Farewell to the Gorzes

I only found out yesterday, thanks to the Observer, of the tragic but nonetheless understandable double suicide of André and Dorine Gorz, which happened a couple of weeks ago. Dorine had been suffering for quite some time with an extremely painful illness, and as André explains in his Lettre a D.

Sometimes, at night, I see the silhouette of a man walking behind a hearse along an empty road in a deserted landscape. I am that man. I don't want to attend your cremation, I don't want to receive your ashes in a bowl.

I had a bit of a Gorz binge a couple of years ago, largely as an extension of the reading I was doing around the Labour Theory of Value and the consequences for libertarian socialism of its refutation. Gorz, like Castoriadis, was one of the early sceptics of the LTV among the New Left (their criticisms not being dependent on the problems identified by the classical economics that gave us Analytic Marxism but from a more thoroughgoing examination of the Law's ambiguous place in Marx's work and its failure to correspond with basic historical facts). Both were willing to follow the consequences of their findings through to their logical conclusions, resulting in a libertarian socialism that understands that a failure on behalf of socialists to recognize humanity's actual circumstances (which is to say the circumstances revealed by science, sociology, and history, rather than by wishful thinking and the imposition of pre-defined categories demanded by ideology) has led the Left down a series of blind alleys, frequently rendering it redundant, irrelevant, or downright dangerous.

Needless to say, plenty of Marxists have been happy to dismiss Gorz's work, ever since his "ecological turn," but as I've said before, (or rather, as Maurice Brinton has said before), “One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.” It may be a while yet before some manage to catch up with Gorz and fully appreciate what he had to offer.