ABSTRACT
Criticism of unemployment – the often traumatic experience of being out of paid employment – began to develop during the early nineteenth century. According to Andre Gorz, political programmes based on the vision of maintaining or restoring the full employment welfare state are exhausted. Gorz’s proposals nevertheless raise many questions about political strategy, that is, questions about which social and political means could facilitate his envisaged goal of a state-protected civil society based on the free use of time. Gorz instead falls back upon the very questionable idea of a single revolutionary group which is presently passing through a vale of tears en route to a mountain paradise of freedom. In Paths to Paradise, Gorz considers for the first time the need for a guaranteed social income for life. Private sector trade unions also object to social wage proposals on the grounds that they would weaken trade unions’ power to defend their members’ livelihoods.
