André Gorz and self-limitation

Dorine and Gérard Horst, alias André Gorz towards the end of their lives. Fond André Gorz IME

I'll be "away from my desk" for the next week or so, but before I go, I just wanted to say that the revised, expanded version of André Gorz's text L'Immatériel has finally been published twenty years after it was completed and nineteen years after its author's death.i Artificial intelligence was in its infancy two decades ago, but Gorz (1923-2007) had already understood that capitalism would evolve towards a system in which the source of value would be chiefly immaterial.
But who was Gorz? Born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna, his father, an Ashkenazi Jew, changed his name to Horst in 1930 in an attempt to shield the family from rising anti-semitism. In 1939, Gérard Horst, as he now was, took refuge in Switzerland. His initial training was as a chemical engineer, but he was also passionately interested in philosophy, and in particular in Husserl and Sartre. Having moved to Paris in 1949, and taking the pen-name Michel Bosquet, he became a journalist. He frequented Sartre and became intellectually invested in existentialist Marxism. As a consequence he accorded an important place in his thinking to the issues of alienation and liberation. Indeed, philosophy for Gorz was focused “on the question of alienation and, naturally, on the means of overcoming it: disalienation, liberation, emancipation – which, in a way, are the cornerstones of Gorzian philosophy, either from an individual or a collective vantage point or, better still, as the connection between the two”.ii In his 1959 La morale de l'histoire, he wrote: "My point of departure was always the experience of alienation”.
Writing in post-war France, he identified consumption, or rather the "obligation to consume", as the fundamental alienation of the capitalist society of abundance: "The obligation to consume to keep the economy going, that one has to consume in order to be able to work, and not the other way around" in a socio-economy where the work of millions of workers "is destined to be wasted, has no meaning and remains enslaved to its products."iii
Work and labour were a central interest in Gorz's journalism as in his theoretical endeavours. In the 1970s he became increasingly interested in the function of technology in relation to labour, writing in 1973 that "Capitalist techniques have the political function of perpetuating the dependence of workers, their subordination, their separation from the means and process of production."iv Gorz saw automation not just as a means of enhancing productivity, but as a concern "with assuring capital the maximum power and control over living labour,"  a "concern for power …at least as decisive as the concern for productivity." v
Ungrowth
But, perhaps, Gorz's major contribution to late twentieth-century political debate was his role in foregrounding questions of limits and developing ecological thinking. It was in 1972 that Gorz started to discuss "décroissance", degrowth or ungrowth, and criticized Marx for his materialism confined to an economism that ignores the natural limits to wealth creation and capital accumulation. Convinced, as was Jacques Ellul, by the need for limiting consumption he wrote: "human activity finds its external limit in nature and ignoring this limit provokes a backlash....the consumption of limited resources will inevitably end up exhausting them completely....the issue is therefore not to consume more and more but to consume less and less." vi
For Gorz, humankind was part of the natural order at the time of the fishers and hunters. However, this perceived harmony was because they lacked the technological ability to dominate nature, not because of a philosophical outlook: "It is not because they wished to live in peace with nature that they did not intervene in its cycles but because they did not have the tools that would have allowed such interventions. The domination of nature began as soon as people became sedentary and developed efficient tools."vii Ultimately, humankind's relationship to so-called "Nature" was cultural, or as he put it: "The relationship of humankind to nature is not a natural relationship but always a cultural one, based on metaphysical or religious conceptions....The question that humanity faces - and already did in Antiquity - is that of the cultural self-limitation (self-restraint Selbstbegrenzung) of its needs and projects…. In pre-capitalist societies, this self-restraint was self-evident. It was demanded by the social order....These restrictions were removed by the bourgeois-capitalist revolution, in favour of the "market society", which in reality is a non-society. At present it is a question of restricting again the rights of economic reason by subordinating it to ecological and social goals." ix
Although Gorz is here very close to the work and conclusions of his contemporary Jacques Ellul he makes no reference to him; nevertheless, just like Ellul, he quoted and frequented Ivan Illich. Was this merely the disdain of the Marxist Gorz for the anarchist Ellul?
The proximity of Gorz's self-limitation and Ellul's self-imposition of limits is something I'll return to in future blogposts. For now, I hope this brief summary of Gorz's thought has been of some use.

i André Gorz, L'Immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital. Paris, Gallimard, 2026. 
ii André Gorz: Thinker of Emancipation by Christophe Fourel & Francoise Gollain , 28 August 2014, translated by Susannah Dale. https://booksandideas.net/Andre-Gorz-Thinker-of-Emancipation.html
iii Gorz, La morale de l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, pp.254-255 
iv Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, Paris, Seuil, 1973.
v In Françoise Gollain, Une critique du travail : Entre écologie et socialisme. Suivi d'un entretien avec André Gorz, Paris, La Découverte, 2000.
vi Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
vii Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
ix André Gorz Le fil rouge de l’écologie Entretiens inédits en français, Paris, Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2015

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