Reinventing Work with André Gorz
by Céline Marty
Image made using “Voiture en étau de vélos,” by Jeanne Menjoulet licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
In this article, Céline Marty exhumes the work of André Gorz, whose work on ecologism and emancipation in a post-capitalist future has found newfound relevance given the contemporary climate crisis. Marty discusses some key ideas in Gorz’ philosophy—degrowth, “sobriety,” and free management of production and time—and their relevance today.
Heir to Sartre and Marx, the philosopher André Gorz bequeaths to us a dual body of work. Under this pseudonym (Gorz was born Gerhart Hirsch and became Gérard Horst after his father’s name change and conversion to Catholicism), he first published Marxist essays theorizing alienation within the society of mass production and consumption, as well as strategic perspectives on emancipation centered around workers’ control, culminating in works from the late 1950s and 60s such as The Morality of History, Workers’ Strategy and Neocapitalism, Reform and Revolution, and The Difficult Socialism. At the same time, and under a different pseudonym, Michel Bosquet, he participated in founding Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964. As a journalist, he disseminated his anti-capitalist political ecology there, grounded in libertarian and humanist principles. He also defended the principle of self-management of needs against the imposition of a way of life by capitalist and technocratic forces. His critique of both the content and the volume of capitalist production led him to the project of degrowth of social production, according to an ecological rationality that would limit it to what is sufficient: less, but better. This collectively chosen sobriety still seemed foreign to the socialist movement of his time. For this reason, Gorz then questioned the relevance of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, understood solely as the working class, and conceptualized, in works like Farewell to the Working Class: Beyond Socialism and Paths to Paradise: The Agony of Capital, a “postindustrial neo-proletariat” whose demands concerning quality of life could not be reduced merely to improving working conditions. Finally, in works like Metamorphoses of Work: Quest for Meaning, Critique of Economic Reason, and Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, he defended the self-management of working time as a condition for an anti-productivist existence, allowing for activities and experiences outside of economic rationality.
These ideas, theorized several decades ago, are at the heart of public debate today, in a context where work is examined through the prism of happiness and meaning, and where ecological urgency compels us to rethink our philosophical systems. We thus seek to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of André Gorz’s philosophy and its fruitfulness for thinking about the social and ecological problems posed by the organization of employment, as well as the perspectives that enable social production to be readapted to fit needs and sufficiency.
Degrowth
Going beyond the Marxist tradition, which focuses its critique of capitalism on working conditions—denouncing alienation (workers are dispossessed of the control and outcomes of their activity) and exploitation (their labor is not remunerated at its fair value, with profits being appropriated)—Gorz attacks the content of production itself.
From The Morality of History onward, Gorz criticizes capitalism’s boundless productivist logic, which seeks growth in production as an end in itself. Production is intended to increase perpetually and at an ever-accelerating pace in order to guarantee a certain profit rate. To achieve this, it is organized to constantly stimulate future consumption—through waste, advertising, marketing, or various forms of planned obsolescence that degrade the quality and use-value of products. Gorz’s conclusion is unequivocal: capitalist production aims to maximize profits rather than to sustainably meet social needs. In contrast, socialist production could better satisfy these needs while consuming far fewer resources and producing higher-quality goods.
This choice of reducing production is grounded in an analysis of capitalism’s ecological consequences. As early as the 1960s, in his articles, Gorz/Bosquet warned of the health and climate effects of air pollution, of the finitude of productive resources (fossil fuels and metals) that capitalism presupposes to be unlimited, and of the problems caused by the industrialization of agricultural production, such as dependence on industrial inputs and declining yields due to soil degradation. Gorz recognized the ecological cost of every act of production: it irreversibly destroys material, energy, and human resources, wears down infrastructure, and generates waste and other phenomena requiring additional human labor to address.1
By revealing the material limits of production, ecology contradicts the goal of infinite growth and is thus necessarily anti-capitalist. Gorz observes that capitalism does not consider these material constraints and its extractions from ecosystems, unless they are monetarily evaluated, quantified, and attributed to a stage in the value chain. However, capitalism can attempt, temporarily, to adapt in order to maintain its profit rate by increasing the prices of goods or relocating polluting industries to poorer countries. In parallel, the state can take advantage of ecological urgency to strengthen its power by creating institutions and regulations managed by experts, rather than developing a democratic ecology.
