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Notes and Commentary:

NINE THESES FOR

FUTURE LEFT*

by Andr6 Gorz

I

Full employment, like all indefinite growth of commercial production, will have

been just a parenthesis in contemporary economic history. We have entered the era of

the abolition of work. The fact that the crisis of capitalism gives it the form of a

calamity should not lead us to forget that the abolition of work and the liberation of

time are themes as ancient as work itself. In the sense in which we understand it today,

work

did not always exist: it appeared with capitalists and proletarians. Today it

designates an activity that we do (1) for someone else's benefit; (2) in exchange for

pay; (3) according to forms and schedules set by the one who pays us; (4) for ends we

have not chosen ourselves. The truck farmer performs work; the child cultivating

his onions in the yard is performing a free activity.

Today work

1

designates primarily a paid activity. The terms work and job have

become interchangeable: work is no longer something we

do

but something we

have.

We say to look for work or to create work in the same sense as to look for a

job

or to create jobs. ^

A constrained, heterodetermined, heteronomous activity, work is seen by the

majority of those who look for it and those who have it as a sale of time whose object

is of little import: we work at Peugeot or at Boussac and not to make cars or

cloth. We

have

a good job or a bad

one,

however, depending on how much we earn,

and only secondarily according to the nature of the tasks and conditions for

accomplishing them. We can have a good job in the armam ents industry and a

bad job in a health care center.

Work is not liberty, because for both the wage earner and his employer work is just a

means of earning money, not an activity with an end of its own. Of course, all work,

even on the assembly line, presupposes that the workers put something of themselves

into it: if they refuse, everything stops. But this labor necessary for the factory to

function is at the same time negated, repressed by the organization of work. That is

why the idea that we must be liberated

in

work and not only

from

work —

from

work

and not only

in

work — is as ancient as wage labor

itself.

The abolition of work — the

abolition of wage labo r: the two things were synonymous in the heroic age of the labor

movement.

II

Wage labor differs from self-determined activity in the same way that exchange

value differs from use value: work is performed mainly for a wage that devotes its

utility to society and entitles one to receive a quantity of social work equivalent to the

one we have furnished. To work for a wage thus means to work to be able to buy from

society as a whole as much time as we have furnished it.

•Originally published in

Les Temps

Modernes

416 (March 1981), pp. 1541-1554. This is the

preface to

Postindustrial

Socialism, to be published by South End Press (Boston) and Pluto Press

(London) next spring. Translated by David J. Parent.

1. The etymology of the French travail is tripalium: a three-posted apparatus whose

activation subjected its operator to torture.

2.

The point seems linguistically more convincing in French, where the words are

travail

and

emploi. —

Translator s

note.

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Self-determined activity, on the contrary, does not have as its principle aim the

exchange of my time for that of

others:

it is its own end when it is a matter of aesthetic

(i.e., play, including love as play) or artistic activities; when it is a matter of

productive activity it creates objects destined for consumption or use by the same

people who produced them or people close to them.

The abolition of work is a liberation only if it permits the development of

autonomous activities.

To abolish work thus does not mean to abolish the need for effort, the desire for

activity, the love of workmanship, the need to cooperate with others and to make

oneself useful to the collectivity. On the contrary, the abolition of work is just the

progressive, never total, suppression of necessity we find ourselves in of buying our

right to live (practically synonymous with the right to a wage) by selling our time, our

life.

To abolish work and liberate time: to liberate time so that individuals can become

masters of their body, of their own employment, of the choice of their activities, of

their ends, of their works, are exigencies to which the right to be lazy has given an

unfortunately reductive translation. The need to work less does not have as its

meaning an end to rest more, but to live more, which means: to be able to do for

oneself many things tha t money cannot buy and even a par t of those which it currently

buys.

Never has this need been so pressing, for a number of reasons that interact,

reinforcing and legitimating one another.

Ill

Th e most directly perceptible reason is that the abolition of work is a process tha t is

already going on and seems to be accelerating. For each of the three main industrial

countries of Western Europe, independent forecasting institutes have estimated that

automatization will in ten years abolish four million to five million jobs, without a

radical change in the length of work time, in the ends and natu re of activity. Keynes is

dead: in the context of the current crisis and technological revolution, it is absolutely

impossible to re-establish full employment by a quantitative economic growth. The

alternative is rather between two ways of managing the abolition of work: one that

leads to a society of unemployment, the other to a society of free time.

Th e unemployment society

is

the one that is being progressively installed before our

eyes:

on the one hand, a growing mass of the permanently unemployed, on the other,

an aristocracy of protected workers and, between the two, a proletariat of endangered

workers performing the least qualified and least grateful tasks.

