Theorizing Deliverance from the Labor- and Commodity-Centered Society

by: André Gorz, Mouvements

Born Gerhard Hirsch in Vienna to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, French philosopher André Gorz, also known as Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet, was a cofounder of "Le Nouvel Observateur," journalist and theorist who above and before all else was a committed humanist.
(Photo: Sydney Morning Herald)

Editor's note: After spending a literal month of Sundays with this text by André Gorz, I have been haunted by his prescience, inhabited by his ideas and charmed by his engaged humanism. Those unfamiliar with the life and thinking of this committed journalist and philosopher will find an excellent précis of his life and work in Chris Turner's obituary for The Guardian and excerpts from the deeply moving "Letter to D. A Love Story" he wrote to his wife Dorine before their joint suicide in 2007 at the "TimesonLine." ljt.

IDEA FACTORY - Philosopher André Gorz returns, in one of the last texts to appear before his death, to the dynamic of financial capitalism and the reasons why we may see guaranteed social income as an opportunity to exit capitalism.     Is the universal allocation of a guaranteed social income (RSG [in French]) compatible with capitalism? If so, is the RSG objective to consolidate capitalist society, even save it? If not, can it undermine the bases of this society or smooth the transition from an economic system based on commercial value towards a fundamentally different system? I continue to encounter these questions since the end of the 1970s. I was convinced from the outset that the global system based on commodity production could not perpetuate itself indefinitely. Since the end of Fordism and the beginning of the information revolution, the system has been working with growing effectiveness towards the destruction of the foundations of its survival. "Les Chemins du Paradis" ["The Roads to Paradise," a 1983 work by Gorz] - a paradise in which, according to Leontief's prediction, people were going to die of hunger because commodity production will employ hardly any workers and will distribute hardly any more capital - was already subtitled, "The Agony of Capital"

 http://www.truthout.org/article/theorizing-deliverance-labor-and-commodity-centered-society