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Review

André Gorz spent his final years assembling a body of work that refuses nearly every comfortable position available to the left. Ecológica—a collection of texts written between 1975 and 2007, the last dictated a week before his joint suicide with his wife Dorine—is not an environmentalist plea for greener capitalism, not a social-democratic blueprint for a just transition, not a primitivist retreat from technology, and not a Leninist faith in seizing the state. It is something far stranger and more demanding: an existentialist-communist political ecology that insists the ecological crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the human subject, and that the only escape from barbarism is a “civilized exit” from capitalism that is already beginning, embryonically, in the cracks of the present. The book’s most distinctive move is to fuse the Wertkritik of Robert Kurz and Moishe Postone with Sartre’s philosophy of the subject and Illich’s distinction between convivial and lock-in technologies, producing an argument that the destruction of the planet and the destruction of human autonomy share a single root in the commodity form itself. That Gorz cannot fully prove his case on empirical grounds is true; that the case has become more urgent with every year since his death is also true.

Gorz’s core thesis, threaded through all seven texts, is that capitalism has hit a double limit. The internal limit is the growing impossibility of valorizing capital through commodity production: as automation and informatization shrink the mass of living labor that produces surplus value, the system sustains itself only by inflating financial bubbles, capitalizing future gains that will never arrive. The external limit is climate catastrophe, which the UN Climate Council’s demand for an 85 percent reduction in CO₂ by 2050 makes a simple mathematical incompatibility with any continuation of compound growth. From these two premises Gorz draws a characteristically stark conclusion: “El decrecimiento, por lo tanto, es un imperativo de supervivencia. Pero supone otra economía, otro estilo de vida, otra civilización, otras relaciones sociales. En su ausencia, el desplome sólo podría evitarse a fuerza de restricciones, racionamientos y subsidios autoritarios de recursos característicos de una economía de guerra. La salida del capitalismo, por lo tanto, ocurrirá de una u otra manera, civilizada o bárbara.” There is no third option, no Keynesian green growth, no sustainable development within the existing relations of production. Degrowth is not a policy preference; it is a survival condition that capitalism structurally cannot meet without ceasing to be capitalism.

What distinguishes Gorz’s version of this argument from countless others is the attention he pays to the forms of life already emerging as people defect from the wage relation. The first chapter—“La salida del capitalismo ya empezó”—is an inventory of what he takes to be prefigurative practices: the free software movement, creative commons licensing, the autoproduction of computers from waste materials in Brazilian favelas, the hacker ethic as an “admirable ética anarcocomunista, a la vez arte de vivir, práctica de otras relaciones individuales y sociales, búsqueda de caminos para salir del capitalismo.” The hacker, for Gorz, is not a Silicon Valley entrepreneur but someone who has already withdrawn the principal productive force—living knowledge—from capital’s attempt to enclose it as intellectual property. The argument is audacious and will strike many readers as hyperbolic. Gorz himself hedges it, closing the chapter with a line that cuts against millenarian certainty: “No estoy diciendo que estas transformaciones radicales tendrán lugar. Digo solamente que, por primera vez, podemos querer que se realicen.” The possibility is real; its realization is contingent.

The historical and philosophical depth of the book emerges most fully in the second chapter, “La ecología política entre expertocracia y autolimitación,” which dismantles the distinction between a genuinely political ecology and a technocratic environmentalism that merely extends bureaucratic power. Gorz traces how capitalism historically abolished what he calls, drawing on Marx and Weber, “la norma de lo suficiente.” Pre-capitalist artisans and peasants worked until they had enough, then stopped; the capitalist wage relation replaced that self-limiting logic with the compulsion to earn and consume without limit. Weber’s Protestant-ethic worker who asked “how much do I need” rather than “how much can I earn” is Gorz’s historical foil. The ecological crisis, in this light, is not a technical problem of emissions but the terminus of a civilization that has systematically destroyed every social mechanism for saying “enough.” The technocratic response—carbon taxes, emissions trading, expert-administered rationing—reproduces the same logic of heteronomous regulation. Gorz is unsparing: “esta aproximación responde a una concepción premoderna típicamente antipolítica. Revoca la autonomía de lo político a favor de la expertocracia.” The alternative he proposes is a democratic politics of self-limitation, grounded in the reconstruction of what he calls, borrowing from Habermas, the “mundo vivido” (Lebenswelt)—the sphere of intuitive experience and autonomous social relations that the capitalist megamachine has colonized. “La norma de lo suficiente,” he writes, “sigue siendo la única vía no autoritaria democrática, hacia una civilización industrial ecocompatible.”