The free-time society, however, is emerging only in the interspaces of and as a

counterpoint to the present society: it is based on the principle of everyone working

less and engaging in more self-activity. In other words, socially useful work, divided

among those who want to work ceases being the exclusive or main occupation of each

person: the main occupation can be a self-determined activity or group of activities

performed not for money but for the interest, pleasure or advantage we find in them.

The way of managing the abolition of work and its social mastery are central

political stakes of the coming decades.

IV

The social management of the abolition of work presupposes that we put an end to

the confusion tha t, under the influence of Keynesianism, has arisen between the right

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NOTES AND COMM ENTARY : 93

to work an d (a) the right to a salaried jo b; (b) the right to an in com e; (c) the right to

create use values; (d) the right to have access to the tools needed to create use value.

Th e necessity to distinguish the right to a jo b from the right to an incom e h ad

already been stressed at the beginning of the second industrial revolution (Taylorism).

Like today, it seemed at the time that the reduction of work time required for the

production of necessities called for new distribution mechanisms, independent of

m ark et laws as well as of the law of value : if pro duc ts fabricated with m inim um

quantit ies of work ought to be purchasable, then the means of payment had to be

distribu ted to the popu lation w ithout rega rd to the sales price of work. Ideas like those

of Jac que s Duboin, notab ly, abo ut a distribution money an d a social inc ome

guaranteed for life, continue to circulate under various forms mainly in Northern

Europe.

The social distribution of production in function of needs and not in function of

solvent demand has long been a central demand of the left. It is increasingly ceasing

to be so. T he right to social incom e (or social wages ) in pa rt abolishes forced

wage lab or only in favor of a wage system without work. It replaces or com plem ents,

as the case may be, exploitation with assistance, while perpetuating the dependence,

impotence and subordination of individuals to the central power. This subordination

will be overcome only if the autonomous production of use values becomes a real

possibility for all.

In the future the split between righ t an d left will be based less on the social wage

than on the right to self-production (autoproduction). Th e right of self-production is

basically each base community's own right to produce at least a part of the goods and

services it consumes, without therefore having to sell its work to those who hold the

means of production nor to buy goods and services from others.

Th e right of self-production presupposes the right of access to tools an a their convi-

viability.-'' It is incom patible w ith private or state industrial, com me rcial, an d

professional monopolies. It consequently causes a decrease of commercial production

and of the sale of work in favor of autonomous production based on voluntary

cooperation, exchange of services or personal activity.

4

Self-production will develop in all fields where the use value of time turns out to be

greater than its exchange value: i.e., where what one can do for oneself in a

determ inate t ime is worth more tha n w hat one could buy by working for a wage du ring

that t ime.

Only in combination with effective possibilities of self-production will the liberation

of time succeed in overcoming ca pitalist logic, in withering away the wag e system an d

market relations. Effective possibilities of self-production can evidently not exist for all

without a policy of collective arrangements aimed at supporting their existence.

IV(b)

Au tonom ous activity must not be confused with dom estic wo rk. As Ivan Illich has

shown,

5

the notion of domestic work arose only with a type of sexual division of labor

proper to individualism: industrial civilization locked woman in domestic tasks which

were not directly productive so that the man could spend all his waking hours and

S. As opposed to programmed tools, Ivan Illich gives the name convivial to tools which

favor each person's aptitude to pursue his aims in his own inimitable way.

4.

On the importance of voluntary association in libertarian communist thought, see Claude

Berger, Marx, VAssociation ouvriere, Vanti-Linine, Vers Vabolition du salariat (Payot, 1974).

5. La Troisieme Dimension de la Te chn olo gic in Co-Evolution I (Spring 1980), B.P. 43

75661 Paris Cedex 14.

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94 : TELOS

energy in the factory or mine. The woman's domestic activity therefore ceased being

auton om ous and self-determined: i t was both the condition and the su balte rna te

appendage to the male's wage labor, which itself was considered essential.

The idea that the wage worker should be relieved of domestic tasks, regarded as

base, while wage labor is supposedly noble — this idea is typical of capitalist ideology

which carries it to absurd lengths: it does not take into consideration the object,

meaning and nature of an activity but only i ts wage remuneration. It leads to

considering the housewife's activity vile, and this same activity noble when it is

performed for others and for pay, as in a nursery, on an airplane, or in a night club.

