The Political Thought of Andre Gorz

Adrian Little

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415138666
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135103514
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Andre Gorz is one of the most important contemporary socialist thinkers. He has acquired a reputation as an iconoclastic theorist who poses radical questions about the future of the Left. This is the first full length assessment of his work which critically evaluates all of his writings from the 1950s to the 1990s.

1
GORZ'S POLITICAL HERITAGE
Existentialism and communism

In the years immediately following the liberation of France at the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party (PCF) was at its strongest. Indeed in the 1946 legislative elections the PCF won the single largest share of the vote with 28.6 per cent (Hazareesingh 1994: 312). Simultaneously the existentialist movement, with Jean-Paul Sartre as the figurehead, was becoming the strongest leftist intellectual grouping in France. By this time Gorz had moved to France and established contact with Sartre. Having first met Sartre in Lausanne in 1946, Gorz went on to become the political editor of Sartre's existentialist journal Les Temps Modernes (LTM) in 1961. Whilst Gorz published a variety of work in the late 1950s, his later work on LTM and Le Nouvel Observateur was to bring him greater notoriety.

MUTUAL ANIMOSITY: THE EXISTENTIALISTS AND THE PCF AFTER 1945

Gorz's personal stance on communism and the PCF in this period was extremely close to that of Sartre in as much as it varied between open hostility and pragmatic acquiescence. Between 1952 and 1956 Sartre could almost be regarded as a ‘fellow traveller’ (Caute 1973). Nevertheless the communists never quite overcame their suspicion of existentialist theorists and their relationship with Sartre was always a little uneasy. In any case the attempted fusion of Marxism and existentialism has always remained important in Gorzian theory as it did in Sartre's political works. That PCF intellectuals, such as Garaudy, treated existentialism contemptuously is a sign of their own materialist dogma rather than the failure of the existentialists to further the radical critique of capitalism (Garaudy 1970, 1971). The tendency of the PCF was to ostracise socialist thinkers, like Sartre and Gorz, who posed critical, ideological questions about Soviet policy. Ironically Garaudy was expelled from the PCF by conservative elements in 1970 (Wilde 1994: 87; Johnson 1981: 155).

In the early 1950s Gorz was part of a group including Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Merleau-Ponty, amongst others, which developed an existential approach to Marxism, thereby confounding PCF proclamations under the then leader Maurice Thorez. Whilst not all of these central figures were to maintain the existentialisation of Marxism through the upheavals of post-war French communism, Gorz continued to see this as his task. It was, for Gorz, the ultimate objective; indeed, following the death of Sartre in 1980, he viewed his work as a continuation of Sartrean ideas (Gorz 1989b: 279). As Davies has observed, Farewell to the Working Class provides:

a scintillating application of Sartrean themes — passivity, resentment, scarcity, autonomy, reciprocity, patriarchy and mental pre-logique to the specific socio-political conjuncture of the late seventies and the early eighties.

(Davies 1988: 207)

The feature that has characterised Gorz's work since the 1950s is his constant stress on individual liberation as a prerequisite for socialist change. The prerogative for Gorz has been to restore individuality to its rightful place at the forefront of liberatory struggle — clearly an existentialist objective. Essentially this depends upon reclaiming individuality from the constraints of ‘possessive individualism’ which permeate liberal democratic regimes. Hence, whilst the neo-liberalism that has developed since the late 1960s and early 1970s has been portrayed as the champion of individual freedom, most of the radical Left has continued to privilege the collective. Furthermore the centre Left has come to engage with the question of individualism within the discourse of the New Right, that is, the freedom of individuals to consume, to be enterprising, to own property. In short, Gorz seeks to rescue the concept of individuality from the possessive individualism of neo-liberal theory.

