In the summer of 1967, I had the good fortune of meeting André Gorz in his small office in Paris. His 1964 book, Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme, had just been published in English as Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, and it was already becoming an influential text within New Left circles in the US. New Leftists were particularly influenced by Gorz’s discussion of an emerging new working class, as well as his formulation of revolutionary reforms, which provided an effective anti-capitalist roadmap for envisioning transformative change. Gorz’s subsequent work during the 1970s about ecology and environmentalism, some of it under his journalist pen name Michel Bosquet, also helped shape the New Left critique not just of capitalism but of the more exclusive Marxist focus on an economy ‘independent both from nature and from the other dimensions of society,’ as Gorz biographer Willy Gianinazzi characterized Gorz’s views at that time. Yet while Gorz has remained influential in Europe, his challenging ideas and insights about such issues as class, work, ecology, and consumption have not received the attention they deserve in the US and the UK.
It is with that gap in mind that we should welcome the English publication of André Gorz: A Life. Translated from French by Chris Turner and published by Seagull Press in 2022 shortly before the 100th anniversary of Gorz’s birth, Gianinazzi, a Swiss-born French historian who has written about radical and syndicalist movements, has provided his own road map of Gorz’s life and work. Born in Austria in 1923 to a wealthy Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Gorz, named Gerhardt Horst at birth, never identified with his Austrian roots. After moving to Switzerland and attending the University of Lausanne, Gorz arrived in Paris in 1946, a place he characterized as ‘the center of the world’ with its post-World War II intellectual and political ferment.
Already by this period, the 25-year-old Gorz was a voracious reader. He immediately immersed himself in Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and acquired a breadth of friendships, and intellectual and political acquaintances among Communists, neo-Marxists, Existentialists, Psychoanalytic theorists, and various other radical thinkers. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became a journalist, writing in part for more conservative publications to earn a living.
A disciple as well as colleague of Sartre’s, Gorz became a leading existentialist. In the 1950s, he assumed the editorship of Les Temps Modernes, the flagship existentialist-oriented journal founded by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Gorz’s first book, The Traitor, is a semi-autobiographical depiction of Gorz’s own journey from a ‘state of absolute subjective misery’ rooted in social and political alienation, to political commitment and self-affirmation. Published in 1958 with a long laudatory introduction by Sartre, it became Gorz’s most popular book and cemented his reputation as a leading left-wing public intellectual. Part journalist, part theoretician, Gorz became fully embedded in change-oriented politics, a political and intellectual hybrid who stretched boundaries. He was also a bit self-effacing, not seeking the spotlight but fully engaged in the major debates about Marxism, work and class, socialism, environmentalism and expertise, and growth and consumption.
Gianinazzi’s book is organized chronologically and he takes the reader through those multiple writings, political and intellectual encounters, and the debates and dialogues Gorz had with both well-known and lesser known contemporaries such as Sartre, Serge Mallet, Herbert Marcuse, Alan Touraine, Edgar Morin, Rudolph Bahro, and many other activists, ideologues, organizers, and radical movement participants and thinkers. Though a complex writer, Gorz was not an academic. By residing outside the university system, he was better able to relate to a younger generation of activists and thinkers who were themselves operating outside the university world. His ideas remained grounded in contemporary events and the challenges of contesting an entrenched capitalist order as well as the possibilities for a different type of future. His was a practical as well as visionary approach who shared the May ’68 idea of ‘power to the imagination.’
Much of the latter half of Gianinazzi’s book is focused on Gorz’s embrace of the concepts of degrowth and redefining work. In Reclaiming Work, a short volume by Gorz that was translated into English in 1994, he argued that work was no longer identity-creating, a concept that had implications for traditional Marxist ideas about working-class consciousness and agency. While pointing to the expanding universe of work precarity and the exploited insecure worker, he sought to revolutionize the idea of work as ‘a mode of life one chooses, a mode that is desirable, one that is regulated and valued by society, a source of new culture, freedoms and sociality, establishing the right of all to choose the discontinuities in their working lives without experiencing a discontinuity in their income.’ Similarly, Gorz identified continuing hypergrowth as fundamental to the capitalist system. While not fully connected to the ‘degrowth’ movement, Gorz argued that two of its primary tenets – unconditional, universal basic income and a major reduction of working hours without loss of income – were connected to a radical environmental perspective, and that precarity, hypergrowth, and consumption were integral to a capitalism-generated environmental and climate crisis.
Gianinazzi also notes that two of Gorz’s most popular books – his first and his last among more than a dozen – were also the most deeply personal as well as political. The Traitor spoke of his early years that led to his political and personal journey, while in Letter to D, Gorz wrote about his 60 years of marriage, collaboration, and love for his partner, Doreen Keir. Letter to D was published in 2007 shortly before their death by a joint arranged suicide, influenced in part by Doreen’s long, debilitating illness. What is striking about this final act is that Gorz, literally just days before their death, was still corresponding with others, commenting on issues and ideas. It is that continuous engagement with ideas that are still relevant and powerful expressions about transformation that also represent Gorz’s legacy, and that Gianinazzi’s biography helps us witness.