Andre Gorz: The End of the Working Class?

The French philosopher Andre Gorz is famous for his thesis that contemporary work practices herald the end of the 'working class' as traditionally conceived. In a number of texts - most famously in 'Farewell to the Working Class' - Gorz gives a historical overview of the meaning of 'work' and shows how its meaning has changed from one historical period to another. He shows that with the emergence of capitalism, work came to take on an increasingly 'abstract quality' as it became 'paid activity'.

However, this form of abstract, 'quantifiable', work - the work of the wage-labourer - is no longer a useful characterisiation of post-industrial labour in his view. What the current situation needs rather is a redefintion of 'work'. Gorz, like his contemporary Daniel Bell (Bell, 1976) sees the so-called 'computer revolution' has having very profound implications for the structure of modern societies and for the very meaning of work. In his view, computers will increasingly displace the unskilled and semi-skilled worker because these simple work functions are now easily automated. Gorz argues that the computerisation of production processes is leading us into a post-industrial society where 'work' will increasingly come to mean something other than its traditional defintion as as 'wage-labour'.

Gorz is fully aware of the dark side to all this. Unless we organise society according to different principles new information technologies will lead to mass redundancies and the emergence of an increasingly pauperised section of society. In order to counter these potentially disasterous developments, Gorz argues for what he calls a politics of time. Here, Gorz is arguing that contemporary radical thinkers should celebrate the labour-saving potential of new technologies and see these technologies as liberating individuals from the dull necessity of work. Individuals, so long as they are properly resourced (perhaps through an enhanced benefit system) can then use their time for the purpose of self-development.

This, Gorz believes, will lead to a healthier and happier society. Industrial society gave the worker affluence but no time. Post-industrial society gives the (now-ex) worker time but no affluence. This finally allows the working class to achieve its traditional political goal freedom from work. However, the challenge today is to make sure that indivduals put this freedom to some useful social purpose.

Gorz has been criticised for being a bit of a romantic. His idea that 'work' can now be replaced by 'self-development' seems to assume that we are all capable of becoming accomplished novelists, piano players or chefs in our leisure time. Not all of us may be able to 'self-actualise' in this way. Some may require institutions to help them forge a sense of self and work may be one such institution.

Neil Turnbull



Further reading

Gorz, A. (1982) 'A Farewell to the Working Class' London: Pluto
Gorz, A (1985) 'Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work' London: Pluto
Gorz, A (1989) 'A Critique of Economic Reason' London: Verso

Illich, I (1978) 'The Right to Useful Umemployment and It Professional Enemies' London: Boyars

Lodziak, C (1995) 'Manipulating Needs: Capitalism and Culture' London: Pluto.

Slavoj Zizek - The most dangerous philosopher in the West.

It is currently the London Literature Festival and as part of this, the Southbank Centre is staging a series of lectures and readings by eminent, contemporary figures in literature. On the bill last night was a talk by Slavoj Zizek centered around his latest book Living in the End Times, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend.

Slavoj delighted an audience -that seemed to me to consist of more than the aging, socialist academics I had suspected- with the mix of pop-culture references and deep analytical thinking that has become his trade mark. I might even call him a philosopher come stand-up but I couldn’t say how he would respond to the title.

The session consisted of a brief lecture regarding the inevitability of communism, and an interview conducted by an equally well respected philosopher A.C Grayling. During his lecture Slavoj made use first of the song Climb Every Mountain, sung by the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music to encourage Maria to follow he heart and love Baron VonTrapp, and the audience cheered as he showed up the hypocrisy of the songs sentiments. The same audience then sat quietly as he explained our grim fascination with fascism by means of the scene from Cabaret where the Hitler Youth sing inspirationally with a crowd in a beer hall. He said that our applause was mis-directed and that we ought to more strongly agree with sentiments of the second song as it is not intrinsically fascist but simply appropriated by fascism because it is beautiful.

During the interview A.C Grayling asked of Zizek “How can communism succeed? Look at the Soviet Union.” and Zizek’s answer lasted at least 40 minutes and took a variety of forms. In short though, he seemed to be talking not so much about an economic communism but instead a sort of cultural communism that is born of capitalism and the irony of postmodernism and consumerism. He claimed that history is no longer on the side of the academic because it encourages a relativist point of view, and as such socialism as it has existed will not come to fruition, but that there may be space for something new.

I’ve read some Zizek and not understood a lot of it, and to be honest last-night’s lecture didn’t clear many things up. However it is exciting to here someone talk about the future and if I can say anything about the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek it would be that it is in the future that he has made his home.


Rob Humphries

Schopenhauer 2: an old conundrum

Shortly after the previously discussed passage, Schopenhauer goes on to consider the human condition in comparison to that of the animal, concluding amongst other things, that the ability to reflect and awareness of the self is what distinguishes human from purely animal and gives us our unique capacity for suffering. This capacity stems partly from our awareness of death, but paradoxically, also confers intensities of pleasure and happiness denied to "brute" animals.

Of course, peace of mind is the price that these intensities exact upon us, and is this a price worth paying? Schopenhauer thinks so (taking us back to the old paradox of the happy pig/unhappy Socrates conundrum and its varients) but as he ruefully concludes: 'The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate. But precisely because this is so it appears in one respect truely sagacious compared with us, namely in its peaceful, untroubled enjoyment of the present: its obvious composure often puts to shame our own frequently restless and disorientated condition'.
Does our capacity for reflection deny to us the ability to enjoy the present moment (another age-old, yet curiously perennial philosophical question?) And is it a misdirection to believe that contentment should even be sought there, as the Stoics so vehemently asserted?
Ruth

Schopenhauer 1: Boredom is the true threat to happiness?

