social production, a sphere of autonomy which must be enlarged and to which the necessarily ‘heteronomous’ sphere of material production must be subordinated. The working class cannot by its very nature be the agent of this transformation because the abolition of work cannot be its objective. A class ‘called into being’ by capitalism,2 the working class identifies itself with its work and with the productivist logic of capital. It is itself a replica of capital, a class ‘whose interests, capacities and skills are functional to the existing productive forces, which themselves are functional solely to the rationality of capital’. It is also a class whose power has been broken by the form and structure of the labour-process itself. The transformative impulse must, therefore, come from a ‘non-class of non-workers’ not ‘marked with the insignia of capitalist relations of production’,3 made up of people who, because they experience work as ‘an externally imposed obligation’ in which life is wasted, are capable of having as their goal ‘the abolition of workers and work rather than their appropriation’.4 This group includes all those whom the system has rendered actually or potentially unemployed or underemployed, all the ‘supernumeraries’ of contemporary social production, perhaps in alliance with the ‘new social movements’, such as the ecology and women’s movements.
Countless questions can be raised about Gorz’s analysis of the labour-process in contemporary capitalism and its effects on the working class. One critical point stands out: his whole argument is based on a kind of inverted technologism, a fetishism of the labour-process and a tendency to find the essence of a mode of production in the technical process of work rather than in the relations of production, the specific mode of exploitation. This, as we shall see, is something that he shares with post-Althusserian theorists like Poulantzas. In both cases, the tendency to define class less in terms of exploitative relations than in terms of the technical process of work may help to account for a very restrictive conception of the ‘working class’, which appears to include only industrial manual workers. This tendency also affects his perception of the working class and its revolutionary potential, since in his account the experience of exploitation, of antagonistic relations of production, and of the struggles surrounding them – i.e. the experience of class and class struggle – play little part in the formation of working-class consciousness, which seems to be entirely shaped and absorbed by the technical process of work. There have certainly been important changes in the structure of the working class which must be seriously confronted; but Gorz does little to illuminate them, because in the end his is a metaphysical, not an historical or sociological, definition of the working class and its limitations, which has little to do with its interests, experiences, and struggles as an exploited class.
Questions could also be raised about his utopian vision itself. What is important from our point of view, however, is not simply this or that objectionable characteristic of Gorz’s utopia, but the very fact that it is a utopia without grounding in a process of transformation – indeed, a vision ultimately grounded in despair. (It is no accident that Gorz’s account of the utopia begins with citizens waking up one morning and finding their world already transformed.) In the final analysis, Gorz offers no revolutionary agent to replace the working class. It turns out that the ‘non-class of non-workers’, this new revolutionary lumpen-proletariat which apparently ‘prefigures’ a new society, holds that promise only in principle, notionally, perhaps metaphysically; it has, by his own testimony, no strategic social power and no possibility of action. In the end, we are left with little more than the shop-worn vision of the ‘counter-culture’, bearing witness against the ‘system’ in an enclave of the capitalist wilderness. This is revolution by example as proposed in various forms from the fatuous ‘socialism’ of John Stuart Mill to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of bourgeois flower-children growing pot in communal window-boxes (while Papa-le-bourgeois sends occasional remittances from home).
Even if the objective of the Left were to be perceived as the abolition of work – and not as the abolition of classes and exploitation – it would be the destruction of capitalism and capitalist exploitation, and their replacement by socialism, that would determine the form in which the abolition of work would take place. What is significant about Gorz’s argument is that, like other alternative visions, his rejection of the working class as the agent of transformation depends upon wishing away the need for transformation, the need to destroy capitalism. It is a monumental act of wishful (or hopeless?) thinking, a giant leap over and beyond the barrier of capitalism, bypassing the structure of power and interest that stands in the way of his utopia. We have yet to be offered a consistent and plausible alternative to the working class as a means of shifting that barrier. Even for Gorz the question is not, in the final analysis: who else will transform society? He is effectively telling us: if not the working class then no one. The question then is whether the failure of the working class so far to bring about a revolutionary transformation is final, insurmountable, and inherent in its very nature. His own grounds for despair – based as they are on an almost metaphysical technologism which denies the working class its experiences, interests, and struggles as an exploited class – are simply not convincing. Much the same can be said about other proposals for revolutionary surrogates, including those implicit in the Eurocommunist doctrine of popular alliances.
II
The single most influential school of Western Marxism in recent years has been a theoretical current that derives its principal inspiration from Louis Althusser. The innovations of Althusser himself have been located by Perry Anderson in the general tendency of Western Marxism toward the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass practice’ occasioned by both ‘the deficit of mass revolutionary practice in the West’ and the repressions of Stalinism.5 Hence the ‘obsessive methodologism’ that Althusser shared with other Western Marxists as questions of theoretical form displaced issues of political substance; hence the preoccupation with bourgeois culture and the ‘retroactive assimilation’ into Marxism of pre-Marxist philosophy, notably in its idealist forms (in Althusser’s case, especially the philosophy of Spinoza),6 as ‘bourgeois thought regained a relative vitality and superiority’7 in the face of a retreating socialism in the West; hence, too, Althusser’s linguistic obscurity. Althusser’s theoretical academicism has existed in uneasy tandem with his active political involvement in the PCF, and the precise connection between his theory and practice has been a matter of hot dispute. There is in any case a certain incoherence in attempts to combine political practice, especially revolutionary practice, with a theory that acknowledges no subjects in history. The theoretical work of Althusser’s pupils and successors has, with a few exceptions, been no less prone to scholastic abstractionism, ‘obsessive methodologism’, philosophical idealism, and obscurity of language; but their development has been much more clearly and concretely tied to the political movements of the West in the sixties and seventies and especially to the shifting programmes of Eurocommunism.
Eurocommunists insist that their objective, unlike that of social democracy, is not merely to manage capitalism but to transform it and to establish socialism. Their strategy for achieving that objective is, essentially, to use and extend bourgeois-democratic forms, to build socialism by constitutional means within the legal and political framework of bourgeois democracy. Eurocommunist theoreticians generally reject strategies that treat the bourgeois democratic state as if it were impenetrable to popular struggles and vulnerable only to attack and destruction from without, from an oppositional base in alternative political institutions. Eurocommunist parties, therefore, offer themselves both as ‘parties of struggle’ and as ‘parties of government’ which, by achieving electoral victories, can penetrate the bourgeois-democratic state, transform it, and implant the conditions for socialism. More particularly, their strategy is based on the conviction
