André Gorz on Less Work and the Revolution

He was wacky but gives us interesting things to think about.

I've been reading way too much André Gorz lately. He was a French proto-green who made a bit of a splash in the early 1980's with *Farewell to the Working Class* and *Paths to Paradise*, followed by *Critique of Economic Reason* almost a decade later.

For Gorz the big change needed was a reduction in working time. He believed this for a number of reasons. Firstly, as a greenie, he did not believe we needed more stuff, and so increased productivity should be devoted entirely to reduced work. Secondly, with modern technology most work has to be narrow in scope and uninteresting, and all jobs, even the minority of more interesting kinds, are inevitably overlayed with hierarchy and people just following orders. So work is a heteronomous rather than an autonomous realm. Thirdly, modern technology needs less and less workers, so people should work less so that others can also work.

According to Gorz autonomous activities are those where individuals, or at most small groups, decide everything, and are often things done purely for their own sake rather than for any end product.

Heteronomous production is needed to cheaply produce necessities and the "convivial tools" and other resources required by autonomous activity. The former is the green "sufficiency". The latter are things like hand tools, sewing machines, telescopes, microscopes, metal detectors, musical instruments and gyms. But given the need to keep a lid on heteronomous production, you wouldn't want to go overboard with this, and anyway you can often share with others.

Some production should move from the heteronomous to the autonomous realm. You would grow your own vegetables, knit your own pullovers, make your own furniture, care for other people's kids, and do your own cleaning and gardening. There would be some exchanging or mutual gifting. You would give away your carrot surplus. If your need for furniture is satisfied but your passion for furniture making is still afire you can always make something for a friend or neighbor. And grandma is bound to knit you something for Xmas.

Less work has a certain appeal. However, I suspect there would be some resistance to this given that people generally are not all that affluent and they also want to save for an uncertain future. You could also find income earning production creeping more and more into the autonomous realm if output from a shrinking heteronomous sector is restricted. In this way you would be expanding the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and deploying less productive technologies.

Particularly remarkable about Gorz's "radical" vision is the absence of any sort of revolution. He doesn't think we need to get rid of the capitalists and totally transform the system of ownership and how we cooperate in production. Nor does he think it is possible, as the proletariat has ceased to be a revolutionary force. Instead we just create a better way of life in our bigger autonomous sphere, while the heteronomous sphere is made tolerable by short hours and various reformist curbs on capitalist awfulness. That's an interesting little brain teaser. Let's have a think.

Is the amount of work to be done going to shrink so dramatically so that we could have a one day week? I think that is some time off unless AI has a really big surprise in store just around the corner. Even developed economies still need quite a lot of growth particularly for infrastructure, housing and R&D. Then the West needs to greatly increase its military spending in the face of the threat from the two fascist tyrannies. (This, by the way, would have been a smaller burden if NATO had simply made the decision to do what was necessary to militarily defeat Russia in its war against Ukraine.) On top of that, a future burst in economic growth in backward regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa will require the developed economies to provide them with a steady flow of plant and machinery. Then further down the track, perhaps when we have left capitalism well behind, we may see a new population growth take-off if we start having more kids as we become wealthier and more in control of how we allocate our time. This would require growth just to stand still.

OK, suppose working time is drastically reduced and people have used the opportunity to become more fully developed and functioning human beings who are making excellent use of their autonomous time. Would such people tolerate the bourgeoisie still running the show and continue to endure capitalist relations of production? Besides, with all that free time you could imagine people devoting some of it to seriously dealing with this question. And with work comprising such a small part of our time we could afford to mess things up a bit as we stumbled up the learning curve.