The two oldest texts in the collection, from 1975 and 1980, show Gorz already working out the concrete implications of this philosophy before he had the full theoretical apparatus of the Wertkritik at his disposal. The 1975 essay on the automobile is a minor masterpiece of polemical compression. Gorz treats the car not as a neutral technology badly used but as a “lujo antisocial” whose very design embodies class privilege. “El vicio profundo de los coches es que con ellos sucede lo mismo que con los castillos o con los chalets en la playa: son bienes de lujo inventados para el placer exclusivo de la minoría de los más ricos; y nada, ni en su concepción ni en su naturaleza, estaba destinado para el pueblo.” This is not moralizing; it is a structural argument. A good that derives its value from exclusivity destroys itself when generalized. The result, which Gorz documents with Illich’s data showing the average American devotes 1,500 hours annually to their car to travel 10,000 kilometers—an effective speed of walking—is an “impecablemente circular” catastrophe: “El coche reúne todas las desventajas del tren —aparte de las que le son propias: vibraciones, contracturas musculares, riesgos de colisión, necesidad de conducir el vehículo— y ninguna de sus ventajas.” The car kills the city, then the car kills the car. Capital, meanwhile, dismantles rail and tram networks because collective consumption does not create individualized commodity markets. The solution Gorz sketches—human-scale federations of communities, green belts, bicycles, trams, communal car pools, the neighborhood restored as “a microcosm modeled by and for all human activities”—reads today less as utopian fantasy than as a description of what urban planners in Paris, Barcelona, and Pontevedra have spent the last decade belatedly attempting.

The 1980 chapter on “Crecimiento destructivo y decrecimiento productivo” extends the logic to the macroeconomy, with a critique of GDP that remains one of the clearest available in a short span. Gorz points out that GDP counts as growth every car accident, every medical expense, every ton of packaging waste, while excluding the wealth created when land is redistributed to landless peasants or when a community digs a shared well. “El PIB no conoce ni mide las riquezas, excepto que tengan forma de mercancías. Sólo reconoce como trabajo productivo el trabajo vendido a una empresa que saca un beneficio de él.” The counter-evidence he marshals—Kerala’s high human development despite low GDP from the 1996 PNUD report; a 1975 Norwegian government survey in which 76 percent of respondents said they would prefer “una vida simple y calma con apenas los objetos necesarios”—is fragmentary but pointed. The Norwegian survey, cited from a single source, is now half a century old and can hardly bear the weight Gorz places on it, an early sign of the empirical thinness that characterizes the book as a whole. Still, the conceptual point is sound and has only been vindicated by the subsequent decades of research on the decoupling of GDP growth from well-being in wealthy countries.

The final two chapters, from 2007 and 2005 respectively, bring the argument to its most radical formulation. Here Gorz, engaging Frithjof Bergmann’s “New Work, New Culture,” proposes that digital fabrication technologies—fabbers, personal fabricators—could become the tools of a communal high-tech artisanal class capable of producing locally almost any object, thereby transcending the megamachine, the wage relation, money, and the commodity form itself. This is combined with a defense of the guaranteed existence income, not as a redistributive safety net within capitalism but as what the Italian economist Antonnella Corsani calls a “lógica subversiva”: an unconditional payment that breaks the compulsion to sell one’s labor, shifting the center of gravity from valorization to use-value, from employment to self-determined activity. “El trabajo no es algo que uno tiene en la medida en que se lo dan; sino que el trabajo es algo que uno hace, siempre que se tengan los medios, y que esos medios, que son también los medios de la reapropiación del trabajo, ahora están disponibles.” The final interview, with Sonia Montaño, distills the book’s philosophical architecture into a distinction between work and employment drawn from Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Greeks: work as the anthropological activity of self-production, subjected to necessity; employment as the specifically capitalist form that sells that activity as a commodity. The knowledge economy, Gorz argues, is the internal crisis of capitalism because living knowledge—diffuse, non-homogeneous, impossible to fully privatize—tends to escape valorization once digitalized. Capital can access the principal productive force of the age only by not subjecting it; the more it tries, the more it kills the goose.

