A Strategy for Labor by André Gorz (Beacon Press, 1964)
“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.” How to rouse people to defeat that system (i.e. capitalism) and build something better in its place, is the question André Gorz applies himself to here. Among his proposals is that of “non-reformist reform,” not reformism as a kind of gradualism or incrementalism—in which changes to the system are absorbed and reframed while the system carries on—but one that looks to that longed-for future and foreshadows its existence in the present. The strategy is echoed in the contemporary prison abolition movement, which refuses to be distracted by placating reforms that maintain an unequal balance of power. That his book is still relevant is our misfortune and our counsel all the same.
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