To the extent that working time diminishes in favor of free time, heterodetermined

time tends to become secondary and autono mou s activities dete rm inan t. A revolution

of customs and an overturning of the system of values thus tend to confer a new

nobility to the family or housekeeping activities and to abolish the sexual division of

tasks. Th is abolit ion is well advanced in Protestant countries. T he road to wom en's

liberation is not via wage remuneration for domestic work

6

but via an association and

a cooperation among equals who, within the family and the broadened family, share

all tasks both inside and outside the home and if necessary take turns at various roles.

V

The abolition of work is neither acceptable nor desirable for all those who identify

with their work, making it the center of their lives and who can or hope to be able to

realize themselves in it. Th e social subject of the abolition of work will thus no t be the

stratum of professional workers who are proud of their trade and aware of the real or

potential power it confers on them. For this stratum, which always was hegemonic in

the organized labor movement, the appropriation of work, of the means of work and

of power over production remain the central strategic objectives. Automation, to the

extent that it undermines the workers' class power over production and the possibility

of identifying with work (or even of identifying work itself) is perceived by the class of

professional workers as a direct attack on their class. Their main concern is to repel

this atta ck , not to deflect its m ean s toward ends contr ary to their ass ailants'. T h e

defense of work and of its qualification, not the control of the mode of its abolition,

will thus be the central concern of traditional labor unionism.

This very thing condemns it to the defensive.

The abolition of work is, on the contrary, a central objective for those who,

whatever they have learned to do, feel that their work will never be a source of

person al enjoyment for them , nor the main con tent of their life — as long, a t least, as

work will be synonymous with fixed hours, predetermined tasks and limited skills,

assiduous toil for mo nth s or years, the im possibility of carrying on their own activities,

etc. Th ese allergies to work , in Rousselet's exp ression ,

7

ought not to be considered

m ar gin al. It is not just a fringe, bu t the actua l or virtual majority of the actively

em ploye d who consider their work to be a fastidious necessity in which it is impossible

to become fully involved.

This non-involvement is due in part to the divergent evolution of the cultural level,

on the one hand, to the type of qualification required by the majority of occupations,

on the other: occupations tending to become intellectualized (i .e. , to appeal to

me ntal operations more tha n to m an ua l ones) yet without stimulating or fulfil ling

6. Which would lead merely to replacing the housewife's alienation with that of the domestic

servant, the wife's sexual service with that of the prostitute.

7. Jean Rousselet, L AUergie au travail (Le Seuil, 1974).

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intellectual capacities. Hence, the impossibility for the workers to identify with their

work and to feel that they belong to the working class.

So, I call this stratum which experiences work as an external obligation by which

one loses one's life in earning a living, a non-class of non-workers ; its aim is not

the appropriation but the abolition of work and the worker. And this is what makes it

a carrier of the future: the abolition of work has no other possible social subject than

this non-class. I do not imply by this that it is already capable of taking the process of

abolishing work under control and of producing a society of liberated time. But I say

that the latter will not be able to be produced without or against it, bu t only by or with

it. The objection according to which we cannot see how this non-class would take

power is irrelevant: its obvious incapacity to take power proves neither that the

working class itself is capable of it (if that were the

case,

this would be known) nor that

power ought to be taken, rather than reduced and controlled, if not abolished.

VI

To consider the non-class of non-workers as the potential social subject of the

abolition of work does not relieve one of an ideological or ethical choice: the choice is

not between abolishing work

or

re-establishing complete trades in which each person

can find happiness. The choice is between the liberating and socially controlled

abolition of work or its oppressive and anti-social abolition.

For it is impossible to reverse the general (social, economic and technological)

evolution in order to reinstate complete trades entirely and for everyone, assuring to

autonomous teams of workers the mastery of production and the product, along with

personal enjoyment. The personal character of work is necessarily blunted to the

extent that the production process is socialized. Its socialization necessarily entails a

division of labor, a normalization and standardization of

tools,

procedures, tasks and

knowledge. Even if, following the current tendency, relatively small and decentralized

units of production replace the industrial mastodons of the past; even if the

brutalizing repetitive tasks are abolished or, when they cannot be, are divided among

the entire population, socially necessary work will never be com parable to the activity

of master craftsmen or

artists:

a self-determined activity of which each person or team

sovereignly defines the modalities and the object, the inimitable personal touch that

puts one's particular m ark on the product. The socialization of production necessarily

implies that the microprocessors or the ball bearings, the sheet iron or the m otor fuels

be interchangeable no matter where they were produced, and thus that work as well as

machines have interchangeable characteristics everywhere.

