Kurzarbeit, 'living-dead capitalism,' and the future of the left.

• Author: Evans, G.S.
• Position: Thinking Economically

The successful implementation of kurzarbeit as an anti-recession measure in Germany has raised once again the question of the shortened workweek as an instrument of progressive economic and social change. As used in Germany (though it is also prevalent in Austria and the Netherlands) kurzarbeit, which literally means "short work" in German, is a short-term, recession-related measure in which a workplace, instead of laying off some workers while the rest continue to work full-time, keeps all the workers on a three-or four-day workweek. The resulting difference in pay is partially made up by the government and, if workers agree to undergo job training on their days off, their pay will be fully made up. Kurzarbeit has been credited with saving nearly 500,000 jobs during the recession, keeping work teams together, and maintaining worker morale and skill levels. (1)

But if the influential French social philosopher Andre Gorz was correct, the reduction of the workweek is not just a short-term, recession-related issue for the European socialist and Green parties but the key to their survival, and indeed the survival of the Left in general. The reason? The increasing automation that we experience all around us--on assembly lines, in banks, even when we call a company for information--is symptomatic of a radical and profound change in the economic and political landscape, one which the Left, trapped in the inertia of its own mental categories, has completely failed to recognize.

The crux of Gorz's argument is that the chronically high level of unemployment that Western Europe has been experiencing since the 1970s--and which has since deepened and spread to the former East Bloc countries and now the United States--is not indicative of a series of short-term economic problems, the failure to apply the proper neo-liberal policies to free up the market economy and thereby create jobs, or the failure to apply neo-Keynesian policies to stimulate and regulate the economy and thereby create jobs.

Rather, it's indicative of the disintegration of a whole economic system--i.e., capitalism in its classical sense--and of the fact that this disintegration has broken the "continuity of two centuries of history, marked by the expansion of industrialism and the spread of commodity relations." (2) The failure to solve the problem of high unemployment (even with extended schooling, early retirements, sabbaticals, and generous vacation benefits helping to reduce the number of workers on the payrolls) isn't, according to Gorz, any more surprising than was the failure of the communist governments of the former East Bloc to solve their fundamental economic problems. Which is to say, just like them, we are trying to reform or revive an economic system that is, in essence, "dead."

Given the seeming dynamism that the post-1989 changeover has brought to the economies of the former East Bloc countries and the continuing success of the export-oriented economies of China and Germany, Gorz's contention that we are now living under a "living-dead capitalism" might not seem, at first glance, particularly evident. But we must not, if we are to understand his argument, confuse a world economy increasingly based on the sale of consumer goods and fueled by short-term, speculative capital (often invested in the service sector)--the one we've been living under and calling capitalist--with a true capitalist economy, which is to say an economy fueled by long-term capital investment in industrial production.

According to Gorz, capitalism in its true sense started to disintegrate in the West in the aftermath of World War II thanks, in part, to its very success. It had, that is, "ceased to be propelled by a spontaneous dynamic of demand, reliant on what Marxists have always called 'basic needs:' those whose non-satistaction is synonymous with destitution." Instead, with the most basic needs of its own populations having been met, it was faced with the need to create a "subject for the object," of a demand for the supply.

"From the mid-1950s onwards," Gorz continues, "the centers of capitalism were faced with the necessity to produce consumers for their commodities, needs to match the most profitable products. Following its spontaneous, capitalist dynamic, production had ceased to correspond to preexisting needs: inasmuch as such needs persisted (notably in housing, sanitation and public health) their satisfaction was not profitable, or not sufficiently so, for capital. And, conversely, the most profitable products did not match unsatisfied needs: these needs had to be created."

Capitalism, then, was no longer operating according to its classical principle that a need leads to a demand which leads to a product being produced to meet that need. Instead, a technocratic superstructure developed that oversaw the advertising campaigns, urban planning, and other forms of social engineering necessary to create new needs, and the dynamic of need was no longer spontaneous. This resulted, during the 1960s...