Farewell to the Working Class

An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism

André Gorz argues that changes in the role of work and labour process have, once and for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers and reduced their potential as a reference point for the socialist movement. Their place has been taken, says Gorz, by the new social movements such as the women’s movement and the ecology movement, and all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies.

For André Gorz, the arrival of the new technology is inevitable. What is important is the terms on which it will be introduced; and what should be fought for is the creation of a society in which waged work is reduced to a minimum and free time expanded and enriched. This can only happen if the socialist movement reclaims “the abolition of waged labour” as a guiding principle.

Farewell to the Working Class is a provocative, heretical book which attempts to make sense of radical politics in the 1980s.

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