It is a beautiful construction, and it is not without serious vulnerabilities. The most obvious is the empirical basis. Gorz’s method, as the introduction’s interview format signals, is conceptual synthesis rather than systematic investigation. The favela computers—three-quarters of those produced in Brazil in 2004 were reportedly self-built from waste materials, according to the director of digital culture at the Ministry of Culture—are presented as paradigmatic but never independently verified. The “200 million references under creative commons” is a figure dropped without source or date. The financial data on S&P 500 reserves and the ratio of financial assets to world GDP establishes the crisis tendency plausibly, but the leap from crisis to exit relies on a chain of emblematic cases. Gorz sees in the townships of South Africa, the favelas of Brazil, and the hacker networks of the global North the first stirrings of a post-capitalist civilization, but the evidence that these are anything more than marginal adaptations within a still-dominant capitalist system is asserted rather than demonstrated. The fabbers that so excite him in 2007 remain, seventeen years later, niche tools; 3D printing has not replaced the global supply chain, and the digital commons have proven eminently compatible with platform capitalism’s rent-extraction model, as the trajectories of Google, Amazon, and OpenAI make brutally clear. Gorz knew this danger. He was criticizing Pierre Lévy’s “World Philosophie” for wanting to turn all social relations into business. But the capacity of capital to metabolize the commons into new forms of enclosure is more robust than his framework admits.

There is also a tension, never fully resolved, between the high-tech vision of the later chapters and the norm-of-sufficiency ethic that anchors the earlier ones. The fabber-equipped communal workshop and the bicycle-and-tram neighborhood can be made to cohere—one can imagine a low-energy, high-knowledge civilization that produces durable goods locally and moves people without private cars—but Gorz does not do the work of integrating them. The 1975 essay on the car implies a radical simplification of material life; the 2007 essay on fabbers implies a radical democratization of productive capacity. The former is ascetic, the latter expansive. The “norma de lo suficiente” requires a cultural transformation that the mere availability of personal fabricators does not guarantee. A fabber in every community could as easily become a tool of hyper-consumerism as of convivial self-provisioning; the difference is entirely in the social relations and ethical norms, and Gorz’s existentialist appeal to the insurgent subject does not specify how those norms are to be built at scale.

The political subject itself remains a sketch. Gorz, following Peter Glotz, identifies “disidentes del capitalismo numérico”—knowledge workers, downshifters, self-providers—as the emergent class that voluntarily defects from capitalist work discipline. This is the old problem of the revolutionary subject updated for the information age, and it inherits all the old difficulties. The disaffected knowledge worker who publishes open-source code by night and collects a salary by day is not straightforwardly a threat to capital; they may be its most productive and integrated element. Gorz’s insistence that the exit from capitalism will take either a civilized or a barbaric form, with no third path, is bracing, but it collapses a genuinely indeterminate political field into a binary that his own examples of interstitial practice actually complicate. The favela self-producer, the free-software developer, and the Norwegian who wants a simpler life are not obviously components of a single exit.

And yet the book outruns its weaknesses because it does something that few works of political ecology attempt: it integrates the critique of political economy with a philosophy of the subject, refusing both the economist’s reduction of the ecological question to pricing externalities and the moralist’s reduction of it to individual lifestyle choice. Gorz’s intellectual formation is singular. Arriving in Switzerland as an Austrian Jew in 1938, shaped by Sartre’s El Ser y la Nada and the experience of writing Le Traître, and spending decades as a co-director of Les Temps Modernes alongside Sartre and Beauvoir, he carried existentialism’s insistence on the subject’s self-constitution into domains where it is normally absent. The debt to Sartre is everywhere in his insistence that the ecological imperative must be an “ética de la liberación,” not a set of administrative measures, and that “la crítica de las técnicas en las que se encarna la dominación sobre los hombres y sobre la naturaleza es una de las dimensiones esenciales de una ética de la liberación.” This is why the opening line of his intellectual autobiography is “El socialismo no vale más que el capitalismo si no cambia de herramientas.” The tools themselves—the automobile, the megamachine factory, the digital platform as enclosure—incarnate domination. Changing ownership without changing the technical form of production, as Soviet state socialism demonstrated, leaves the domination intact.

