André Gorz
Encyclopedia
André GorzAndré Gorz (February 9, 1923, Vienna
– September 22, 2007, Vosnon
, France
), pen name
of Gérard Horst, born Gerhard Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was an Austria
n and French
social philosopher
. Also a journalist
, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur
weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre
's existentialist version of Marxism
after World War Two, in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots, he became more concerned with political ecology
.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left
movement. His central theme was wage labour
issues such as liberation from work, just distribution of work, social alienation
, and Guaranteed basic income
.
under the name of Gerhard Hirsch, he was the son of a Jewish wood salesman and a Catholic
mother, who came from a cultivated background and worked as a secretary. Although his parents did not have any strong sense of national or religious identity, the spreading anti-Semitism
of the time led his father to convert to Catholicism in 1930. At the outbreak of World War II
, his mother sent him to a Catholic institution in Lausanne
in order to avoid his mobilization in the German military
. Thereafter, Hirsch was stateless until 1954, when he was naturalized
French thanks to Pierre Mendès-France
's support. He graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
in chemical engineering
in 1945.
Working at first as a translator
of American short stories published by a Swiss editor, he published his first articles in a cooperative
journal. In 1946 he met Jean-Paul Sartre
, whom he became close to. He was then mainly influenced by existentialism
and phenomenology. Gorz contributed to the journals Les Temps Modernes
(Paris
) and Technologie und Politik (Reinbek
). In June 1949 Gorz moved to Paris where he worked first at the international secretariat of the Mouvement des Citoyens du Monde, then as private secretary of a military attaché
of the embassy of India. He then entered Paris-Presse as a journalist, taking the pseudonym of Michel Bosquet. There, he met with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
, who in 1955 recruited him as an economist journalist for L'Express
.
Alongside his journalistic activities, he worked closely with Sartre and adopted an existentialist approach to Marxism
, leading him 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. This intellectual framework formed the basis of his first books, Le Traître (Le Seuil, 1958, prefaced by Sartre), 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 eye-glasses given to his father by the Austrian Army were made.
movement, inspired by the young Marx
, discussions of humanism and alienation
and the liberation of mankind. Gorz was also influenced by the Frankfurt School
, being a friend of Herbert Marcuse
. Other friends of his included Rossana Rossanda
, founder of Il Manifesto
newspaper, or the photographer William Klein
, and younger intellectuals such as Marc Kravetz or Tiennot Grumbach.
He strongly criticized Structuralism
, because of its criticisms of the subject and of subjectivity. He called himself a "revolutionary-reformist", a democratic socialist who wanted to see system-changing reforms. In 1961, he entered the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes, introducing to French thought the Italian Garavini
, the neo-Keynesian and Communist Bruno Trentin, and the anarcho-syndicalist Vittorio Foa
. Imposing himself as the "intellectual leader of the 'Italian' tendency of the New Left
" (Michel Contat), he influenced activists of the UNEF
students' union and of the CFDT (in particular on Jean Auger, Michel Rolant and Fredo Krumnow) as a theorist of workers' self-management
, recently embraced by the CFDT.
He directly addressed himself to trade-unions in Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Le Seuil, 1964), where he criticized capitalist
economic growth
and expounded on the various strategies open to trade-unions. The same year, he quit L'Express along with Serge Lafaurie, Jacques-Laurent Bost, K.S. Karol and Jean Daniel
to found Le Nouvel Observateur
weekly (using the pseudonym of Michel Bosquet).
Deeply affected by May '68, Gorz saw in these events a confirmation of his existential-Marxist posture, which joined the students' criticisms towards institutional and state organization (State, School, Family, Firm, etc.). Thereafter, Ivan Illich
's thesis on education, medicine or the abolition of wage labour
became the focus of his attention. He published one of Illich's speech in Les Temps Modernes in 1961, before meeting him in 1971 in Le Nouvel Observateur at the occasion of his publication of Deschooling Society (Une Société sans école). He later published a resume of Illich's Tools for Conviviality (1973) under the title Libérer l'avenir (Free Future). His links with Illich were strengthened after a trip to California
in 1974, where he wrote several articles for Le Nouvel Observateur discussing Illich's thesis.
