Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology
By Andre Gorz
Verso, 1994. 147 pp., $34.95
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
To say, as the blurb on this book does, that Andre Gorz offers "a vital, fresh perspective for the left" is like a baker selling three-day-old bread as "oven-fresh". Gorz, a radical critic of both capitalism and the revolutionary left, offers up a stale, warmed-over product from the reformist bakery.
The anti-capitalist ingredients of Gorz's recipe are fresh enough; he thoroughly (if not quite splendidly — his prose is terribly turgid) indicts capitalism for its failings. The "economic values of efficiency, profitability and competitiveness" lead to "domination, alienation and violence". People's skills could be better employed, and industry less polluting and less energy-consuming, if production decisions were not made on the capitalist criterion of maximal return on investment. Unemployment is a crippling blight on people's lives but capitalism, which has developed the technical means to abolish deprivation, refuses for the sake of accumulation and competition to redistribute work so all can work less and better.
Gorz still acclaims the "urgent need to get beyond capitalism", but his socialism is "redefined" to little more than a mild plank that could belong to a slightly left-of-centre Labor Party platform (indeed, Gorz gets somewhat excited by the SPD, the German equivalent of the ALP).
Gorz discards so much "baggage" of the traditional revolutionary left (which he often confuses with the Stalinist and statist deformations of socialism) that he is easily blown in the prevailing direction of the capitalist wind. His first paragraph contains the depressingly familiar recantation of former revolutionaries — socialism is dead, its goals out of date, its historical social agent (the working class) as extinct as the dinosaurs.
Gorz argues that the working class is shrinking, both numerically through the replacement of full-time blue-collar employment with part-time service jobs, and in terms of working-class consciousness as workers now no longer define their identity, or sense their power, as a class with interests radically opposed to the employing class. Class struggle has, so his tale of woe goes, been superseded, class antagonism replaced by "multi-dimensional social movements". It is through questioning capitalism as citizens, residents, parents, teachers, students, the unemployed, consumers and tenants that socialism will find its new agenda.
How capitalism will be made to give way to socialism, however, is a question that arises repeatedly, and is repeatedly unanswered, as Gorz ploughs on. How can those who have no economic power end the reign of the economically dominant class? The capitalist class is utterly dependent on the working class continuing to supply its labour. This gives the working class enormous power to wield in the lesser battles and the greater war of the class struggle.
Struggles outside of the industrial sphere are important, of course (and Marxists have always been "tribunes of the people", taking up all the issues that concern, mobilise and politicise ordinary people). But to tackle the big cookies like the overthrow of capitalism, as much as making other struggles more effective, the power of the working class remains vital.
Neither has the working class disappeared; its profile has simply changed. Although this poses un-simple challenges for organising the new McJob workers, it does not present an insuperable obstacle that negates the historical socialist project.
By accepting the political parameters of capitalism, Gorz's "socialism" fizzles into piecemeal change which does nothing to challenge capitalist power. To reduce working hours and provide jobs for the unemployed, he argues, would reduce production and wealth, which can be countered only by a reduction in wages to keep the whole thing cost-neutral for business. Although he proposes a "social cheque" to compensate workers for their reduced earnings, this will have to be financed by indirect taxes on consumption. This is GST territory, and, contrary to his assertion, consumption taxes are not "fiscally neutral" for working people.
Those who wave away class antagonism with the magic wand of post-Marxism also wave away the orientation of making the rich, not the workers, pay for reduced working hours. Old-fashioned class struggle is also far less utopian than Gorz's lame offer of "transverse alliances" which cut across class boundaries. "Each of us knows", he says, "some capitalist or other — a top manager in the chemical industry, for example" who we can make common cause with because they are "racked with doubt about what they are doing".
He does concede that "the managers of the capitalist megamachine won't be converted spontaneously to ecological self-limitation and socialist democracy" but maintains that cultural change and good ideas will win enough of them over.
This is fanciful stuff. Any individual capitalist experiencing a Road-to-Damascus-like conversion will be ruthlessly disgorged from the capitalist class, which will continue on under the imperative of economic competition and profit maximisation.
From the "beyond-class" vision of Gorz we merely get social bandaids, not a cure.