Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-based Society: Written by Andre Gorz, 1999 Edition, Publisher: Polity Press [Paperback]

Great to contextual debates pertinent to work

The subtext to André Gorz's Work, is: Any valid metric by which the efficacy of politics may be judged, must be eliminated from the minds of the polity. Thus, Gorz wilfully and misleadingly maligns capitalism, via which, a mere 4% makes it possible for almost everyone else to have a job, beyond the likes of subsistence farming and the associated quality of life, which most of France endured, prior to WW1. The criticism of the car industry is a consequence of labour, which had come to own capital by way of exchanging labour for money, and relinquished that ownership to a party, such as their pension and/or insurance funds, which then, by investing in the car industry, effectively meant that labour was paying itself to detrimentally maintain that line of work, instead of choosing to direct that capital towards new lines of production, and using some of their savings to carry them over the transition period, and/or utilise the millions of un/underemployed scientists and engineers.

Gorz's work never disappoints. He places lots of value on leisure time reminding us that if we were to look at how little economics holds to its value that everything in economics is arbitrary. At the end of the day, profit as a motivator as well as waiting until retirement to have meaningful leisure time should never be something that we endure; to Gorz, they are clearly argumentum ad antiquitatem and we must let go. Being called lazy in the name of having work for the sake of having something to do provides no conduit for fulfillment of our lives' missions to add to the world without taking away from it by being mindless consumers, rather loving our families and fostering the life of the mind - becoming, in effect, complete people.

This book is far ahead of its time. Even now pundits and economists argue with outdated ideas. There was a time when people in the American South thought slavery would never end. They were wrong. People today believe that Wage-Based work will always be the dominant form of modern society. They are wrong.