Gorz's evolution and political and philosophical stances led to some tensions with his colleagues on Le Temps Moderne, for which he had assumed the chief editorial responsibilities in 1969. In April 1970, his article Destroy the University (Détruire l'Université) provoked the resignation of Pontalis and Pingeaud. Gorz also criticized a Maoist
tendency present in the journal since 1971 (and supported by Sartre). Finally, in 1974 Gorz resigned as the editor of Les Temps Modernes, following a disagreement concerning an article about the Italian autonomist group Lotta Continua
. At the same time, he found himself he was forced to the periphery of Le Nouvel Observateur, being replaced by more classically-oriented economists, while he followed at the same time a campaign against nuclear industry — to which EDF
, the state electricity firm, replied by withdrawing advertisements from the weekly. Following the weekly's refusal to let him publish a special issue on the nuclear issue, he published it in the Que Choisir? consumers' magazine.
In the same period, Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology
, his ideas being spread in particular by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage
, founded by Alain Hervé, the creator of the French section of the Friends of the Earth
. In 1975, he published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic" (Françoise Gollain).
He was also influenced by Louis Dumont
in considering Marxism and Liberalism
to be two versions of economist thought. Gorz then opposed himself both to hedonist individualism
and utilitarianism
and to materialist and productivist collectivism
, defending a humanist version of ecology similar to social ecology
which is opposed to deep ecology
. Gorz's ecologism, however, remained linked to a critique of Capitalism, as he called for an "ecological, social and cultural revolution which would abolish the constraints of Capitalism".
of the left's candidate, François Mitterrand
, to the presidency, he published Adieux au prolétariat (Galilée, 1980 - Farewell to the Proletariat) where he criticized the cult of the Proletarian class in Marxism, arguing that changes in science and technology now made it impossible for the working-class to be the sole, or even primary, revolutionary agent. Although the book was not well received among the French Left, it did receive attention from younger readers. Soon after Sartre's death in that same 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, using 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 had a falling out with the pacifist movement
s when he refused 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 2000s, the journals Multitudes
, EcoRev' which will publish the last article in French "la fin du capitalisme a déjà commencé" and Entropia published his articles.
Gorz was also critical of the Post-Structuralism
and Postmodernism
of thinkers such as Toni Negri. His point of view was rooted in early Marxist humanist
thinking. Liberation from wage-slavery and social alienation
was still one of his goals, even in his later works. He never became an abstract theorist; 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 which were not paid back. As such, he became an advocate of Guaranteed basic income
, independent from "labour." He made such an proposal in his book, Critique of Economic Reason, 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...."
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."
). His wife had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and they had already said that neither wanted to survive the other's death. Their bodies were found on the 24th of September 2007 by a friend, both having died after a lethal injection
. 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 the love he had for her.
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
– September 22, 2007, Vosnon
Vosnon
Vosnon is a commune in the Aube department in north-central France.-Population:...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
), pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
of Gérard Horst, born Gerhard Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was an Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n and French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
social philosopher
Social philosophy
Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social behavior . Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract to criteria for revolution, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of...
. Also a journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
's existentialist version of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
after World War Two, in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots, he became more concerned with political ecology
Political ecology
Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena....
.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
movement. His central theme was wage labour
Wage labour
Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined...
issues such as liberation from work, just distribution of work, social alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
, and Guaranteed basic income
Basic income
A basic income guarantee is a proposed system of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order...
.
Early life
Born in ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
under the name of Gerhard Hirsch, he was the son of a Jewish wood salesman and a Catholic
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
mother, who came from a cultivated background and worked as a secretary. Although his parents did not have any strong sense of national or religious identity, the spreading anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
of the time led his father to convert to Catholicism in 1930. At the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, his mother sent him to a Catholic institution in Lausanne
Lausanne
Lausanne is a city in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and is the capital of the canton of Vaud. The seat of the district of Lausanne, the city is situated on the shores of Lake Geneva . It faces the French town of Évian-les-Bains, with the Jura mountains to its north-west...
in order to avoid his mobilization in the German military
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...
