André Gorz argues that changes in the role of the work & labor process in the closing decades of the 20th century have, once & for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken, he says, by social movements such as the women's movement & the green movement, & all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies. Provocative & heretical, Farewell to the Working Class is a classic study of labor & unemployment in the post-industrial world.

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason . Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the 'traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, 'fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time. Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical project—which, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz (1923-2007) was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression." This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz's final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology--Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz "To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers."--Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America "Gorz's work was always within the Utopian tradition--a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz's Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense--we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination."-- Independent