Table Of ContentBEACON BP 282 $4.95
STRATEGY
FOR
LABOR
A
Radical
Proposal
Andre
Gorz
STRATEGY FOR LABOR
STRATEGY FOR LABOR
A
Radical Proposal
ANDRE GORZ
By
pom
Translated the French by
Martin A. Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz
BEACON BOSTON
I'l
©
French text 1964 by Editions du Seuil
First published in France by Editions du Seuil
under the title Strategic Ouvriere et Neocapitalisme
©
English translation copyright 1967 by Beacon Press
First published by Beacon Press in 1967
First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1968
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Saunders of Toronto, Ltd.
All rights reserved
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices
of the Unitarian Universalist Association
Printed in the United States of America
International Standard Book Number: o-8oyo-o^y-$
9 8 7 6
Note
Translators*
Thk translators would like to thank Mr. Jean Bcaupertuis of
St. Pierre et Miquelon, North America, for his invaluable assist-
ance in finding English equivalents for many of the technical
economic terms used in this book.
Preface to This Edition
"Bk ursi rr has failed to engage itself with the problems that
dog us during our working days and haunt our dreams at night,
politics has not engaged the best of us, or at least the best in
us. If people seem complacent or inert, the cause may lie less
in them than in a political system that evades and confuses the
real issues rather than sharpening or resolving them."
These words of James MacGregor Burns1 apply to all ad-
vanced capitalist countries, whatever their history. In all of them,
democracy has grown into a representative system whose main
characteristic is not to be representative of any popular will.
The so-called representatives of the people are picked by
parties that, far from expressing any popular will, are bureaucra-
tized machines, bent on exerting power on behalf of the "elite"
that actually wields that power, and on winning privileges for
those who serve the interests of the elite. Parties compete for
governmental and administrative posts; they don't set forth com-
peting policies and visions showing how to solve the basic prob-
lems of the present and to shape the future.
The people do not have the choice between two (or several)
fundamentally distinct sets of policies or programs; their choice
is only to have one of several sets of politicians apply policies
which, except for some marginal differences, are basically the
same.
How has this situation arisen? It springs from the concentra-
tion of power in the hands of a small number of private cor-
porations whose decisions have a national and even an interna-
tional scope. No government can afford to antagonize Big Busi-
ness, unless its clear resolve is to wage a long, drawn-out battle,
appealing to mass mobilization and active popular support, with
the aim of transferring economic power to the public (which may
1 In The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America,
Fnglcwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. (1963), p. I.
viii Strategy for Labor
mean the State, but does not necessarily do so). In the absence
of public pressure in this direction, government must bend to
the interests of Big Business and toe the latter's line. It must keep
Big Business prosperous or the whole nation will suffer from the
corporations' ill will, and so will the government's popularity.
The prosperity of Big Business depends on constant State inter-
vention to keep the profit rates attractive and investment boom-
ing. In the guise of bringing corporate interests into line with
the general interest, the general interest, conversely, must be
brought into line with the interest of Big Business.
This constant mutual adjustment of business and governmental
policies explains the strengthening of the power wielded by the
State, and the weakening of the influence held by representative
assemblies. Such "serious matters" as the military budget, the rate
and the taxation of profits, the use to be made of the economic
surplus, the volume and the location of new investments, diplo-
matic or military intervention abroad, must not be discussed by
"irresponsible" delegates of the people, since these might question
rather than understand and cooperate with the leading corpora-
tions' aims.
Thus, the nation becomes identified with the policies of its
leading firms; the foremost task of the State is to protect and
to coordinate the latters' interests. Effective power, as Eisenhower
once said, belongs to the "military-industrial complex." The
monopoly of decision making and of information lies with the
bureaucracies of the leading corporations and of the State. Modern
capitalism has thus evolved a system of domination in which peo-
ple have no democratic control over their political parties, their
elected assemblies, or their labor unions; in which "democracy"
is but a method of manipulating the atomized masses into accept-
ing decisions they do not share in making, of preventing citizens
from organizing themselves, from shaping, expressing, and exert-
ing their will collectively.
We have no power over what to produce, how to produce it,
or for what market to produce; we have no power over what
We
needs or whose needs are to be given priority. are hardly able
to define our own needs, since the chances to discuss them pub-