. Thereafter, Hirsch was stateless until 1954, when he was naturalized
Naturalization
Naturalization is the acquisition of citizenship and nationality by somebody who was not a citizen of that country at the time of birth....
French thanks to Pierre Mendès-France
Pierre Mendès-France
Pierre Mendès France was a French politician. He descended from a Portuguese Jewish family that moved to France in the sixteenth century.-Third Republic and World War II:...
's support. He graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...
in chemical engineering
Chemical engineering
Chemical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with physical science , and life sciences with mathematics and economics, to the process of converting raw materials or chemicals into more useful or valuable forms...
in 1945.
Working at first as a translator
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
of American short stories published by a Swiss editor, he published his first articles in a cooperative
Cooperative
A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...
journal. In 1946 he met Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, whom he became close to. He was then mainly influenced by existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
and phenomenology. Gorz contributed to the journals Les Temps Modernes
Les Temps modernes
The first issue of Les Temps modernes , the most important cultural review of the period after World War II, appeared in October 1945. It was known as the review of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was named for a film by Charlie Chaplin...
(Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) and Technologie und Politik (Reinbek
Reinbek
Reinbek is a town located in Stormarn district in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein within the metropolitan region of Hamburg...
). In June 1949 Gorz moved to Paris where he worked first at the international secretariat of the Mouvement des Citoyens du Monde, then as private secretary of a military attaché
Military attaché
A military attaché is a military expert who is attached to a diplomatic mission . This post is normally filled by a high-ranking military officer who retains the commission while serving in an embassy...
of the embassy of India. He then entered Paris-Presse as a journalist, taking the pseudonym of Michel Bosquet. There, he met with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, often referred to as JJSS was a French journalist and politician. He co-founded L'Express in 1953 with Françoise Giroud, and then went on to become president of the Radical Party in 1971...
, who in 1955 recruited him as an economist journalist for L'Express
L'Express (France)
L'Express is a French weekly news magazine. When founded in 1953 during the First Indochina War, it was modelled on the US magazine TIME.-History:...
.
Alongside his journalistic activities, he worked closely with Sartre and adopted an existentialist approach to Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, leading him to emphasize the questions of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
and of liberation
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
in the framework of existential experience and an analysis of social systems from the viewpoint of individual experience. This intellectual framework formed the basis of his first books, Le Traître (Le Seuil, 1958, prefaced by Sartre), 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
Gorizia
Gorizia is a town and comune in northeastern Italy, in the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. It is located at the foot of the Julian Alps, bordering Slovenia. It is the capital of the Province of Gorizia, and it is a local center of tourism, industry, and commerce. Since 1947, a twin...
) where the eye-glasses given to his father by the Austrian Army were made.
1960s-1980s
Gorz also was a main theorist in the New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
movement, inspired by the young Marx
Young Marx
Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...
, discussions of humanism and alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
and the liberation of mankind. Gorz was also influenced by the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, being a friend of Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
. Other friends of his included Rossana Rossanda
Rossana Rossanda
-Biography:Rossanda was born in Pula, then part of Italy. She studied in Milan and was a pupil of philosopher Antonio Banfi. At a very young age, she took part in the Italian resistance and, after the end of World War II, she entered the Italian Communist Party . After a short period, secretary ...
, founder of Il Manifesto
Il Manifesto
il manifesto is an Italian newspaper. While it calls itself communist, it is not connected to any political party. It was founded as a monthly review in 1969 by a collective of left-wing journalists engaged in the wave of critical thought and activity on the Italian left in that period. Prominent...
newspaper, or the photographer William Klein
William Klein
William Klein is a photographer and filmmaker noted to for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography...
, and younger intellectuals such as Marc Kravetz or Tiennot Grumbach.
He strongly criticized Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, because of its criticisms of the subject and of subjectivity. He called himself a "revolutionary-reformist", a democratic socialist who wanted to see system-changing reforms. In 1961, he entered the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes, introducing to French thought the Italian Garavini
Sergio Garavini
Sergio Garavini was an Italian politician, writer and trade unionist.-Biography:Garavini was born in Turin....