Furthermore, the prospect of ecological degrowth in production comes up against the conservatism surrounding employment. In a wage-based society, where employment determines access to economic resources and social rights, it also becomes socially fetishized. At the individual level, having a job becomes an end that dictates educational pathways and life choices, while at the collective level, unemployment is seen as the scourge of the century, to be fought at all costs by creating jobs, regardless of their purpose or working conditions.
Gorz critiques this ideology of work that, by portraying it as the quintessential human activity, justifies the existence of any job and acceptance of the capitalist labor market as it is. Due to the slowdown of economic growth, the gradual deindustrialization starting in the 1970s, and the emergence of structural unemployment, governments saw the “service society” as a way to create non-relocatable jobs, even though it could instead have been an opportunity to radically reduce both production and everyone’s working time. For this reason, Gorz opposed these “servant jobs” (such as delivery services or domestic cleaning), consumed by the wealthiest who can afford to buy the time of the most precarious workers rather than doing domestic work themselves.
Today, employment conservatism is reflected in defending the continued production of good or services with minimal utility (such as meal deliveries), that are highly polluting (aviation), and even socially harmful (advertising), simply to preserve the jobs they entail. Not all of the jobs we know today are necessarily desirable in an ecological society. While the ecological transition will create certain jobs (in repair, recycling, teaching daily skills, peasant agriculture, care work, and sustainable mobility), it will also require eliminating existing jobs that serve capitalist production and have negative collective consequences.
Self-management
Gorz’s original contribution is to subordinate the content and volume of production to social needs. Whereas the Eastern Bloc partially copied Western capitalist production—notably in the case of individual automobiles—Gorz envisioned eco-socialist production in a radically different way. The latter would be organized according to ecological criteria (sustainability and resource conservation) combined with socialist values (resource sharing and equalization of living conditions).
Such a perspective requires questioning the relevance of our needs today and imagining how to satisfy them without relying on capitalist goods and tools: which of our needs should take priority, and what are the most resource-efficient means to fulfill them? What are our actual transportation needs, and how can they be met other than through airplanes or individual cars? What are our dietary needs, and how can they be satisfied without industrial, meat-based, globalized food systems? The goal is not to “green” current production but to transform it, reducing it to what we collectively deem sufficient for a good life.
To determine these modalities, Gorz preferred collective and democratic deliberation over centralized and technocratic planning, as implemented in Eastern Bloc countries. Populations, aware of their own situations and local resources, are best placed to know their needs and the most effective means to satisfy them. This is a form of self-management of needs bringing together producers, consumers, users, and residents, which Gorz envisioned after theorizing workers’ control over production. This collective organization of subsistence was once at the heart of peasant communities before being undermined by industrial capitalism through rural exodus and the commodification of need satisfaction.
For Gorz, an “ecological nebula” of popular movements seeks to fulfill its needs outside of markets and institutions, opposing capitalist and technocratic projects that appropriate resources (water, land, energy) and then impose specific conditions for their use. In his view, political ecology is intrinsically self-managing: it demands that popular power over the conditions of life be restored. It aims not so much to delegate power to political parties or representative institutions as to create spaces and means of action through which everyone can directly exercise power.
Sobriety
Gorz advocated genuine sobriety in production and consumption to achieve sobriety in energy and other material resources. He presupposed that the capacity to moderate one’s efforts to match what seems sufficient is an anthropological constant, exemplified by ancient ethics. It is capitalism, conversely, that imposes the unlimited expansion of effort and desire. By giving individuals the means to think and act according to what they deem sufficient, conditions for collective sobriety could be established.
Human labor-based production is thus conceived instrumentally: work is a collective-productive activity to satisfy social needs with collective resources. As a means serving an end, work can be intentionally limited if needs, resources, and productive efforts are themselves limited.
We must also reflect on the tools used in production. In discussion with Ivan Illich, who advocated convivial tools to replace the industrial mega-machine, Gorz sought techniques that promote autonomy. Thus, as early as the 1970s, he opposed the nuclear power program for technical but above all political reasons: nuclear energy entails centralized and authoritarian management of investments, production, distribution, control, and maintenance. By contrast, renewable energies can be managed, produced, distributed, and consumed locally. Rather than producing electricity to power the tools of industrial society (such as electric ovens, refrigerators, and heaters), these energies can be used directly to cook, cool, and heat. Such low-tech solutions are more easily handled and repaired, thereby increasing user autonomy instead of making them dependent on technical or energy infrastructure.
