Gorz’s utopia: changes in industrial structure
In the early 1970s, after analyzing changes in the industrial structure and the composition of the labor market in the US.UU. During the preceding decade, Daniel Bell predicted the advent of post -industrial society in countries with advanced economies. Starting from the classical tripartition of the economy in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, it observed a growing importance of the tertiary sector or services sector in GDP and in the labor market indicated by a gradual transit from the industrial society, characterized by workManual, towards a posindustrial society dominated by the intellectual work of professional and technical cutting. This change was determined by three main factors: the rapid increase in the services sector and the gradual decline of traditional industry, the centrality of technical and scientific knowledge in the production process and the emergence of a new technical class of workers.
Bell’s prognosis begins four decades of posindustrial narratives and does not go unnoticed by André Gorz, who applies it to the analysis of social classes to decree the crisis of the labor and Marxism movement. The cause of this crisis is that "the development of capitalism has produced a working class that, for the most part, is unable to take the domain of the means of production and whose directly conscious interests do not agree with a socialist rationality";On the contrary, their interests and capacities are functional to capitalist rationality.
Gorz no longer observes a class capable of taking charge of the socialist project. Work does not involve empowerment;Within the framework of capitalist production relations, workers’ sovereignty is reduced to union power and the development of productive forces has not favored that work becomes a personal activity or that its organization is lived as the result of voluntary cooperationBetween individuals. It is the failure of the Marxist utopia of the coincidence of work and personal activity: we cannot translate the functional division of work in voluntary social collaboration. This entails the loss of the yearning for liberation at work and, on the contrary, the proliferation of the desire to release work. Here is the key moment for the announced end of the proletariat: "With the possibility of identifying at work, the feeling of belonging to a class disappears". Rejecting work means rejecting the traditional strategy of the labor movement.
To this we must add the consequences of technological change in employment. According to Gorz, technological development is in the sense of a certain marginalization of work, since we produce more and better with a lower employment of labor. The work society, the one that has work as a axis of social integration, is in crisis, and not because there are no things to do but because the amount of human work necessary for social reproduction decreases quickly. This metamorphosis leads us to a duration of the company protected in a new ideology of work that consists in the appropriation of the values of the utopia of work by capital: the control of the means of production, the development of individual capacities inThe workplace, the assessment of the trade and professional ethics. The meritocratic discourse and the image of the company as a place of personal fulfillment are ideological devices with which capital breaks class solidarity and the collaboration of the labor elite is won, with well -paid jobs, stable and socially recognized, in front of aGreat mass of workers condemned to precariousness and unemployment, the already classic reserve army.
This situation requires, according to Gorz, a paradigm shift that goes through freeThey cannot consider work as their main activity: «The product of the decomposition of the old society based on work». To light this new non-Class, the working class must refuse itself, reject the capitalist production relations and transform the productive structure according to autonomous demands. The possibility of refusing is already implicit in the idea of Marx’s proletariat, but a cultural revolution that indicates the sense of such denial is needed, that is, a transmutation of the dominant values in capitalist society. We must free the work of productivist ideology and break the impossible utopia from a full -time exciting work for all replacing it with a new utopia of the time -released society.
The fight for this new utopia demands to recover the old tools of the labor movement – the solidarity union and the rejection of the competition – and go beyond the salary claims, functional to economic rationality, to oppose claims related to intensity, durationand the organization of work, which do have subversive potential. This depends on the search for a different rationality that is subtracted from the domain of prevailing economic rationality, since «the central problem of capitalist society, and the central envy of its political conflicts, has been, from the beginning, that of thelimits in which economic rationality must be applicable ». This implies seeking formulas of redistribution of work that reduce its duration, combat paneconomism that subordinates all activity, especially work, technical-economic rationality and promote values outside the performance, competition and discipline, such as reciprocity, tendernessand gratitude, linked to traditionally considered secondary activities, such as care and creation, and subordinated to productive work.
Gorz’s utopia seeks to establish a new time economy, a new relationship between working time and the available time in which work is one more activity among others within a life project characterized by multiactivity. Therefore, it is not about monetizing the growing available free time, transforming so far free and autonomous activities into new jobs, but about reducing working time to gain life time. In short, it is about recovering individual sovereignty prioritizing the framework of activities that constitute the fabric of life to the detriment of this activity privileged by the productivist ideology called work.
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