John Keane interviews André Gorz. The interview was published by The New Statesman. View pdf here (also available in Spanish). Transcript below.
Imagine a world in which we take our time at last, free from unnecessary labour. Markets exist, but The Market doesn’t shadow our lives. André Gorz moves us towards a new life.
André Gorz is one of the most influential theorists of the post-industrial era – a frankly utopian thinker whose ideas about the future of sociery liberate possibilities that the Labour Policy Review doesn’t reach. He is best known for the path-breaking book, “Farewell to the Working Class“. Verso publishes his latest book “Critique of Economic Reason“, in November. Here he is interviewed by John Keane, author of “Democracy and Civil Society“.
You caused something of a scandal in 1980 in Farewell to the Working Class by challenging widespread calls to get the jobless back to work and to “restore full employment”. You shocked many people, especially on the political left, with a bold statement: “Keynes is dead! In the context of the current crisis and technological revolution it is absolutely impossible to restore full employment by quantitative economic growth.” Is “full employment” still an impossible goal?
It most definitely is, if by full employment we mean that everyone should work full time, year in year out, from school leaving age till the age of retirement. The main reason is that economic growth tends to be what American economists have called “jobless growth”: you can produce increasing amounts of goods and services with
less and less labour. This means that it’s completely unrealistic to think you can restore full employment by stimulating investment. Of course, it’s also unrealistic to think that you can maintain higher levels of employment by refraining from investing: this would simply price a country out of the world market and make things even worse. To keep its share of the world market-or even its home market-a country has to invest in new technologies, which are both labour-saving and capital-saving. This is why “Keynes is dead”.
So you still hold to your original rejection of proposals for getting the jobless back to work?
I certainly do if that means that everyone should spend his or her whole life working: full-time, life-long work is the most vicious invention of capitalism. I’d rather have all the socially necessary work spread in such a way that everyone can work three days a week or 30 weeks all year and receive their share of the total wealth that is socially produced.
It’s often argued that job growth in services can offset the losses in manufacturing employment. But you’ve argued that this growth is a sign of decadence. Why?
Economists who try to prove that job losses due to computerisation can be offset by enlarging the service sector, in fact advocate a kind of society which I find repugnant: a society based on extreme inequality, where the people for whom the social process of production has no use are to sell their personal services to those who have a comfortable income. This would take us back to the second half of the 19th century, when one sixth of the labour force worked as “servants and domestic employees”. It would create pre-democratic conditions, a kind of “South Africanisation” of society (see André Gorz’s essay, “Making space for everyone”, NSS 25 November 1988, which argues this view).
Thatcherites argue that the present technological revolution will have universally beneficial effects if only it is allowed to proceed unhindered by market “rigidities”, state regulations and trade union demands on wages and working conditions.
The technological revolution was not initiated by private enterprise. In the US, where it originated, it has largely been a spin-off from government financed military and space programmes. In Japan it has developed the most spectacular momentum through voluntaristic economic planning by the policymakers of MITI in coordination with the big banks and industry. Chips, microprocessors, biotechnologies, nuclear power and photovoltaic cells wouldn’t have been developed without publicly funded or subsidised research and development. In Europe, even such industrial giants as Philips and Siemens asked for government subsidies as a condition for developing a 16 megabyte chip. I don’t wantnt to deny the potential creativeness of free enterprise, run by people who imagine, invent and innovate. But these people are either workers or engineers or scientists or artists, and they never have enough capital to develop their ideas. They can’t get the necessary capital from banks because they can’t offer the guarantees of profits financial capital expects.
If you look at the countries in Europe where you have a creative and competitive machine tool industry, what do you find? You find that this industry is made up of hundreds of small enterprises founded by skilled workers or engineers who were helped both technically and financially by their regional governments.
Neo-liberals always reason as if capital were spontaneously invested where it is needed most. This may have been true to a limited extent in conditions of general scarcity. At present capital goes where the highest profits are to be expected, and you just don’t make the highest profits, satisfying people’s most pressing needs. You make them on luxuries and on the kind of fancies for which an effective demand can be
created and manipulated. Last summer the NSS published a fascinating report, “The amazing Aids scam” illustrating this point. If someone invents a cure for Aids or other serious diseases that is cheap, non-toxic and easy to produce without large investments, the pharmaceutical industry is not interested. It prefers to make big profits on large capital outlays. Exchange value and profitability, not use value and effectiveness, are the decisive criteria for capitalist investment.
That’s why neo-liberal policies lead inexorably to social and economic decline. You can see this in the US, not to speak of Britain. Decline is accelerated by the disruption of union control, the breakdown of collective bargaining, and the lowering of real wage levels. Now take a look at the three countries with the highest wage levels
and the most complete union control in Europe, Switzerland, West Germany and Sweden. Wage costs there are 30 per cent higher than in France, 50 per cent higher than in Britain. And yet you have there the highest productivity and cost effectiveness. You can’t have an efficient economy without high wage levels. When you lower or deregulate wages, you enable employers to use cheap, unskilled labour instead
of increasingly efficient machines and well-trained workers. That’s how a country becomes under-developed.
And yet in your writings you aren’t exactly sympathetic to what you call the “aristocracy” of highly-paid, organised workers.
You are right. I strongly dislike these elite workers when they are being turned into privileged and willing allies of modern capital. According to a German trade union study, this privileged stratum of elite workers may eventually comprise one quarter of the working population. Another quarter of the working population will be made up of unskilled or semiskilled industrial and clerical workers holding stable jobs. And half of the working population will be on and off their job continually. This “floating population” will be employed mainly in subcontracting and service industries, either
part-time or full-time. In other words, half of the population won’t have a regular job any longer.
