“A report in last Sunday’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2185461,00.html carries the news of the death of André Gorz and his wife Dorine in a suicide pact. Gorz was a kind of Cassandra of the left: in the 1968 _Socialist Register_ he published a piece telling us that the great era of revolutions was over. Just a few months later he was ridiculed as May 68 unfolded. But he was right. In the early eighties he published _Farewell to the Working Class_. Absurd! we all thought, as the striking British miners seemed to reaffirm the transformative power of the industrial proletariat. He was righter than we were. And he started thinking about green issues when the rest of the left thought of all that as a petty-bourgeois indulgence. Again, he saw more clearly than most of us did.
{ 7 comments }
ajay 10.09.07 at 1:25 pm
Gorz was a kind of Cassandra of the left: in the 1968 Socialist Register he published a piece telling us that the great era of revolutions was over. Just a few months later he was ridiculed as May 68 unfolded. But he was right.
What happened in 1989, in that case?
Marc Mulholland 10.09.07 at 1:28 pm
This is shocking!
Ironically given the the of the book, I have never read a better explanation of why Marx thought the working-would would incline towards socialist preference formation than in the first few pages of ‘Farewell to the Working Class’.
Chris Bertram 10.09.07 at 1:43 pm
Actually Ajay, what he wrote was:
“The working class will neither unite politically, nor man the barricades, for a 10 per cent rise in wages or 50,000 more council flats. In the foreseeable future there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes or armed insurrection in defence of their vital interests.”
I don’t think 1989 is a challenge to that.
novakant 10.09.07 at 4:02 pm
And you guys really believed in all that stuff? Wow!
Makes me kind of glad that I grew up in the rather disillusioned 80s – but your honesty is greatly appreciated.
DC 10.09.07 at 4:58 pm
Quite the hallowed Marxist way to go though, didn’t Paul Lafargue and Jenny Marx do the same thing?
ejh 10.09.07 at 6:35 pm
As did the ex-Marxist Arthur Koestler and his missus. And their dog, I think.
Also see Harry Horse.
Jon Pike 10.10.07 at 9:29 am
That would be Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx.
Lafargue’s last testimony doesn’t exactly take a Gorzian line:
“Since years ago I have promised myself not to surpass the age of seventy; I have fixed the season for my departure from this life and prepared the means to execute this decision: a hypodermic injection of cyanhydric acid. I die with the supreme happiness of having , the certainty that very soon will triumph the cause to which I have given myself since 45 years ago. Long live Communism! Long live the International”
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