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ASSAULTS ON ECONOMIC REASON

Using André Gorz's reformist Critique of Economic Reason as a starting point STEVE BUSHELL argues that relinquishing faith in progress reveals practical possibilities and strange allies.

THE decline in the number of working days lost to strikes, and the shift from the workplace to the streets (and countryside?) in the location of struggles, indicates that whatever the fate of the Totally Managed Society as a whole, the factory, hospital, office and workshop have become control zones of greater intensification than before. One way to make sense of the 80s, in the UK at leas, is to see them as a counter-revolution to the revolt against work.

There have been a number of responses to this counter-reformation. Marxism Today, true to its marxist/leninist tradition of slavish adherence to the forces of production coupled with a penchant for disguising the ascent of a particular class with the camouflage of universalist rhetoric, has identified a technocratic class capable of manipulating the new technology with some autonomy as the harbingers of New Times and which will go some way to establish Marx's utopia of work within a free market economy. Their class base remains the technocratic stratum which Machajsky warned about in the 1890s. Others more prepared to shed the theology of marxism find little to celebrate in one class's good fortune. The elevation of the professional, managerial and technocratic class and an improvement in its working conditions does not a revolution make.

One such is André Gorz whose book Critique of Economic Reason is in part an attempt to understand the changes of the 80s, and in part an explanation of where the revolt against work has gone, and what it should be doing. For him the devolution of power implicit both in technological developments and managerial strategies to certain select groups in the workforce bodes little good. He subscribes to the ideas of the 'South Africanisation' or 'Brazilification' of the economy - the stratification of the working class into a 'relatively' stable core (the overseers of production), a 'peripheral' mass of part timers and temporaries, and a segment of sub-contracted out-workers, professional or unskilled.

The new managerial strategies of 'Human Resources' are in the main directed at the stable core. What Human Resources ideology is relies on capitalism's own criticism of itself. For too long, according to this idea, has labour been regarded as just another factor in the production process. By specifying and identifying the human factor in production, human resources ideology intends to undermine the revolt against work (motto: 'the object of work is not to work') by taking into account desires for self management, work control, and democratisation, together with an intrusive concern in the non-economic aspirations of the workers leading to flexible working for study or child care, and the setting up of swish leisure facilities. In effect what this means is that perceived non-economic activities become colonised by economic reason. What the marxists would call 'reproduction of labour power' becomes a real cost to the company.

Gorz is unimpressed, Not only is this strategy directed at a minority, but the care and concern behind the 'democratisation' of work rests on the same illusions about capitalism which 'self-managementists' entertained in the 60s and 70s.

Gorz's Farewell to the Proletariat was not so much an attack on the notion of class struggle as a dismissal of the privileged position the proletariat has had as the midwife of freedom. In Critique of Economic Reason he states clearly his belief that the development of the productive forces has ruled out the kind of utopia of work that was once Marx's and is now the managerial revolutionaries' dream. This utopia of work is the myth that the individual worker can be master of the totality of productive forces by means of voluntary collaboration. Like Jacques Camatte, Gorz sees capital and technology as inseparable, and that industry is indistinguishable from capital:

"...if from the outset, the development of the means of industrial production has been in the hands of 'associated producers' in workers' cooperatives, enterprises might have been managed and controlled by the people working in them, but industrialisation would not have taken place. What we call industry is, in fact, a technical concentration of capital which has only been made possible by he separation of the worker from the means of producing . It is this separation alone which made it possible to rationalise and economize labour, to make it produce surpluses in excess of the producers' needs and to use these growing surpluses to expand the means of production and increase their power."

Unlike Camatte, Gorz does not see the better future in an apocalyptic dismantling of those productive forces. He recognises their harmful effects, has woken from the dream of their self-management which sweetened the sleep of many a revolutionary but argues for the care, control and eventual incarceration of economic reason, rather than its liquidation, as a way out of its evils.

These evils include: the destruction of the notion of the sufficient, the mathematisation of social relationships which then disguise real relations and relieve us of any responsibility for them, the need for continual correctives to economic reason in the form of state intervention, the destruction of mutual aid networks, the degradation of work and the shrinkage of free time. One particular target of Gorz's scorn is economic reason's notion of 'efficiency'.

