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Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society

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In May 1997 protesters from an unemployed workers' movement occupied the Bank of France and successfully demanded a meeting with the bank's directors. In December protesters occupied the pyramid at the Lourve demanding more welfare and Christmas bonuses for the unemployed. Persistently high unemployment and a well organized protest movement have created a sense of crisis in France. Full employment has gone and it's not coming back.

André Gorz is convinced that capitalism is almost over. In 'its final phase' it is eliminating the need for work, and workers are fighting each other for the few jobs which are left. The answer, according to Gorz, is for us to understand work in new ways. Why, for example, does taking care of children only become work if you're getting paid for it? Gorz wants governments to provide a basic income to every citizen, not a means tested negative income tax (like Milton Friedman suggests) or an allowance which is conditional on social or economic participation (as some communitarians propose), but an unconditional income which is enough to live on comfortably. We can then move to a 'multi activity' society where individuals can choose whether to accept paid work and on what terms. Alternatively they can fill they time with unpaid work in their communities, their families or on personal projects.

Whether Gorz's account works for you will depend on how much of his broader world view you share. Gorz assumes that capitalism is fundamentaly unjust and inhuman and he tends to write about it as if it were a cunning and malevolent dictator. Coming from the Marxian tradition means he often lapses into portraying industrial labor as the paradigm case of 'work' a view which suggests that labor is a commodity and jobs can be easily shared. Gorz also senses a growing economic crisis, unemployment is not a short term phenomenon but an early sign or the end of work as we know it. This perspective might be plausible in France but if you find yourself caught up in America's overheated job market it might be tougher to maintain.

Reclaiming Work presents some challenging new ways to think about work, what it is and why it matters. It offers a utopian vision of the future where having a job is optional and government benefits carry no stigma. It's a fascinating, but not always convincing, perspective on a crisis and a way through it.

The subtext to André Gorz's Work, is: Any valid metric by which the efficacy of politics may be judged, must be eliminated from the minds of the polity.

Thus, Gorz wilfully and misleadingly maligns capitalism, via which, a mere 4% makes it possible for almost everyone else to have a job, beyond the likes of subsistence farming and the associated quality of life, which most of France endured, prior to WW1.

The criticism of the car industry is a consequence of labour, which had come to own capital by way of exchanging labour for money, and relinquished that ownership to a party, such as their pension and/or insurance funds, which then, by investing in the car industry, effectively meant that labour was paying itself to detrimentally maintain that line of work, instead of choosing to direct that capital towards new lines of production, and using some of their savings to carry them over the transition period, and/or utilise the millions of un/underemployed scientists and engineers.