Ghosts of Gorz.

• Author: Burke, R.
• Position: Book review

The Immaterial, by Andre Corgi, Seagull Books, 2010, 209 pages, ISBN 9781906497613, $19095 Ecologica, by Andre Gorz, Seagull Books, 20109185 pages, ISBN 9781906497415, $19.95

Andre Gorz is a towering figure for socialist ecological politics. Since his death in 2007 each passing year brings startling reminders of just how far ahead he was in his thinking. Gorz managed to be both visionary and practical in his politics, a thinker who foresaw both the dangers and the opportunities of the 21st century. Two posthumously translated books of his have just been published. The Immaterial, in which advances in digital technology, a triumph of the capitalist system, undermine the capitalist order; and Ecologica, a collection of essays outlining Gorz's proposals for an ecological socialism.

The Immaterial deals with the problems forced on the capitalist world-system as a result of technological changes. Living intelligence has become the main productive force, yet it always threatens to slip from the control of the capitalist enterprise. Formalized knowledge can be translated into software, and is reproducible in unlimited quantities at negligible cost. Over time there is a tendency for it to slip into the public domain. Wealth increasingly takes an immaterial form which is harder to measure in monetary terms. In order to exploit knowledge, the capitalist enterprise has to privatize it and restrict access through private licenses and copyrights. Increasingly profit becomes indistinguishable from the extraction of rent.

Gorz relates this development to the prediction Marx made in the Grundrisse regarding the development of automation leading to a situation where technology becomes able to create an abundance out of all proportion to the labor time which went into its production. We are now entering a period in which wealth is harder to measure in purely monetary terms. The collective knowledge of humanity now plays an ever greater role in its creation. For capitalists the problem becomes how to appropriate that wealth for their own purposes.

"Control of access is, as we shall see, a preferential form for the conversion of immaterial wealth into capital." Thus the increasing emphasis on trademarks, copyrights, intellectual property, franchising, and image. "The whole of the mother company's profits will come from the rental charges it collects from the franchisees. These charges are, in fact, monopoly rents and may represent a multiple of the cost of the...