Gorz also questioned our modes of housing, transport, education, and health care. The civilization of individual automobiles distances workers from their places of living, work, and consumption; capitalist schooling specializes children according to the needs of the labor market; curative medicine attempts to compensate for civilizational diseases without addressing their causes. Conversely, he advocated a school that would disseminate vernacular knowledge, rooted in popular experience, to teach the use of convivial, manageable, human-scale tools, and to satisfy diverse needs autonomously, thereby reducing professional specialization.
Degrowth in production and consumption would improve working conditions by removing stressful productivism, while also massively reducing working time. This would have ecological effects insofar as it would reduce resource depletion, but it would also have social and political effects. It would give each person the means to exist beyond their economic function as producer-consumer, allowing them to engage in the activities of their choice—social, political, familial, cultural, or simply useless, selfless, and free-floating—without being accountable to an employer or the state. This free time would also empower civil society in the face of concentrated political and economic power.
But how can such perspectives be realized, in theory and in practice, when we are steeped in the capitalist culture of “always more at the lowest cost,” which prioritizes short-term interests? After advocating for the self-management of work and needs, Gorz championed self-management of life time as a way to escape the rhythms of productivism. Political revolution calls for an existential revolution.
Self-management of time
Only a different relationship to time can sustainably transform individuals and enable them to envisage, imagine, and desire a degrowth-oriented ecological society. Capitalism imposes its norms through its rhythms, both of production and of consumption: accustomed to working ever faster and more intensively, hurried workers also desire to consume in the same manner, satisfying needs and desires as quickly and cheaply as possible, even during breaks and vacations, which are illusorily considered “free.” Yet the immediacy of consumption carries a significant ecological cost, particularly due to the transport and storage infrastructure it requires.
From the 1980s onward, Gorz studied how capitalism dominates our life time and the temporal organization of our existence. He developed an existentialist critique of working time, revealing its alienating consequences for people’s lives. Drawing on Christian Topalov’s The Birth of the Unemployed, Gorz showed how full-time employment was imposed on the working class, in contrast to earlier practices of intermittent and discontinuous work, as well as multiple activities, which reflected flexible uses of working time. Work time used to be chosen based on income needs, the time of year, economic circumstances, and decisions between various productive activities. Workers were dispossessed of autonomous use of their working time, subordinated instead to the rhythms of industrial production and consumption.
William Beveridge, initiator of anti-unemployment policies and founder of Britain’s welfare state, believed that the labor market and advances in production processes were hindered by intermittent workers who refused strict hourly discipline. As John Smith wrote in the eighteenth century, “the poor will never work more hours than necessary to feed themselves and fund their weekly debaucheries.” Consequently, Beveridge suggested forcing them into full-time work so they would work “enough”: he instructed employment offices, which distributed work, to reject “those who want to work once a week and stay in bed the rest of the time” or “those who want to find precarious jobs from time to time.”
Following the Swedish economist Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Gorz attributed the economic growth of the Trente Glorieuses to full-time employment, which created exhausted workers inclined to mass consumption of commodities, as they were deprived of the time and tools needed to satisfy their needs otherwise. The more time spent working, the stronger the tendency to consume market goods and services. On the one hand, consumption of “ready-to-use” commodities increased, in volume and quality, due to a lack of the time and energy necessary to produce one’s own means of satisfaction; on the other hand, this increasing consumption was a result of the workday itself, to compensate for frustrations or to reward efforts. The loss of control over work rhythms also prevented workers from adapting their output according to their lived experience at work, with major physical and mental health consequences.
Gorz thus theorized self-management of time, work, and life as a condition for individual autonomy and resistance to capitalist rhythms. It involves being able to decide on one’s own work rhythms and schedules, both in the short term and over a lifetime. This is why Gorz envisioned annualization of working time and discontinuities throughout life with periods of training, breaks, and leave. He asked: “If we could adjust our working time to the needs we actually feel, how many hours would we work?” Self-managing one’s working time allows one to genuinely reflect on one’s need for economic resources. Based on surveys of his era, Gorz estimated that workers would prefer to reduce their working hours to regain existential autonomy, by asking themselves what tasks they actually want to devote time to. They could then, as they wish, carry out daily and domestic tasks that capitalism’s rhythms have forced them to delegate (such as food preparation, home repairs, and childcare).