, the neo-Keynesian and Communist Bruno Trentin, and the anarcho-syndicalist Vittorio Foa
Vittorio Foa
Vittorio Foa was an Italian politician, trade unionist, journalist and writer.-Biography:Foa was born in Turin in 1910 into a middle-class Jewish family....
. Imposing himself as the "intellectual leader of the 'Italian' tendency of the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
" (Michel Contat), he influenced activists of the UNEF
Union nationale des étudiants de france
The National Union of Students of France is the main national students' union in France....
students' union and of the CFDT (in particular on Jean Auger, Michel Rolant and Fredo Krumnow) as a theorist of workers' self-management
Workers' self-management
Worker self-management is a form of workplace decision-making in which the workers themselves agree on choices instead of an owner or traditional supervisor telling workers what to do, how to do it and where to do it...
, recently embraced by the CFDT.
He directly addressed himself to trade-unions in Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Le Seuil, 1964), where he criticized capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
economic growth
Economic growth
In economics, economic growth is defined as the increasing capacity of the economy to satisfy the wants of goods and services of the members of society. Economic growth is enabled by increases in productivity, which lowers the inputs for a given amount of output. Lowered costs increase demand...
and expounded on the various strategies open to trade-unions. The same year, he quit L'Express along with Serge Lafaurie, Jacques-Laurent Bost, K.S. Karol and Jean Daniel
Jean Daniel
Jean Daniel, is an Algerian-born French-Jewish journalist and author. He is the founder and executive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur weekly.Daniel is a Jewish humanist in the venerable tradition of the French Left...
to found Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur
Le Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. Based in Paris, it is the most prominent French general information magazine in terms of audience and circulation ....
weekly (using the pseudonym of Michel Bosquet).
Deeply affected by May '68, Gorz saw in these events a confirmation of his existential-Marxist posture, which joined the students' criticisms towards institutional and state organization (State, School, Family, Firm, etc.). Thereafter, Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...
's thesis on education, medicine or the abolition of wage labour
Wage labour
Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages are market determined...
became the focus of his attention. He published one of Illich's speech in Les Temps Modernes in 1961, before meeting him in 1971 in Le Nouvel Observateur at the occasion of his publication of Deschooling Society (Une Société sans école). He later published a resume of Illich's Tools for Conviviality (1973) under the title Libérer l'avenir (Free Future). His links with Illich were strengthened after a trip to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
in 1974, where he wrote several articles for Le Nouvel Observateur discussing Illich's thesis.
Gorz's evolution and political and philosophical stances led to some tensions with his colleagues on Le Temps Moderne, for which he had assumed the chief editorial responsibilities in 1969. In April 1970, his article Destroy the University (Détruire l'Université) provoked the resignation of Pontalis and Pingeaud. Gorz also criticized a Maoist
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
tendency present in the journal since 1971 (and supported by Sartre). Finally, in 1974 Gorz resigned as the editor of Les Temps Modernes, following a disagreement concerning an article about the Italian autonomist group Lotta Continua
Lotta Continua
Lotta Continua was a far left extra-parliamentary organization in Italy. It was founded in autumn 1969 by a split in the student-worker movement of Turin, which had started militant activity at the universities and factories such as Fiat...
. At the same time, he found himself he was forced to the periphery of Le Nouvel Observateur, being replaced by more classically-oriented economists, while he followed at the same time a campaign against nuclear industry — to which EDF
Électricité de France
Électricité de France S.A. is the second largest French utility company. Headquartered in Paris, France, with €65.2 billion in revenues in 2010, EDF operates a diverse portfolio of 120,000+ megawatts of generation capacity in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.EDF is one of...
, the state electricity firm, replied by withdrawing advertisements from the weekly. Following the weekly's refusal to let him publish a special issue on the nuclear issue, he published it in the Que Choisir? consumers' magazine.
In the same period, Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology
Political ecology
Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena....
, his ideas being spread in particular by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage
Le Sauvage
Le Sauvage is a 1975 French film starring Yves Montand and Catherine Deneuve. The film was a commercial success with a total of 2,373,738 admissions in France and was the 12th highest grossing film of the year....
