References for Theme: Gorz Citations
- Gorz, André
- Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism (1982)
(p.2) A society based on mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes. It consists of a growing mass of the permanently unemployed on one hand, an aristocracy of tenured workers on the other, and, between them, a proletariat of temporary workers carrying out the least skilled and most unpleasant types of work.
- Farewell to the Working Class (1982)
(p.1) Work has not always existed in the way in which it is currently understood. It came into being at the same time as capitalists and proletarians. It means an activity carried out: for someone else; in return for a wage; according to forms and time schedules laid down by the person paying the wage; and for a purpose not chosen by the worker. A market gardener 'works'; a miner growing leeks in his back garden carries out a freely chosen activity
- Farewell to the Working Class (1982)
(p.67) For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the strategy and organisational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class...
- Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work (1985)
(p.221) all reductions in public responsibility for social costs accentuate social inequalities and, especially, the visibility of these inequalities: the brutal elimination of the less fortunate by the better-off, the violence of social relations in the struggle for scarce resources (like air, space, light, cleanliness), the obscene privileges of wealth and power
- Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work (1985)
(p.240) The sphere of individual sovereignty is based (…) upon activities unrelated to any economic goal which are an end in themselves: communication, giving, creating and aesthetic enjoyment, the production and reproduction of life, tenderness, the realisation of physical, sensuous and intellectual capacities, the creation of non -commodity use-values (shared goods or services) that could not be produced as commodities because of their unprofitability - in short, the whole range of activities that make up the fabric of existence and therefore occupy a primordial rather than a subordinate place.
- Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work (1985)
(p.32) Confronted with a technological revolution which permits the production of a growing volume of commodities with diminishing quantities of labour and capital, the aims and methods of economic management clearly cannot remain those of capitalism… Automation takes us beyond capitalism.
- Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work (1985)
(p.49) It is industrialisation which has made work into a purely functional activity, separated from life, severed from culture, torn out of the fabric of human existence. No longer is work a way of living and acting together, no longer is the workplace a place of life, work time a reflection of seasonal and biological rhythms.
- Paths to Paradise (1985)
(p.35) This, then, is the fundamental aim of keeping full-time work as the norm - to maintain the relations of domination based on the work ethic.This political preservation of the ideological bases of domination has a high social cost. It leads inevitably to a dualistic division of the active population: on one side, acting as the repository of industrialism's traditional values, an elite of permanent, secure, full-time workers, attached to their work and their social status; onthe other, a mass of unemployed and precarious casual workers, without qualifications ' or status , performing menial tasks. All industrial societies are moving towards...
- Paths to Paradise (1985)
(p.54) there is every reason to suppose that abolition of the permanent compulsion to work, along with the development of family, community, collective and co-operative life and activity, will encourage people to seek socially determined work for the same reasons as 'housebound women', retired people, the unemployed and sons and daughters of peasants seek waged work, however, unrewarding. It provides an escape from the narrowness and stifling conformity of the domestic unit or village community, a way of meeting other people from other places with whom relationships can be freer, less familiar, than with those who see you first and foremost as...
- Critique of Economic Reason (1989)
(p.122) Capitalism has been the expression of economic rationality finally set free of all restraint. It was the art of calculation, as developed by science, applied to the definition of the rules of conduct. It raised the quest for efficiency to the level of an 'exact science' and thus cleared the factors of moral or aesthetic criteria from the field of decision-making. Thus rationalized, economic activity could henceforth organize human behaviour and relationships 'objectively', leaving the subjectivity of. decision-makers out of account and making it impossible to raise a moral challenge on them. It was no longer a question of good...
- Critique of Economic Reason (1989)
(p.66) it is not only a question of winning the loyalty of an elite of workers employers cannot do without and integrating them into the enterprise; it also means cutting this elite off from its class of origin and from class organizations, by giving it a different social identity and a different sense of social worth. In a society cut in two ('dualized'), this elite necessarily belongs to the world of 'the fighters and winners' who deserve a different status from the work-shy masses. The members of this elite of workers will therefore be encouraged to form their own independent trade...
- Critique of Economic Reason (1989)
(p.66) it is not only a question of winning the loyalty of an elite of workers employers cannot do without and integrating them into the enterprise; it also means cutting this elite off from its class of origin and from class organizations, by giving it a different social identity and a different sense of social worth. In a society cut in two ('dualized'), this elite necessarily belongs to the world of 'the fighters and winners' who deserve a different status from the work-shy masses. The members of this elite of workers will therefore be encouraged to form their own independent trade...
- Critique of Economic Reason (1989)
(p.68) The division of society into classes involved in intense economic activity on the one hand, and a mass of people who are marginalized or excluded from the economic sphere on the other, will allow a sub-system to develop, in which the economic elite will buy leisure time by getting their own personal tasks done for them, at low cost, by other people. The work done by personal servants and enterprises providing personal services makes more time available for this elite and improves their quality of life; the leisure time of this economic elite provides jobs, which are in most cases...
- Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
(p.45) It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the 'losers'.
- Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
(p.53) For the unfettered power capital has assumed over labour, society and everyone's lives depends precisely on 'work' – not the work you do, but the work you are made to do – retaining its centrality in everyone's lives and minds, even when it has to a massive extent been eliminated, 'saved' and abolished at all levels of production across the whole of society and throughout the world. Even when post-Fordism, the networked interaction of fractal factories and the 'immaterial' economy are based on a wealth production which is increasingly disconnected from work and an accumulation of profit increasingly disconnected from...
- Reclaiming Work, Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
(p.56) 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 soundisputed. Never has the 'irreplaceable', 'indispensable' function oflabour as the source of 'social ties', 'social cohesion', 'integration',`socialization', 'personalization', 'personal identity' and meaningbeen invoked so obsessively as it has since the day it became unableany longer to fulfil any of these functions – nor any of the five structuralfunctions Marie Yahoda identified for it in her famous study ofthe unemployed of Marienthal in the early 1930s. Having becomeinsecure, flexible, intermittent, variable as regards hours and...
- Reclaiming Work, Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
(p.58) 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...
- Reclaiming Work, Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999)
(p.99) To change society, we have to change 'work' – and vice versa. To change it by divesting it of all its reifying constraints (hours, hierarchy, productivity), which reflect its subordination to capital and which, so far, have determined the essence of what is currently known as 'work'. To change it by reconciling it with a culture of daily life, an art of living, which it would both extend and nourish, instead of being cut off from them. To change it by the way it will be appropriated from childhood onwards, when it will be possible no longer to suffer it as a penance, but to live it as...
- Ecologica (2010)
(p.131) work can now free itself from external necessities, recover its autonomy and turn towards the effectuation of everything that has no price and cannot be bought or sold. It can become that which we do because we really want to do it, and because we find fulfillment in the activity itself as much as in its outcome.
- Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (2012)
(p.55) true work is a historical-fundamental need: the need the individual feels to appropriate the surrounding world, to impress his or her stamp upon it and, by the objective transformation he or she effects upon it, to acquire a sense of him- or herself as an autonomous subject possessing practical freedom.
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