We have already seen how economic reason itself has had to modify its own laws in order to accommodate human resources ideology. Maximisation of production could only be maintained by dragging non-economic considerations into cost/benefit analysis. However it is this very productivity which Gorz questions:

"Economic rationality saves labour in pursuit of an ever-vanishing end goal which is always out of reach and this end-goal is never the liberation of time itself, that is, the extension of the time we have for living."

Productivity is an end in itself leads to a new kind of inefficiency. Maximum realisation of the value of capital demands maximum inefficiency in the satisfaction of needs, and unlimited maximum wastages in consumption, or, in other words, if needs were met there would be no demand. Efficiency which is proclaimed as a great universal, turns out to be very partial in its application, and very particular about where it is deployed.

Gorz argues that economic reason must be reined in, shown its place, and prevented from intruding upon human activities where it has no useful role to play. And where Gorz is superior to other critics of economic reason like Camatte or Ken Smith is that he advances a practical proposal which goes underneath the florid urgings to revolt, the faith in 'One Big General Election', or the enclaves of pure living outside the economy, without necessarily denying the possibility of any of those ideas. Gorz starts small, but not so small as to rule out an effect or a challenge to the corporations currently running the economy. Continuing the tradition of the revolt against work he argues for a push, by all or any forces, for a systematic and sustained reduction in working hours without loss of pay.

His arguments for this are obvious once stated. The efficiency which guarantees maximisation of production is going nowhere either ecologically or in terms of improving global standards of living.

That efficiency should be used for the liberation of time, because only the freeing of time can solve the problems which were caused by its initial enslavement, for example: the decline of mutual aid, the rise of the professional, the attack on subsistence and vernacular values, the domination of the culture industry etc. Reduction in work time should be without loss of pay in order to prevent the exascerbations of global capitalism's trend towards an impoverished part-time and temporary proletariat. Reduction in work time should be for managers etc. as well, in order to make those positions available to people with commitments beyond work. The pay cheque should be made up by the state in a form of a basic income scheme, which would include the right to work (for all his criticisms of wage labour he recognises its impersonal public nature can represent a pleasure in small doses, as well as freeing people from the potential hothouse of personalised relations). With the liberation of time should come the flourishing of other activities, a widespread differentiation of human purposes, which up until now, have all been threatened with being subsumed under the dread category of wage labour.

Gorz sees the differentiation of kinds of work as crucial for re-establishing subjectivity's place in the economy. Instead of the one-dimensional wisdom of the left which identifies the evils of capitalism with inequality and exclusion, he argues that the very systematisation crucial to the imposition of wage labour removes from work all the different ways of thinking and feeling about it that an individual could have. He uses examples such as prostitution, motherhood, housework and 'autonomous activity' to show how each of these constitutes a different experience, which demands to be judged, which placing them under the catch-all category of 'labour' will obscure. He also takes issue with those 'futurists' who see the solution to the decline of employment in commodifying greater areas of life. These 'service industry' ideologists put forward housework and personal services as growth areas for employment. Gorz shows how contradictory it is for those leftists who support this to claim to be against inequality. Paying somebody a wage for doing a personal service you couldn't be bothered to do yourself can only take place if one hour of your time earns you more than what you will pay your servant to do one hour's personal service. What Gorz is arguing for is the re-establishment and defence of 'non-economic' activities, not because they will remain at the level of 'privatised' chores, but because they could provide the basis for setting up genuine networks of mutual aid, which in their turn could help establish a combative public sphere. The reduction in time spent for wage labour will lead to greater free time in which these activities and aims can be nourished.