The book’s theoretical vocabulary, mapped across the canonical traditions, draws from an unusually wide set of sources. The Wertkritik of Robert Kurz and Moishe Postone supplies the distinction between value (the capitalist form of wealth, measured in abstract labor time) and concrete wealth (use-value, the actual satisfaction of needs), which allows Gorz to argue that capitalism is destroying real wealth—ecosystems, social bonds, autonomous capacities—in order to produce value, and that this contradiction is terminal, not cyclical. From Ivan Illich he takes the distinction between convivial tools that expand the user’s autonomy and “lock-in” technologies that monopolize expertise and compel dependence. From Karl Polanyi comes the notion that the economy is historically embedded in social relations and that capitalism’s attempt to disembed it and subject society to the market is the generator of permanent crisis. From Arendt, the Greek distinction between labor and action. From Dick Howard, the definition of the political as a bipolar mediation between individual autonomy and the general interest. Gorz’s years with the journal Futur Antérieur, founded in 1990 by Jean-Marie Vincent and Toni Negri, brought him into sustained engagement with Italian autonomist Marxism and the German value-critique school, and the book’s final chapter is dedicated to Vincent’s memory. This is not eclecticism for its own sake; it is an attempt to build a political ecology that can address the objective drivers of ecological collapse without evacuating the question of human freedom. The alternative, which Gorz calls “petainismo verde” or ecofascism, is the management of scarcity through authoritarian constraint, and he takes it seriously as a genuine historical possibility.

The book’s status as a collection of occasional pieces—interviews, a reprint from an earlier book, journal articles—means it is not a systematic treatise. The chapter introductions do not bridge the temporal gaps between 1975, 1980, 1992, and 2007, and the reader must supply the connective tissue. But this fragmentation is also, unintentionally, a fidelity to Gorz’s method. He is not attempting a closed system; he is working with the materials that present themselves at different moments, testing concepts against events, and the through-line—the critique of the commodity form and the search for an exit that emancipates the subject rather than administering the disaster—is firm.

For a reader in 2025, Ecológica lands differently than it would have when the texts were first published. The climate crisis has meanwhile accelerated past the thresholds Gorz cited; the UN’s 2050 target for an 85 percent emissions reduction looks simultaneously more necessary and more distant. The barbaric exit he warned of is no longer speculative—the wars over water and arable land, the fortress borders, the weaponized scarcity are all, in various degrees, materializing. And the civilized exit, in its embryonic forms, remains fragile. The free-software movement has won battles and lost wars. The fabber promise has not scaled. The guaranteed income has been piloted and shelved. But Gorz’s central insight, that the exit from capitalism is already beginning wherever people withdraw their living knowledge and their productive capacities from the wage relation and the commodity form, is not falsified by its incompleteness. It is an insight that operates at the level of possibility, not prediction, and the book’s closing line deserves to be taken seriously: “El trabajo no es algo que uno tiene en la medida en que se lo dan; sino que el trabajo es algo que uno hace.” That sentence, with its quiet displacement of the entire wage-labor ontology, is Gorz’s real testament. Whether its promise is realized depends on whether enough people begin to act as if it were already true.

Gorz wrote his last text a week before he and Dorine ended their lives together, and that fact hangs over the book without being mentioned in its pages. It is impossible to read the final interview’s insistence on liberation—from the wage, from the commodity, from the megamachine—without hearing in it a personal as well as a political urgency. The book is not a suicide note; it is the opposite, a work written by someone who believed that life beyond the present order was thinkable and worth fighting for, even as his own became unlivable. That conviction, argued with rigor and without sentimentality, makes Ecológica a necessary text for anyone trying to think the relationship between climate catastrophe, the end of work, and the reconstruction of autonomy. Its empirical foundations are thinner than its conceptual ambitions, and its political subject remains more gestured at than specified. But as a fusion of existentialist ethics with the critique of political economy, it has few equals, and it continues to ask the question that the official discourse of the green transition is designed to suppress: not “how do we decarbonize growth,” but “how do we exit a civilization that has abolished the very idea of enough.”

Notable Quotes

El socialismo no vale más que el capitalismo si no cambia de herramientas.

Introduction. Gorz's foundational thesis from Ecología y libertad, restated here as the epigram for his entire ecological-political project. — socialism, technology critique, means of production, political ecology

La ecología sólo adquiere su carga crítica y ética si las devastaciones de la Tierra y la destrucción de las bases naturales de la vida se comprenden como consecuencias de un modo de producción, el cual exige la maximización de la rentabilidad y recurre a técnicas que violan los equilibrios biológicos.

Introduction. Gorz argues ecology without anti-capitalism can lead to eco-fascism; only when ecological destruction is understood as rooted in the capitalist mode of production does ecology become liberatory. — political ecology, anti-capitalism, ecological crisis, critique of production

La salida del capitalismo, por lo tanto, ocurrirá de una u otra manera, civilizada o bárbara. La pregunta se plantea justamente sobre la forma que adoptará y la cadencia a la que se producirá esta salida.