Since economic rationality is imposed under capitalism in the limitless expansion of efforts and needs, reducing the time devoted to productive efforts and the satisfaction of needs is a way to delimit economic rationality and decrease reliance on production/consumption, which in turn allows for a reduction in everyone’s working time. Creating time outside economic rationality, where the individual is no longer merely an instrument of someone else’s or a utilitarian project, enables them to regain power over their existence: they can engage in activities according to their own interests and values, regardless of their productivity. Such practices are deemed revolutionary because they cannot be fulfilled within capitalism. Self-management of time nurtures individuals’ autonomy and makes them more critical of all aspects of their lives, including at work, which in turn fuels struggles for emancipation within the workplace.
For Gorz, self-management of time is a dimension of the project for a cultural society, one that frees time from economic rationality to allocate resources to other activities, whether social and associative or nonutilitarian and selfless. It goes beyond the capitalist organization of leisure because it genuinely gives individuals the means to pursue projects that hold meaning for them—not merely those compatible, during breaks, with capitalist rhythms. Organizing the coexistence of these different ways of life, relationships to time, and activities is a crucial issue for a democratic society that aims to be pluralistic. This enables various projects and values to coexist: taking time to raise children, developing artistic and community projects, or devoting all one’s time to a business. Current social protection, based on the norm of lifelong full-time employment, does not allow for such arrangements. This is why Gorz considered decoupling wealth distribution first from full-time employment and then from the amount of work performed and guaranteeing all workers an independent income. He ultimately envisioned universal income as a way to share collectively produced wealth among everyone, ensuring material conditions of existence while enabling a plurality of projects and relationships.
Today, this position is debated on the left because it is perceived as replacing struggles for emancipation at work. However, Gorz also viewed universal income as a tool for these struggles: it would free individuals from the compulsion to sell themselves at any cost on the labor market and would allow them to refuse certain jobs to negotiate their working conditions. Unemployment insurance partly fulfills this role, which is why it is currently under attack in many Western countries. By giving individuals the opportunity to live experiences of autonomy outside of work, in other temporalities and activities, universal income subjectively transforms them: it makes them more demanding with respect to their working conditions, which can, in turn, transform them further.
Thus, working less is a desirable horizon for Gorz, according to his eco-socialist values and project, which combine a social critique of capitalism—focused on working conditions and relations of production—with an ecological critique, which warns of ecosystemic transformations. What he failed to anticipate is that this objective can today be seen as a necessity in the context of the climate crisis, which is above all a health crisis, as the World Health Organization argues: it is first and foremost our material conditions of existence, notably our bodies’ capacity to rest, that are affected by the increasing frequency of heat waves and extreme heat (on similar themes, see Chapter 10 of Éloi Laurent’s Economics for the 21st Century). A human born in 2020 will not have the same conditions of rest and work as a human born in 1970. Yet the repercussions of climatic conditions on working conditions are still barely integrated into collective reflections—including public policy—on the concrete organization of work.
We cannot assume that human labor will continue in the same way—even less that it can be increased and intensified. Reducing our reliance on living labor through restrained production seems all the more necessary given that we do not know, empirically, how we will work, physically, in 20 or 50 years in a climate that is +2 or +4 degrees Celsius warmer.
Céline Marty is a doctor of philosophy; her thesis focuses on the philosophy of André Gorz, analysed through the problem of alienation and the ideal of self-management. She has written two books based on her thesis, Découvrir Gorz (Editions Sociales, 2025) and L'écologie libertaire d'André Gorz (PUF, 2025). Her current research focuses on the ecological transformation of work and degrowth, following on from her book Travailler moins pour vivre mieux (Dunod, 2021).
Gorz notably drew on the research of economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and biologist Barry Commoner. See Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Tomorrow, Degrowth: Entropy, Ecology, Economy, translated and presented by Jacques Grinevald and Ivo Rens, Lausanne, Pierre-Marcel Favre, 1979 (reissued by Sang de la Terre, 2006). See also Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology [1966], translated by Chantal de Richemont, preface by Claude Delamare Deboutteville, Paris, Seuil, “Science ouverte” series, 1969; The Closing Circle: Problems of Survival in a Terrestrial Environment [1971], translated by Guy Durand, Paris, Seuil, “Science ouverte” series, 1972; The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis [1976], translated by Jacqueline Bernard, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, “Économie en liberté” series, 1980.