On the relationship between Bruno Trentin and André Gorz, see W. Gianinazzi, op. cit.
  10. ^ Michel Contat, « Illustres inconnus et inconnus illustres : André Gorz », in Le Débat, n° 50, p. 243.
  11. ^ Julian Bond; Leah Wise; Henry Durham; Howard Romaine; Robert Sherrill; Derek Shearer (30 January 2013). Military and the South. p. 39.
  12. ^ Thierry Paquot, The Non-Conformist, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2003 (in English) (French version freely-available, and Portuguese and Esperanto translations available)
  13. ^ Françoise Gollain, Pensée écologique et critique du travail dans une perspective gorzienne, Orléans, Ph.D. en economic sciences, 1999, p. 113
  14. ^ French: « révolution écologique, sociale et culturelle qui abolisse les contraintes du capitalisme», quoted by Françoise Gollain, op. cit., p. 13
  15. ^ "Le travail dans la sortie du capitalisme - Revue Critique d'Ecologie Politique". ecorev.org.
  16. JSTOR 41203052
    .
  17. ISBN 978-1-84467-667-5
    .
  18. ISBN 978-1-84467-667-5
    .
  19. ^
    AFP, "French philosopher commits suicide with wife," 25 September 2007 on-line Archived 3 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine
    (in English)
  20. ^ "" Il faut vouloir autre chose, mais quoi ? " : avoir 20 ans et écrire à André Gorz". L'Obs (in French). 27 September 2019. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  21. ^ "Letter to G., the film - Rethinking our society with André Gorz". Letter to G. Retrieved 4 September 2020.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=André_Gorz&oldid=1185896734"