Chapter 1, 'The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun.' Gorz frames the ecological-economic crisis as making the end of capitalism inevitable; the only question is whether the transition will be humane or catastrophic. — post-capitalism, crisis, degrowth, civilizational choice

El capitalismo necesitaba que la gente tuviera necesidades mayores. Mejor todavía: debía poder moldear y desarrollar esas necesidades del modo más rentable para él, incorporando un máximo de superfluo en lo necesario, acelerando la obsolescencia de los productos, reduciendo su durabilidad.

Introduction. Gorz traces how capitalism must manufacture consumer desire, drawing on a 1954 American article about the need for 50% consumption growth and the role of advertising in creating artificial needs. — manufactured desire, planned obsolescence, consumer capitalism, advertising

El auto, al igual que el chalet en la playa, sólo es de interés y ofrece ventajas cuando la masa no dispone de ellos.

Chapter 3, 'The Social Ideology of the Car.' The opening argument: the automobile is a luxury good that, by definition, cannot be democratized — when everyone has one, no one benefits. — automobile critique, false democratization, luxury goods, collective vs individual consumption

El norteamericano tipo dedica más de mil quinientas horas al año a su coche; esto incluye las horas que pasa al volante, en marcha o parado; las horas de trabajo necesarias para pagar la gasolina, las ruedas, los peajes, el seguro, las multas y los impuestos… Seis kilómetros le llevan una hora.

Chapter 3, citing Ivan Illich's Energy and Equity. When all car-related time is accounted for, the American effectively travels at walking speed — the automobile creates the distances it promises to overcome. — automobile critique, Ivan Illich, time poverty, speed illusion

De objeto de lujo y de fuente de privilegios, el coche ha pasado a convertirse en objeto de una necesidad vital: para evadirse del infierno de la ciudad hay que tener un auto.

Chapter 3. Gorz shows the circular logic: the car destroyed the livable city, making car ownership necessary to escape the city the car destroyed. The superfluous has become the necessary. — automobile dependency, urban destruction, artificial necessity, circular logic of capitalism

Cuanto más difunde una sociedad vehículos rápidos, más tiempo emplea y pierde la gente para desplazarse. Es matemático.

Chapter 3. Gorz summarizes Illich's paradox: above a certain threshold, faster vehicles increase total time spent in transportation, not decrease it. — speed paradox, Ivan Illich, counterproductivity, transportation critique

El sujeto siempre es un mal sujeto, un rebelde contra el poder y la regla, contra la sociedad como aparato total.

Introduction, quoting Alain Touraine. Gorz uses this to establish that the question of the subject — the autonomous individual who refuses to be reduced to social function — is the moral foundation of both ethics and political ecology. — subjectivity, rebellion, autonomy, existentialism

El conocimiento y la información son por esencia bienes comunes que pertenecen a todos y que, por lo tanto, sólo pueden volverse propiedad privada y comercializarse si se los mutila en su utilidad.

Introduction. Gorz argues that knowledge is inherently common, and that capitalism's attempt to privatize it through patents and copyrights undermines the very categories of economic value. — knowledge commons, intellectual property critique, immaterial labor, capitalism's internal contradictions

La idea de que producción y consumo pueden decidirse a partir de las necesidades es políticamente subversiva.

Chapter 4, 'Destructive Growth and Productive Degrowth.' Starting from genuine human needs rather than capital's need for growth would require that producers and consumers collectively deliberate and decide — a democratic act incompatible with capitalism. — needs vs growth, democratic production, political subversion, degrowth

No estoy diciendo que estas transformaciones radicales tendrán lugar. Digo solamente que, por primera vez, podemos querer que se realicen.

Chapter 1. Gorz's careful utopianism: the exit from capitalism through communal self-production is not inevitable, but for the first time in history, both the tools and the people exist to make it possible. — concrete utopia, possibility, agency, self-production

El empleo es una especie en vías de extinción… Nuestra intención es saltar esta fase de mierda del siglo XX para pasar directamente del XIX al XXI.

Chapter 1, quoting Claudio Prado, director of digital culture at Brazil's Ministry of Culture. Brazil's favela communities were already building computers from scrap and producing music at rates dwarfing the commercial industry. — end of employment, Global South, leapfrogging, self-production, digital commons

Librado a sí mismo, acabaría en la extinción de la vida y, por lo tanto, de sí mismo. Si debe tener algún sentido, no puede ser sino el de crear las condiciones de su propia supresión.