This interchangeability is, moreover, a fundamental condition for the reduction of

the duration of time and the distribution of the necessary social work among the whole

population. The proposition, as old as the labor movement, that tends to obtain a 20

percent reduction of work time by hiring a corresponding number of supplementary

workers, implicitly supposes the interchangeability of workers and their work. If 1,000

people working 32 hours can do the work for which 800 people working 40 hours

would be enough, this work must not require irreplaceable personal qualities of those

who do it. On the contrary, it is the employers who are opponents of a reduction of

working time who declare it to be technically impossible under the pretext that there

are not enough workers with the required qualities.

The depersonalization, standardization and division of labor are thus at once what

permits the reduction of the working time and what makes it desirable: each person's

work

can

be reduced because others

can

do it instead of one, and it

ought

to be

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reduced so that I can have different, more personal activities.

In other words, the heteronomy of work, a consequence of its socialization and its

multiplied production, is also what makes possible and desirable the liberation of

time , the expansion of auton om ous activities. To believe tha t self-ma nage me nt can

make work complex, personal and enjoyable for everyone is a dangerous illusion

VII

In every complex society, the nature, modalities and object of work are, to a great

extent, determined by necessities over which individuals and teams have but a feeble

grip . Th ey can , of course, succeed in self-manag ing the pro duc tion plants, in

self-determining the working conditions, co-determining the conception of machines

and the definition of tasks. But as a whole these remain no less heterodetermined by

the social process of production, i.e., by society insofar as it itself is a big machine.

W orke rs' control (erroneously called workers' self-man agem ent ) in reality consists

only in self-determining the modalit ies of hetero determ ination : the workers appo rtion

and define their tasks within the framework of a division of labor pre-established on

the level of the whole society. They do not themselves define this division of labor nor,

for example, the manufacturing standards for ball bearings. They can eliminate the

mutilating character of work but not confer on it a character of personal creation.

This kind of alienation is inherent not only in the capitalist relations of production,

but in the socialization of the production process

itself:

in the functioning of a

complex machine-like society. This alienation can be mitigated in its effects but it

cannot be abolished.

However, it does not have just negative consequences as long as its insurmountable

reality is recognized. And to recognize its reality means above all to recognize that

there cannot be complete coincidence of the individual with his social work, and that,

inversely, social work cannot always be a personal activity which the individual enjoys

com pletely. Socialist mo rality, by de m an din g tha t everyone com mit himself totally

to his work and confuse it with his personal ends, is oppressive and totalitarian in its

root. It is a morality of accumulation, symmetrical with the bourgeois morality of the

heroic age of cap ital. It identifies m orality with the love of work while at the same time

depersonalizing work by its very industrialization and socialization: it thus demands a

love for depersonalization, i.e., the sacrifice of

oneself.

It is opposed to the very idea of

the free developmen t of each person as end a nd co ndition of the free develop men t of

all (M arx ). It run s coun ter to the mo rality of liberation of our times, which o riginally

dominated the labor movement .

T he reconc iliation of individuals with work is m ad e possible by the rec ognition tha t,

even subjected to workers' control, work is not and must not be the essential thing in

life. It must be just one of its poles. The liberation of individuals and of society, as well

as the re duc tion of the wage system and of ma rket relations, is mad e possible by giving

preponderance to autonomous activit ies over heteronomous ones.

VIII

W he n I speak of the non-class of non-workers as the (potential) social subject for the

abolition of work, I do not claim to replace Marx's working class by a different class

invested with the same type of historical and social mission. The working class, in

Marx or in the Marxists, had (or has) a theological character by the fact that it is a

subject tha t transce nds its m em be rs: it ma kes history an d society throu gh them bu t

without their knowledge. It is the subject idea by which the workers are thought in

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their truth; it is unthinkable by them in its subject-unity, just as the organism is

unthinkable by the thousands of cells that compose it or as God is unthinkable by his

crea ture s. Th a t is why it has been able to have its priests, its pro phe ts, its martyrs , its

churches, its popes and its wars of religion.

T he non-class of those refractory to the sacralization of work, on th e co ntrary , is not

a social subject. It has no trans cen den tal unity or mission, an d consequently no

holistic conception of history and society. It is thus, so to speak, without religion or

God , without other reality th an t ha t of the people who com prise it: in short, it is not a

class, bu t a non-class. An d precisely for that reaso n it has no pro phe tic p ow ers: it does

not proclaim a subject-society by which the individuals will be integrated and saved;

on the contrary it reminds the individuals of the necessity to save themselves and to

define a society compatible with their autonomous existence and their ends.

Th is is the property of nascent social mo vem ents: like the pea sant m ovem ent, the

Protestant movem ent and the labor movem ent, the movem ent of people who refuse to

be just workers has a liber tarian c ore : it negate s ord er, p ower, th e social system, in t he

name of everyone's irrescindable right to his own life.