It is here that Gorz really starts to part company with the traditional left. Years of training in marxist dogma have ensured that residues of 'productive forces ideology' cling to the sides of the leftist mind. The idea that development must be going somewhere good seems to have joined forces with an attitude of mind which has simply capitulated to the apparent inevitability of economic reason. The left may call it 'socialisation' but in a capitalist economy it means 'monetisation'. The campaigns for 'Wages for Housework', the socialisation of childcare, the further professionalisation of social assistance, all mean one thing - the extension of wage labour into areas previously free of this curse. Gorz argues for making distinctions between different kinds of human work rather than asserting that in their 'essence' they are all 'labour' and therefore should be treated as such. Leftists may argue that the removal of the profit motive from the socialisation process and its replacement by a notion of social function somehow constitutes a revolution, but this as we have shown above is on the horizon of present society, and, anyway, the decisions about what constitutes valuable social function will ensure the same direction, control and surveillance as would occur in a profit-orientated society, only worse. What the left really sees in its socialisation policy is more jobs for professionals, and greater opportunities for regulation, a fact practically admitted by Sean Sayers in his review of Gorz's book for Radical Philosophy. The left always trusts the State before people.

It has to be said that despite the central thrust of his demand for a reduction in working hours without loss of pay - a demand which unites old-fashioned trades unionism with both ecological and ultra-left aspirations - there are a number of weaknesses in Gorz's argument. In his latest book The New Realities, Peter F Drucker, the guru of the management gurus, points out that the US worker now works 1800 hours a year compared with 3300 in the early years of the century while the figures for Japan are 2000 and 3500 in 1939 respectively, with German workers doing not a lot more than 1500. Drucker wrote a book called The End of Economic Man in which he saw the rise of nazism as final proof that the ideals of the economic society had been thoroughly discredited in human beings' eyes. He now sees our period as a 'post-business society' in that the development of the productive forces has led to a greater opportunity for people to participate in 'non-economic' activities. He also sees the development of management, something born in the economic world, as leading the way towards a different kind of society where management becomes autonomous from its business roots and becomes a 'liberal art' in itself and the leading force of society. The argument here is that management has economic reason under its care and control, that the world has moved away from the grand narrative of salvation by society towards the search for specific remedies for specific ills which is management's legitimating ideal. The challenge to Gorz that this presents is firstly, whether he has identified correctly economic reason as still the dominating force in society and secondly, whether the reduction in wage labour does lead to an increase in autonomy.

The 'escape of capital' - its global, transnational and fictive nature, its move away from being individually possessed (towards pension fund type ownership), and its thorough-going colonisation of everyday life (how free is free time?) - does present a difficult problem, but not one which can be wished sway with lashing of millenarian rhetoric about the 're-constitution of the human community'. Despite Drucker's hopes management are not as free from the economic demons as he would like, in fact it is this stratum which is taking quite a hammering in the current recession. Although it is true that Gorz proposes very little to disrupt the culture industry's covetous eye on free time, it does not follow that capital's colonisation of such time is either total or irreversible. Similarly Gorz's failure to identify what Illich calls 'shadow-work' - that 'unpaid work' created in the shadow of industrialisation which includes housework, shopping and commuting, but which is different form subsistence activities - does not invalidate his claim that 'autonomous' activities do exist, and that economic reason has not penetrated universally. Evidence for this can be found in countries like Indonesia where the Ministry for Language Development has been striving for years to establish one word (bekerdja) in the minds of the people to mean 'productive jobs'. while journalist and trades union leaders have been happy to oblige, people have carried on using their diverse terms according to whether the work was pleasurable, tiresome or degrading rather than whether it was paid or not, and in Mexico the toiling unwaged consider the term disempleado to refer to the unoccupied loafer on a well-paid job, rather than to themselves. There are plenty of cracks in the system, the danger of theory is that it can paper over them.

Gorz's strategy of reducing working time is one useful wedge which can help open up some of these cracks. But Gorz also represents part of that crystalisation of anti-capitalist thought which has dispensed with productive forces ideology. The ideology of progress still exerts a powerful, if unacknowledged, hold over radical thinking. Extricating oneself from this progressivist metaphysic means resisting the lure of the new and refusing to endorse the value of 'change'. Progress is a deeply ingrained habit - prevalent as much in the assumption that the random peregrinations of 'art' constitute some kind of 'development' as in the dogma of the academic world that the latest publications somehow amount to an 'advance' in knowledge. To settle accounts with the capitalist/marxist ideology of the 'progressive' should open up large number of questions which readers may want to take up in future.

