Text: English, French (translation)

Socialism and revolution

Politics & Social Sciences

Gorz, André

Politics & Government

Anchor Books

In this study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world, the author argues that changes in the role of the work and labour process in the closing decades of the 20th century have weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken by social movements, such as the women's movement and the green movement, and also by all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies.

Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism

Business & Money

Economics

Pluto Press

Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society

Over the last twenty-five years, Western societies have been reversing into the future.

Polity

Over the last twenty-five years, Western societies have been reversing into the future.

Letter to D: A Love Story

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him. 
As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife. In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another. An international bestseller, Letter to D is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true.

Philosophy

<div> Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz&nbsp;was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression." This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz's final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology--Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Praise for André Gorz "To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers."--Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America "Gorz's work was always within the Utopian tradition--a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz's Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense--we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination."--Independent </div> <div>&nbsp;</div>

Ecologica (The French List)

Seagull Books

The Traitor (English and French Edition)

Verso Books

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the ‘traditional values’ of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, ‘fundamentalist’ projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time. Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism’s historical project—which, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

Verso

Autobiography, philosophical inquiry, confession—The Traitor is an unclassifiable and unforgettable book from one of France’s most inspiring social critics. Written when André Gorz was 32 and rising to prominence in the Parisian existentialist milieu, The Traitor starts from an acute personal crisis, “a state of absolute subjective misery,” rooted in social and political alienation. Using psychoanalysis and Marxism, Gorz explores the origins and symptoms of this crisis and struggles towards a resolution which he finds at last in political commitment and self-affirmation. Few personal documents have ever been so rigorously analytical; few philosophical texts so vividly illuminated by the honest recall of painful experience. Gorz’s father was Jewish, his mother Catholic: his tormented childhood in Austria during the Anschluss, when he took refuge first in religious asceticism, then in a self-destructive identification with Nazism, is scrupulously recorded. So, too, is his adolescent exile in Switzerland, his early encounters with Sartre—who, as “Morel”, is a constant reference point—and the conflicts of his first love affairs. Sartre called The Traitor “an invitation to life.” It remains the most intimate and profound book to emerge from the existentialist movement, while providing remarkable insights into André Gorz’s subsequent work.

The Traitor

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gorz, André. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gorz, André

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gorz, André. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Socialism and revolution

Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism

Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society

Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society

Letter to D: A Love Story

Ecologica (The French List)

The Traitor (English and French Edition)

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

The Traitor