It is apparent that Gorz's task is as difficult now as it was in the 1950s. Whilst he realises that the individual remains alienated, he has witnessed the colonisation of individuality by the Right. This is partially due to the failure of the radical Left to engage with the question of the individual in the post-war years. Gorz's belief is that the collective freedom which is championed by the radical Left cannot occur without individual liberation — a view he shared with Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse 1972b). This corresponds with the original aims of the existentialist movement as voiced by Sartre in the first issue of LTM before he had even met Gorz. There he stated that the aim of the journal was to ‘participate in bringing forth certain changes in our society. … Without being materialist … we want to side with those who want to change both the social condition of a man and his conception of himself’ (Hirsch 1982: 41). Thus the ultimate goal of socialist revolution for the founders of LTM was reliant upon the freedom of the individual. In effect, the existentialists were identifying individual autonomy as the primary factor for radical social change. This was to become the rallying call for the French students and workers twenty years later.

The late 1940s were a period of immense rivalry between the existentialists and the PCF. The PCF line was that the existentialists were anti-Soviet and thus, given the close personal relationship between Stalin and PCF leader Maurice Thorez, anti-communist (Johnson 1981: 43). This was a misconception on the part of the PCF because the objections of Sartre at this time were to the lack of discussion and self-criticism within the communist movement and not to the cause of communism itself. In short, the existentialists were criticising Stalinist dogma rather than posing rigorous ideological questions.

The communist suspicion of the existentialists probably reached its peak during Moscow's dispute with Tito in 1948 (Wilde 1994: 141). The Yugoslavs had been expelled from the Cominform, the international Communist organisation, on charges of authoritarianism. French intellectuals such as Pierre Herve accused Tito of being a fascist on the grounds that no party conference had taken place in Yugoslavia since the 1930s (Caute 1964: 178). This hypocrisy within the PCF and the communist movement as a whole was seized upon by Sartre who criticised the approach of Moscow. After all, Stalin was not beyond reproach for his bureaucratic centralism and lack of democratic accountability. Furthermore Sartre realised that incidents such as these could do substantial damage to the communist movement because it added fuel to the anti-communist lobby in Western Europe. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the PCF, Sartre was merely continuing to criticise their party/Stalin and was not, therefore, working in the interests of communism. Against this view, Sartre argued that the communist movement had to provide a united front in opposition to American neo-colonialism.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s it became apparent that the intellectual credibility of the PCF was being questioned because of its unconditional acceptance of Stalinist policy. Whilst some states within the Soviet bloc were prepared to question the Stalinist hierarchy, Thorez and the PCF remained fiercely loyal. Simultaneously Sartre was regarded as an enemy by the party because of his revisionism and his immense appeal to the disillusioned youth who felt alienated by traditional communist politics.

1952–6: FELLOW TRAVELLERS

Nevertheless, the situation during the Cold War was beginning to bring Sartre closer to the French communists. The reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, in 1951, Thorez, having suffered a stroke, went to the Soviet Union for treatment at the behest of Stalin. He was to remain in the USSR until Stalin's death in 1953 (Johnson 1981: 46). During the intervening period Jacques Duclos took hold of the reins of the party. His immediate goal was the amalgamation of all pro-peace and anti-imperialist groups that were developing. Hence the movement was opening its doors to more disparate support and when Sartre returned from the Vienna peace conference in 1952, he was willing to adopt a less critical approach to the party. The second reason for this new mood of rapprochement was the success of the PCF in articulating the now widespread anti-American fervour that was sweeping France. Whilst the PCF had, since the war, consistently warned about the danger of political subsidy from the Americans, the Right had welcomed the Marshall Plan. By the early 1950s though, the end of Marshall aid had produced a bitter reaction from de Gaulle. Thus the communists were handed the moral high ground on the issue of sweeping American influence (Johnson 1981: 42–3). The wave of ‘Americo-phobia’ also corresponded to Sartre's post-war warnings and so pushed the PCF and the existentialists closer together.

The Korean War set the seal on their uneasy alliance. The American aggression in Korea, albeit reacting to the North Koreans' initial strike, inflamed communist and existentialist passions to the extent that by 1952 the relationship between Sartre and the PCF was relatively harmonious. Nevertheless it was notable that the PCF intellectuals never really adopted the anti-imperialist discourse which was to characterise the rise of the New Left. This created a political problem for the PCF because most of the enemies of French imperialism in the post-war years in Africa and Asia had similar Marxist-Leninist leanings to the PCF. The silence of the intellectuals in the PCF in the face of French colonial exploits in Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon and Indo-China was abhorrent to independent intellectuals such as Sartre. It appeared though that by 1952 he was prepared to overlook this tacit justification of French colonialism in order to support the communist movement as a whole from the onslaught of criticism it was receiving from the Right. This criticism was to be silenced in 1952 by the growing anti-American feeling that allowed the communists to present themselves as morally correct.

