Farewell to the working class Book

Austrian-French activist André Gorz is not one of the better known left-wing political thinkers of his generation in the Anglosphere, but in France he is apparently considered one of the founding fathers of modern environmentalism. He is also a personal hero of my father, who is a former politician for a now-defunct far-left party here in Denmark and still active in several environmentalist NGOs. It is from him I borrowed Danish translations of two of Gorz' books.

"Farewell to the Working Class" is one of his André Gorz' known books now, as it made Gorz plenty of enemies. I can understand why - Gorz here spends more time criticizing traditional Marxist economic thinking than he does either conservatism or liberalism. Then again how many conservatives or liberals would even read a book like this in the first place? It might explain why outside of France, Gorz has been forgotten in left-wing political circles as those have for the most part either retreated into nostalgia for the social-democratic welfare state or become allergic to any self-criticism that isn't focused on purifying the line. "Farewell to the Working Class" was for me both a frustrating and insightful book to read.

The overall point that Gorz makes here is that the lot of most working people in industrialized countries now only superficially resembles the diagnosis given by traditional Marxist economists, whom Gorz accuses of having generalized from unionized industrial labour in the late 19th
/early 20th century. Which, Gorz, points out many times, is a very anomalous economic structure in the larger history of humanity. He spends more time in his other book "Paths to Paradise" (which I found much better) hammering home how anomalous modern industrial economies, be they capitalist or socialist, really are and how unlikely future economic structures are to have much in common with them at all. The real insight here is how Gorz describes the actual daily situation for more and more working people as what today is called the precariat - whose employment is constantly in an uncertain future. Gorz himself does not use that terminology himself, as he wrote this book in the 1980s.

On the other hand, I was often not sure if I understood the text as Gorz meant. Whenever he doesn't strictly talk nuts-and-bolts economic reality in the 1970s and 1980s, he resorts to writing almost exclusively in complicated academic jargon from economics, political philosophy and sociology which is largely impenetrable to non-experts. I am saying this as someone who has a Master's Degree in philosophy from university, has some interest in political philosophy enough to have been a regular contributor to a political theory journal for several years. What use is a political polemic that is completely incomprehensible to people who do not have the exact same academic background as the author, let alone the precariat whose cause it is written with the purpose of advocating for?