, founded by Alain Hervé, the creator of the French section of the Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth International is an international network of environmental organizations in 76 countries.FOEI is assisted by a small secretariat which provides support for the network and its agreed major campaigns...
. In 1975, he published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic" (Françoise Gollain).
He was also influenced by Louis Dumont
Louis Dumont
Louis Dumont was a French anthropologist. He was an associate professor at Oxford University during the 1950s, and director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris...
in considering Marxism and Liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
to be two versions of economist thought. Gorz then opposed himself both to hedonist individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
and utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
and to materialist and productivist collectivism
Collectivism
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, economic, mystical or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human in some collective group and the priority of group goals over individual goals. Collectivists usually focus on community, society, or nation...
, defending a humanist version of ecology similar to social ecology
Social ecology
Social ecology is a philosophy developed by Murray Bookchin in the 1960s.It holds that present ecological problems are rooted in deep-seated social problems, particularly in dominatory hierarchical political and social systems. These have resulted in an uncritical acceptance of an overly...
which is opposed to deep ecology
Deep ecology
Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological philosophy that recognizes an inherent worth of all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependence of organisms within ecosystems and that of ecosystems with each other within the...
. Gorz's ecologism, however, remained linked to a critique of Capitalism, as he called for an "ecological, social and cultural revolution which would abolish the constraints of Capitalism".
1980s-2000s
A year before the electionFrench presidential election, 1981
The French presidential election of 1981 took place on 10 May 1981, giving the presidency of France to François Mitterrand, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic....
of the left's candidate, François Mitterrand
François Mitterrand
François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand was the 21st President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, serving from 1981 until 1995. He is the longest-serving President of France and, as leader of the Socialist Party, the only figure from the left so far elected President...
, to the presidency, he published Adieux au prolétariat (Galilée, 1980 - Farewell to the Proletariat) where he criticized the cult of the Proletarian class in Marxism, arguing that changes in science and technology now made it impossible for the working-class to be the sole, or even primary, revolutionary agent. Although the book was not well received among the French Left, it did receive attention from younger readers. Soon after Sartre's death in that same 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, using 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 had a falling out with the pacifist movement
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
s when he refused to oppose the deployment of Pershing II
Pershing missile
Pershing was a family of solid-fueled two-stage medium-range ballistic missiles designed and built by Martin Marietta to replace the PGM-11 Redstone missile as the United States Army's primary nuclear-capable theater-level weapon. The Pershing systems lasted over 30 years from the first test...
missiles by the United States in West Germany. The same year, he resigned from Le Nouvel Observateur. In the 1990s and 2000s, the journals Multitudes
Multitudes
Multitudes is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt...
, EcoRev' which will publish the last article in French "la fin du capitalisme a déjà commencé" and Entropia published his articles.
Gorz was also critical of the Post-Structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
and Postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
of thinkers such as Toni Negri. His point of view was rooted in early Marxist humanist
Marxist humanism
Marxist humanism is a branch of Marxism that primarily focuses on Marx's earlier writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which Marx espoused his theory of alienation, as opposed to his later works, which are considered to be concerned more with his structural...
thinking. Liberation from wage-slavery and social alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
was still one of his goals, even in his later works. He never became an abstract theorist; 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 which were not paid back. As such, he became an advocate of Guaranteed basic income
Basic income
A basic income guarantee is a proposed system of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order...
, independent from "labour." He made such an proposal in his book, Critique of Economic Reason, 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...."
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."
Death
Gorz and his wife, Dorine, committed suicide together in his home in Vosnon (AubeAube
Aube is a department in the northeastern part of France named after the Aube River. In 1995, its population was 293,100 inhabitants.- History :Aube is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790...
). His wife had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and they had already said that neither wanted to survive the other's death. Their bodies were found on the 24th of September 2007 by a friend, both having died after a lethal injection
Lethal injection
Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs for the express purpose of causing the immediate death of the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide...
. 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 the love he had for her.
