Reclaiming Work, Beyond the Wage-Based Society

by Gorz, André (1999)

Key Passage

Never has the ideology of work-as-value been proclaimed, flaunted, reiterated so unashamedly and never has capital's – business's – domination of the conditions and price of labour been so undisputed. Never has the 'irreplaceable', 'indispensable' function of labour as the source of 'social ties', 'social cohesion', 'integration', `socialization', 'personalization', 'personal identity' and meaning been invoked so obsessively as it has since the day it became unable any longer to fulfil any of these functions – nor any of the five structural functions Marie Yahoda identified for it in her famous study of the unemployed of Marienthal in the early 1930s. Having become insecure, flexible, intermittent, variable as regards hours and wages, employment no longer integrates one into a community, no longer structures the daily, weekly or annual round, or the stages of life, and is no longer the foundation on which everyone can base his/her life project. 
(p.56)

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Turner C

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