Chapter 2, on economic rationality and capitalism. Left unchecked, the dominion of instrumental economic reason over all life leads to extinction — the only purpose of economic activity is to create the conditions for its own abolition. — capitalism's self-destruction, economic rationality, ecological limit, self-abolition

Cuanto más compleja se vuelve una sociedad, menos intuitivamente inteligible resulta su funcionamiento.

Chapter 2. Gorz describes how industrial complexity destroys the 'lifeworld' — the domain of intuitive understanding and autonomous self-determination — replacing it with systems that require specialized knowledge no individual can possess. — complexity, lifeworld, alienation, expertocracy

Vamos a destruir las grandes ciudades y a construir nuevas. Eso ya nos llevará un buen tiempo.

Chapter 3, quoting Herbert Marcuse's response when asked what people would do with their time after the revolution. Gorz uses it to envision federated communities surrounded by green belts, with communal bicycles, electric taxis, and community workshops. — urban transformation, revolution, post-capitalist cities, Marcuse

La organización del espacio continúa la desintegración del hombre iniciada con la división del trabajo en la fábrica. Corta en pedacitos al individuo, corta su tiempo y su vida en parcelas bien separadas.

Chapter 3. Gorz connects the spatial segregation of modern cities — separate zones for work, residence, shopping, leisure — to the division of labor, showing that urban planning is an extension of capitalist fragmentation of human life. — urban critique, division of labor, spatial alienation, fragmentation of life

El decrecimiento es una buena idea: indica la dirección hacia la que hay que ir e invita a imaginar cómo vivir mejor consumiendo y trabajando menos y de otras maneras.

Chapter 5, 'Global Crisis, Degrowth, and Exit from Capitalism.' Gorz endorses degrowth as a direction but warns it cannot become policy within the existing system without being emptied of its radical potential. — degrowth, sufficiency, radical politics, living better with less

Somos incapaces de decidir y hasta de preguntarnos de qué tenemos necesidad en cantidad y en calidad. Nuestros deseos y necesidades están amputados, formateados y empobrecidos por la omnipresencia de las propagandas comerciales.

Chapter 5. Gorz on how capitalism not only manufactures desires but destroys the capacity for autonomous self-reflection about genuine needs. — manufactured desire, propaganda, autonomy, needs critique

No se hace andar una economía vendiéndose hamburguesas unos a otros.

Chapter 6, quoting an unnamed American business executive. Gorz uses this to show that most service-sector job creation does not create value but merely redistributes it — a critique of the neoliberal employment model. — service economy critique, unproductive labor, GDP illusion, neoliberalism

La persona se convierte en una empresa. Ya no hay familia ni nación que se sostenga.

Chapter 6, quoting Pierre Lévy's World Philosophie critically. Gorz sees in the vision of total self-commodification — turning all human relationships into business transactions — the logical endpoint of capitalist rationality. — self-commodification, neoliberal subjectivity, marketization of life, social destruction

Cuanto más extienda el capitalismo digital su influencia sobre nuestras vidas, mayor será la cantidad de desclasados voluntarios.

Introduction, quoting Peter Glotz. Gorz sees in the growing number of voluntary downshifters, self-entrepreneurs refusing competition, and hackers rejecting corporate servitude the seeds of a new social movement against digital capitalism. — digital dissidents, voluntary simplicity, hacker ethic, counter-culture

La producción capitalista sólo desarrolla la técnica y la combinación del proceso de producción social agotando al mismo tiempo las dos fuentes de donde surge toda riqueza: la tierra y el trabajador.

Chapter 6, quoting Marx's Capital, Book I. Gorz cites this 140-year-old passage to show that Marx already understood capitalism's double destruction of ecological and human resources. — Marx, ecological destruction, labor exploitation, metabolic rift

Los fundamentos de la economía política se desploman. En este sentido, la economía del conocimiento es la crisis del capitalismo.

Chapter 6. Gorz's concluding argument: when work, value, and capital can no longer be measured by a common standard, the fundamental categories of capitalist political economy collapse from within. — knowledge economy, crisis of value, end of capitalism, immeasurability

Todos somos argentinos en potencia.

Chapter 6. Referring to Argentina's 2001 economic collapse and the grassroots cooperatives and alternative currencies that emerged, Gorz warns that systemic financial crisis could reach any country — and that the response must come from below. — financial crisis, solidarity economy, grassroots response, systemic fragility