There was universal unease on the Left at the brutal police suppression of the anti-American ‘Ridgeway’ riots in Paris on 28 May 1952 (Johnson 1981: 48). The conservative Pinay government (1952–3) had started to purge the communists in their own French version of McCarthyism. General Ridgeway, an American who was prominent in the Korean War, had been appointed as the new NATO commander in Paris and upon his arrival he was greeted by demonstrations orchestrated by the PCF against the American usage of biological warfare in Korea. The demonstrators were attacked by the police and several leading communists, including Jacques Duclos, were arrested on false charges. This led to a political backlash against the government's tactics that pulled the Left closer together. Indeed it is clear that the existentialists, including Gorz and Sartre, saw this repressive action by the government as the point at which the Left in general had to close ranks to preserve their mutual cause.

This was the period when the theorists of the PCF and the existentialists converged to the greatest degree. Nevertheless Sartre was more sympathetic to this alliance than other members of the existentialist movement such as Camus and Merleau-Ponty who believed that, in effect, this closing of ranks was an endorsement of Stalinism. This may have been an overestimation but Sartre was certainly beginning to understate some of the more idealistic elements of his existentialism. It also outlines the degree of expediency that Sartre was willing to exercise in his desire to unify the Left. Chiodi gives another explanation for Sartre's attempt to fuse existentialism and Marxism:

What Sartre accepts from communism is its demands that limited ‘bourgeois’ humanism be replaced by a universal humanism, and that the only way of achieving this is by removing the means of production from the hands of a single class and placing them at the disposal of the entire collectivity. But he continues to hold that the political action this demands can only take place with, as its driving force, an ideology which recognises the existentialist anthropology as its proper foundation. If the demand for this is couched in terms inimical to Marxism, Sartre considers that its effects will be sterile, but if existentialism declares its support for Marxism at the politico-cultural level it will thereby gain a position within Marxism whence it can instigate a transformation of its ideological basis.

(Chiodi 1976: 7)

Sartre clearly perceived Marxism as a potentially useful theory for the transmission of existentialist doctrines but he was aware that this required a rigorous restructuring of the Marxian method to remove economism and incorporate existential phenomenology. Thus, in maintaining that individual freedom was reliant upon the freedom of that individual's class, he was not really erring from the existentialist track. The two, as Gorz has long maintained, are interdependent. As Marcuse put it: ‘no revolution without individual liberation, but also no individual liberation without the liberation of society’ (Marcuse 1972b: 48).

A notable feature of this period was that it signified the end of a unified French existentialist movement, to the extent that it was ever really ‘unified’. Sartre had been its figurehead and his disagreement with the other leaders, Camus in particular, was to lead the way for a wider unification of New Left interests in France after Sartre's split with the PCF in 1956. The period up to 1956 marked the emergence of a more reformist tendency in the communist movement as a whole. The Korean armistice minimised one source of contention and the accession of Malenkov and Khrushchev to power in the Soviet Union following Stalin's death, and the slightly more revisionist discourse which they adopted, increased hopes within the PCF that a new unity could develop with the moderate Left. In so doing they hoped that the PCF could end the Algerian crisis which had escalated in 1953.

However Guy Mollet, the leader of the socialist Section Française d'Internationale Ouvrière, rejected the offers of the PCF to create a new alliance. Despite this the communists were to support Mollet in the next election and he duly came to power (1956–7). His first step was to seek special powers from the assembly to suppress the unrest in Algeria. Reluctantly the PCF ensured the passage of these special powers by abstaining in the vote — a move that was to seriously undermine their credibility. Hence a new regime of terror was created in Algeria with the large-scale execution of many nationalist guerrillas (Hazareesingh 1994: 238). As a civil rights exercise it was abhorrent; as a socialist exercise it was disastrous. The Left was torn apart and in 1957 the government was overthrown. It was only at this time that the intellectuals within the PCF were able to voice support for Algerian independence fully. Nevertheless, by this time their credibility amongst independent intellectuals was minimal and the Left was decimated.