One example of someone who resolutely refuses to be fooled by the beneficence of time is Herbert Shove, whose book The Fairy Ring of Commerce condemns industrialism for its effect of dispossessing human beings both materially and spiritually. Identifying agriculture as the basis for any society, Shove holds that it is the method by which the ruling class establishes control over the fruits of agriculture which is the key to understanding any system. Using many of the sources Ken Smith used in Free is Cheaper, Shove reveals how changes in property ownership forced through by he State were the pre-condition for the development of a society based on wage labour. By removing the social duties form property ownership, and establishing absolute ownership, profitability could be increased. Once self-sufficiency has been compromised, commerce can begin to flourish. Once commerce begins to flourish then agriculture itself became threatened. Because agriculture is dependent upon the seasons for the realisation of value, industry will always outstrip agriculture as a source of profit, and thereafter will always attract greater investment. Only those farms tied in some way to the industrial system are likely to survive. Industrialism in its very essence is about quickening the process of production, as Shove puts it: "Speed begets Credit; the greater the speeding up of life, the quicker can profits be made". The 'fairly ring of commerce' itself describes capitalism's effects spatially:

"...as the fungus of commercialism starts in an economic society, it first concentrates wealth and 'fertilises' the soil for industrial prosperity. Then, when this artificially stimulated prosperity is worked out, the area of its growth is left with ruined agriculture and depleted natural resources, while 'capital' successively 'develops' the resources of ever more and more distant regions."

Shove goes further than Gorz in that his idea involves the wholesale rejection of industrialism which is not be be replaced by an unknown community but by a return to a society of agriculturalists, where reproductive property is equitably distributed amongst the members of society. Such a conclusion has a whiff of 'Pol Pottery' about it except that his preferred method of change is through moral persuasion and the actions of a disinterested middle class. However the similarity between Gorz and Shove (and for that matter Smith and Camatte) rests on a rejection of progress that marxist and managerialist alike would consider regressive and conservative. However if one escapes from the whole rhetoric of 'the progressive' then the notion of 'the conservative' falls away as a meaningful category as well. Certainly the dominant traits of the left since 1917 have established their apparent cogency on their instinctive opposition to social phenomena and mindsets identified as 'conservative' and it would be no exaggeration to say 'conservatism' itself has only achieved coherence in opposition to perceived radical positions. Ideologies do seem to start from what they are against, and this may be where the fatal errors begin - imputing a mistaken unity to the thing being criticised. At the beginning of the end of right and left it is going to be those ambivalent ideas, neither one thing nor the other, political defectors, dissenters trapped in institutions they cannot shake their loyalty for, the paradoxes of right-wing anti-capitalism or left-wing anti-collectivism, which should excite the interest of those looking for a better world wherever, or whenever it might be.

If asked most critics of economic reason would still base their attack on the stifling of potential, the narrowing of horizons that capitalism has imposed on people. A better world is still imagined in terms of uninterrupted procreation, of frenetic insatiability, of endless bustle - a vision based on the quintessentially bourgeois notion that no possibility must be wasted. As a reaction against the austere 'naturalism of needs' which reduces the anti-economy to democratically administered subsistence, the idea of a better world as a blind fury of activity is understandable but unnecessary. It is not a wide but narrow horizons which are the most beautiful and interesting.

Books discussed:

Critique of Economic Reason, André Gorz (1989)
The Wandering of Humanity, Jacques Camatte, Black and Red (1975)
The End of Economic Man, Peter Drucker (1939)
The New Realities, Peter Drucker (1989)
Shadow-Work, Ivan Illich
Free is Cheaper, Ken Smith. John Ball Press (1988)
The Fairy Ring of Commerce: Herbert Shove (1930), Birmingham Distributist League forthcoming reprint, Pelagian Press (1992)

This typesetting dated: 3 November 1995

This article was first published in Here & Now No.12, 1992 and is republished with full acknowledgment to Here & Now which operates an anti-copyright policy.