Reclaiming Work, Beyond the Wage-Based Society

by Gorz, André (1999)

Key Passage

Work now retains merely a phantom centrality: phantom in the sense of a

phantom limb from which an amputee might continue to feel pain.

We are a society of phantom work, spectrally surviving the extinction

of that work by virtue of the obsessive, reactive invocations of

those who continue to see work-based society as the only possible

society and who can imagine no other future than the return ,of the

past. Such people do everyone the worst service imaginable Ey persuading

us that there is no possible future, sociality, life or selffulfilment

outside employment; by persuading us that the choice is

between a job and oblivion; between inclusion through employment

and exclusion; between 'identity-giving socialization through work'

and collapse into the 'despair' of non-being. They persuade us it is

right, normal, essential that 'each of us should urgently desire' what in

actual fact no longer exists and will never again lie within everyone's

grasp: namely, 'paid work in a permanent job', as the 'means of access

to both social and personal identity', as 'a unique opportunity to

define oneself and give meaning to one's life'.

(p.58)

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Turner C

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