Books
- La morale de l'histoire (Seuil, 1959)
- Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Seuil, 1964)
- Socialism and Revolution (first published in France in 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 - Galilée, 1975)
- Écologie et liberté (Galilée, 1977)
- Fondements pour une morale (Galilée, 1977)
- The Traitor (1980, first published in 1957 by Le Seuil)
- Farewell to the Working Class (1980 - Galilée and Le Seuil, 1983, Adieux au Prolétariat)
- Paths to Paradise (1985 - Galilée, 1983)
- Critique of Economic Reason (1989)
- Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (1994 - Galilée, 1991)
- Misères du présent, richesse du possible (Galilée, 1997)
- Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
- L'immatériel - Connaissance, valeur et capital (Galilée, 2003, in French)
- Lettre à D. Histoire d'un amour (Galilée, 2006 - extract on-line)
- Ecologia (Galilée 2008)
Essays
- Article : Misreading Gorz.by Finn Bowring - author.se New Left Review. 1996. Page Number: 102
- "The American Model and the Future of the Left". TELOSTELOS (journal)Telos is an academic journal published in the United States. It was founded in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction...
64 (Summer 1985). New York: Telos Press
Audio
- An hommage to the thought of André Gorz broadcast on France CultureFrance CultureFrance Culture is a French public radio channel and part of Radio France. Its programming encompasses a wide variety of features on historical, philosophical, sociopolitical, and scientific themes , as well as literary readings, radio plays, and experimental productions...
: Philosophie en situations : André Gorz, philosophe d'avenir - A portrait of André Gorz was broadcast on France CultureFrance CultureFrance Culture is a French public radio channel and part of Radio France. Its programming encompasses a wide variety of features on historical, philosophical, sociopolitical, and scientific themes , as well as literary readings, radio plays, and experimental productions...
on 20 December 2006, on the radio show Surpris par la nuit.
Interviews
- Interview with Andre Gorz (video in German), 3sat3sat3sat is the name of a public, advertising-free, television network in Central Europe. The programming is in German and is broadcast primarily within Germany, Austria and Switzerland .3sat was established for cultural...
, 5 September 2007 - Interview with Gorz 1983-Farewell to the Proletariat (text in English)
- Entrevistas a Andre Gorz : Clarín y Michel Zlotowski, 1999. Traducción de Cristina Sardoy (in Spanish) - Les périphériques vous parlent, printemps 1998 (in French)
External links
- Appendix to Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Union and Other Left Activists
- Reform and Revolution, Socialist Register, 1968
- « Oser l'exode » de la société de travail dans Les périphériques vous parlent n° 10, printemps 1998, pp. 43–49
- André Gorz French philosopher who pioneered ideas of political ecology, The Guardian, 7 Nov 2007
- Andre Gorz -- RIP, Monthly Review
- Social theorist André Gorz dies, aged 84, World Socialist
- Page dedicated to André Gorz on MultitudesMultitudesMultitudes is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt...
- « L’immatériel » d’André Gorz, by Yann Moulier-Boutang, MultitudesMultitudesMultitudes is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt...
, 2003 - Extract of an article published in March 1974 in Les Temps ModernesLes Temps modernesThe first issue of Les Temps modernes , the most important cultural review of the period after World War II, appeared in October 1945. It was known as the review of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was named for a film by Charlie Chaplin...
- Articles in the journal Streifzüge
- Articles in the journal Ecorev'
- Blog entry concerning the death of Andre Gorz and his wife
- 'My love, I cannot live without you' - On Gorz and his wife after their death
- Finn Bowring, “The Writer’s Malady: André Gorz, 1923–2007” Obituary published in Radical PhilosophyRadical PhilosophyRadical Philosophy is a British academic journal of critical theory and continental philosophy, appearing six times a year. It was established in 1972 with the purpose of providing a forum for the theoretical work which was emerging in the wake of the radical movements of the 1960s, in philosophy...
(March/April 2008) - El suicidio de André Gorz y su mujer (Archived 2009-10-25) (Spanish) artículo del escritor colombiano Germán Uribe
- André Gorz and the Syndicalism in Mil neuf cent, 2008
- Thinking after capitalism with André Gorz in Ecorev', automn 2009
- Kurzarbeit, "living-dead capitalism," and the future of the left article summarizing Gorz's Paths to Paradise