REOPENING OLD WOUNDS

Whilst the apparently inconsistent behaviour of Sartre had disrupted the unity of the existentialists, Gorz remained faithful to his mentor. Indeed, before his own publishing career began, Gorz appears as something of a Sartrean acolyte rather than a political theorist in his own right. Having been a ‘fellow traveller’ between 1952 and 1956, Sartre strongly criticised the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in October 1956. This in effect marked a complete return to his mutual hostility with the PCF of the late 1940s. Sartre severed his ties with the PCF and the animosity that preceded the Korean War was reinstated. That Gorz and Sartre followed the same intellectual path in these years was no coincidence. Nor is it merely an indicator of Gorz's admiration for Sartre, rather it signifies the close political proximity of the two. Even during his sojourn with the communists, Sartre never renounced his idealism or his individualism. Because of this it is clear why Gorz believes that his ‘utopian’ and individualist writing in the 1980s is a logical extension of Sartre's critique.

Prior to 1956 Sartre had understated his criticism of the Soviet system in order to maintain solidarity with the anti-American and peace movements that were growing in France. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, though, was considered a blatant abuse of the Soviet Union's military power and it led to Sartre's famous comment that the USSR had opened fire on an entire nation (Caute 1973: 350–7). This is perhaps the point at which a shift in the political agenda that created the French New Left occurred most clearly. Nevertheless the denunciation of the repression of the Hungarian Revolution by the existentialists need not have proved so controversial if the PCF had not seen fit to overlook the candid abuses of civil and individual liberty that were taking place in Hungary. In their attempt to maintain a good relationship with the Soviet leadership the PCF supported the invasion of Hungary — a stance that was irreconcilable with the beliefs of the existentialists. LTM perceived the Soviet intervention in Hungary as a return to Stalinism. Thus, following the revolution, a group of intellectuals, including Sartre and De Beauvoir, signed a letter protesting against the Soviet action. Whilst they proclaimed their belief in socialism, they disagreed with the violent suppression of Hungarian independence, insisting that socialism could not be achieved at bayonet point (Caute 1964: 227). The Kadar regime in Hungary, maintained by the Red Army, was infringing, the signatories argued, the liberty of socialist writers who were being imprisoned or sentenced to death. Kadar continued to persecute anti-Soviet socialists such as Heller, Feher and Markus until his removal from power in 1988 (Wilde 1994: 145–6).

The PCF support for the USSR over the Hungarian Revolution seriously damaged the party in France. It was apparent that the Left had torn itself apart. In the following years France was to witness the rise of the Right with the re-election of Charles De Gaulle as president in 1958. This period of right-wing presidential leadership was to continue until 1981. The division between the existentialist movement and the PCF was to expand long before the electoral decline of the French communists. The primary reason for this split was the reaction of the communists to the colonial exploits of the French government in Algeria. Whilst Sartre voiced extreme caution about the course of the war, the PCF had difficulty criticising it, given that they had agreed to the special powers granted to the Mollet administration that had led to the escalation in repressive violence. Not only had the PCF pandered to Soviet aggression in Hungary, but also they were failing to criticise French colonialism in North Africa. It appeared, to their existentialist critics, that the communists were bowing to public opinion rather than their own principles because the intellectuals of the party were still moving with the prevalent anti-Muslim sentiment in F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 GORZ'S POLITICAL HERITAGE: EXISTENTIALISM AND COMMUNISM
• 2 WORKERS' CONTROL AND SELF-MANAGEMENT: A RADICAL STRATEGY FOR LABOUR?
• 3 POLITICAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIALISM: A NEW VANGUARD?
• 4 REFORMULATING MARXISM: CLASS CONFLICT AND THE STATE
• 5 ECONOMIC REASON, FULL EMPLOYMENT AND THE IDEOLOGY OF WORK
• 6 TOWARDS SOCIALIST INDIVIDUALISM?
• 7 UTOPIANISM AND WELFARE: THESES FOR A FUTURE LEFT
• CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index