IX

This right, certainly, can be affirmed only if it corresponds to a power that the

individuals draw not from th eir integration into society, but from their own existence,

i.e., the ir autonom y. It is the construction of this auto nom ous power t ha t defines the

nascent movement in its present phase. Scattered, composite, it is by its nature and

its aims, refractory to organ ization, pro gra m m ing , th e delegation of functions,

integ ration into a constituted political force. T ha t is its strength as well as its weakness.

Its streng th, for a different society, perm itting new spaces of auton om y, ca n be bo rn

only if individuals have first invented and put into practice a new autonomy and new

relations. Every change of society thus presupposes the extra-institutional work of

cultural and ethical change. No new liberty can be conceded from above, by

institutional power, unless it has already been taken and practiced by the citizens

themselves. In the movement's nascent phase, the citizen's distrust of institutions and

established parties reflects essentially its refusal to pose the problems in the habitual

forms and to consider as solely decisive the debates on the better management of the

state by the parties and of society by the state.

Its weakness, however, for the spaces of autonomy conquered from the existing

order will be marginalized, enclaved or subordinated to a dominant rationality unless

there is a transform ation and a reconstruc tion of society, its institutions, a nd its laws.

Th e pre pond eranc e of autonomo us activities over heteronomous work is inconceivable

in a society in which the logic of the marketability, profitability and accumulation of

capi tal remains dominant .

This preponderance is thus not just an ethical and existential stake but a political

one.

Its realization presupposes that the movement not merely open, by people's

practice, some new spaces of autonomy, but that society, its institutions, its

technologies and its laws be made compatible with this expansion of the sphere of

auto nom y. T he tran sform ation of society in accord with the aims of the move me nt will

in no way be an automatic effect of the expansion of the movement

itself.

It

presupposes a specific, i.e., a political, thought, action, and will. The fact that the

post-capitalist, post-industrial, post-socialist society

8

which is aimed for here cann ot

8. In the Marxist definition, socialism is the stage of transition to communism. During this

transition, the development and socialization of productive forces are completed, and the wage

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and must not be integrated, regulated and programmed to the same degree as those

that preceded it, this fact does not dispense one from posing the question of the

functioning, the juridical bases and the balance of powers of this type of society.

Non-integrated, diverse, complex, pluralist, libertarian, it is nonetheless a society

among other imaginable ones and needs to be realized by a conscious action.

I do not know what form this action and the political force capable of leading it can

take.

I know only that this political force is necessary and that its relations with the

movement will be and ought to be as conflicting and tense as the relations between the

(anarcho-syndicalist) trade union movement and the workers' parties have been. The

subordination of one to the others has always resulted in the bureaucratic sterilization

of both, especially when the parties confuse their political act with their control of the

state apparatus.

I have deliberately left this question open and suspended. In the current phase, one

must dare ask questions to which one does not have the answer and to raise problems

whose solution still remains to be found.

system is retained and even expanded. The abolition of the wage system (as the dominant form of

work, at least) and of market relations is supposed to be realized later, with communism.

In the industrially developed countries a stage beyond socialism has already been reached: the

current po litical task, as proclaimed already in 1969 in // M anifesto, goes beyond socialism, i.e.,

to communism as originally defined.

The use of these ideas has become difficult because of the perversion and demonetization of

socialism and communism by the regimes and parties that claim to represent them . T he crisis of

Marxism, which extends even to language

itself

must, however, not lead one to renounce

thinking capitalism, socialism, their crisis and what comes afterward. The conceptual

instruments of Marxism remain irreplaceable and to reject them in

toto

stems from an attitude as

infantile as to consider

Capital

to be revealed tru th, despite its expansion and its incompleteness.

NARCISSISTIC POLITICS IN ATLANTA

byAdolphReedJr .

Atlanta has recently become a focal point of national and international attention

because of a mysterious series of murders of local black children. Reporters have come

from around the world and visitors to the city immediately press Atlantans for news,

inside dope or the latest updates as they express their sympathy and solidarity. The

sentiments no doubt are genuine and the outpouring of befuddled, curious concern is

understandable, especially given the apparent senselessness of the killings. However,

this phenomen has another side beyond the personal and collective tragedy of the

murders themselves.

Indeed, the Atlanta child murders can serve as a micrological window on several

important trends in contemporary American life. These tendencies can be illuminated

by discussing four discrete but related themes. These issues are: (1) the increasingly

consolidated stratification of the black community and the growing subordination of

those Afro-American strata who exist as clients of the social-administrative apparatus;

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gorz_a1981