In On the Suffering of the World , Schopenhauer argues that suffering is intrinsic and, even more than this, crucial to human existence. Without what he terms "Work, worry, toil and trouble", human life would have no purpose since we are designed to constantly struggle. Without this, we would either collapse through boredom or else create new and ever more harmful distractions.
In a particularly memorable passage concerning the nature of Utopia, he writes:

'Imagine this race transported to Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without delay and keep one another without any difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses'.

At first glance, this may appear counter-intuitive, but does Schopenhaur have a point here? Does work, which for him is at the opposite pole of human existence from boredom, save us from self-destruction? Have we evolved to the point where the lives that we lead ideally suit our disposition to suffering, despite the fact that we believe this not to be the case?
Something to think about as we continue to seek distractions from what many have argued to be the disease of our age: boredom...
Ruth

Knowledge and the Public Good

Some key questions for us to reflect on over the summer

What matters most philosophically, knowledge or the way that is attained? For example, should we use the results of Nazi experiments on humans at massively sub zero temperatures even though these results may be perfectly valid and possess and social/commercial utlity? The current consensus is that we shouldn't and the research should proceed ethically. But what does it mean for scientific research to proceed ethically?

More generally, what is the value of scientific knowledge if it causes harm?

If we see the telescope as the basis for the intercontinental ballistic missile, do we need to revisit the myth of 'Galileo the hero' in this context?

Neil Turnbull

Terry Eagleton on Football

Perhaps in line with Neil's last post on fetishism, and given that a load of footballers are interrupting vuvuzuela concerts in South Africa, I thought that it would be interesting to provide a link to Terry Eagleton's recent article. Eagleton argues in a somewhat conventional sense that football is a distraction from political urgencies. In essence, the old Marxist argument, football is the opium of the people. One interesting aspect of his analysis is that he suggests that football as a spectacle adopts carnivalesque aspect which substitutes for the contemporary
dearth of symbolism and and ritual. Furthermore, he rather cheekily suggests that football fans are the true academics of the world. Involved in the everyday,yet holding the aptitude to discuss with an in depth rigour to rival the greatest of scholastic philosophers the various benefits, evils, intricacies of strategy, grace, morality and ability of the footballing world. I can't say that I can agree with Eagleton's call to ban football, provocatively and all as it is put. I think that if one were to consider football was immoral, we would also have to abandon a whole other raft of practices which exhibit similar characteristics, popular music, religion, politics, art and so on. I think the reason football, or sport in general fascinates us, is that it is truly philosophical in its own kind of way. The vagaries of Mourinho's relationship to Ferguson and the micro-politics which surrounds it is as compelling as any political event. But the point is that football equally follows the same trajectory as other human activities. It offers a rich tableu of human experience and for this reason we philosophize about it and mull over and become engaged with it. So football is philosophical in itself in the same way that religion, art and politics is. Of course, Eagleton's point is well taken, football is a capitalistic enterprise, embroiled in petty narcissism's and a waste of human potential, and has lost its base in the communities. This should be acknowledged, however, sporting activity whether team or individual, has innumerable benefits for a flourishing society such as health, activity, a reduction of depression, and perhaps most importantly the delimitation of disgruntled male anxiety. Or maybe not?

Fetishism

As is well known, Freud draws our attention to the psychic mechanisms that distort our thinking. One such mechanism is what he terms disavowal. In Freud's view, disavowal is related to fetishism/perversion and involves the expression of two contradictory attitudes that persist side by side. More specifically, it involves a kind of 'reverse hallucination'; on one level denying the existence of something and on another level continuing to believe it. This is typically because the original belief is associated with an 'unacceptable' desire. The classic disavowed response involves admitting but rejecting something in the same breath. For example, the smoker who says that they have given up smoking yet continues to smoke is disavowing the fact that he/she is a smoker.

Very often the original belief is maintained by displacing the original desire onto a more ‘acceptable’ - less feared - object. For Freud this is exactly what is involved in fetishism. Fetishism is a key idea in philosophy in many ways and it generally signifies a tendency to imbue an irrelevant object or part of an object with a ‘significance’ that it doesn’t really possess. Marx, as we know, tried to understand capitalism as based upon the fetishism of commodities that involved the over valorisation of the world of things and the ontological emaciation of the world of human agency.

For Freud, a fetish - surprise, surprise - is a substitute for a penis. Not just a substitute for any penis however; but specifically the substitute for the penis that the boy-child thought the mother had before he became aware of sexual difference. For some children, this idea is too traumatic to contemplate and hence they only partially give it up; creating elaborate substitutes for the ‘real thing’ in order to defend themselves from this traumatic reality. Freud goes on to use this idea in order to make an interesting observation:

'[w]hat happened therefore, was that the boy refused to take cognisance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger; and against that there rose in rebellion the portion of his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that particular organ. In later life a grown man may experience similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will ensue (Freud 1961, 153)'

In the light of Freud’s observation can we view academic ideas/positions as fetishes in just this sense? Is disavowal the psychic mechanism involved in the defensiveness that often accompanies contemporary political/ideological positions; the 'thrones' and 'altars' of contemporary intellectual life? Might we say that fearing the 'castration of rationality', a number of contemporary thinkers have created intellectual fetishes - protected by powerful taboos - that allow them to preserve an often retarded political orientation? What ideas/systems of thought fit the bill here? Postmodernism perhaps with its fetishes of ‘identity’ and so on? Perhaps we might say that even the great academic name or movement is itself a disavowed fetish in just this sense -'Deleuze', 'Badiou' and so on?

Neil Turnbull