Page 16 RAIN October 1980 November 4, 1980. The last major election til 1984. You know you don't want Reagan running the show. Carter and his Trilateral Commission buddies are hardly more inspiring, and Anderson, another Trilateral Commissioner, is supposed to represe.nt the "alternative." What's left? Some people will vote for the Citizen's Party, others for the Socialists or the Libertarians or other "minor" parties. And a lot of people just ain't gonna vote in the presidential race, at least not for anyone. Voting against someone isn't impossible, but how do you vote against all of them? Most Europeans can vote "No Confidence." Americans cannot. The pollsters will tell·us it's apathy, but we know it's protest. What's left? Andre Gorz is left, and represents a long-awaited merging of the struggle for democratic socialism with the attempt to create an ecological society, offering new vitality to people in both movements. , This excerpt illustrates several key ideas in Gorz's Ecology As Politics ( see review this issue). None of the presidential contenders, major or minor, have a program as appealing as the one you're about to read. The setting: France. The time: the first days of the new administration. Let's hope it happens here someday soon. -MR When they woke up that morning, the citizens asked .themselves what new turmoil awaited them. After the elections, but during the period of transition to the new administration, a number of factories and enterprises had been taken over by the workers. The young unemployed, who for the previous two years had been occupying abandoned plants in order to engage in "wildcat production" of various socially useful products, were now joined by a growing number of students, older workers who had been laid off recently,· and retired people. In many places, empty buildi'ngs were being transformed into communes, production cooperatives, or "alternative schools." In the schools themselves, the older pupils were taking the lead in practicing skills for self-reliance and, with or without the collaboration of the teachers, establishing hydroponic gardens and facilities for raising fish and rabbits; in addition, students were beginning to install equipment for woodworking, metalworking, and other crafts which had for a long time been neglected or relega- • ted to marginal institutions. The day after the new government came into office, those who set out for work found a surprise awaiting them: during the night, in most of the larger cities, white lines had been painted on all the major thoroughfares. Henceforth these would have a corridor reserved for buses, while on the side streets.similar corridors were set aside for bicyclists and motorcyclists. At the major points of entry to each city, hundreds of bicycles and mopeds were assembled for use by the public, and long lines of police cars and army vans supplemented the buses. On this morning, no tickets were being sold or required on the buses or suburban trains. At noon, the government announced that it had reached the decision to institute free public transportation throughout the country, and to phase out, over the next twelve months, the use of private automobiles in the most congested urban areas. Seven hundred new tramway lines would be created or reopened in the major metropolitan centers, and twenty-six thousan9 new buses would be added to city fleets during the course of the year. The government also announced the immediate eliminat~on of sales tax on bicycles and small motorbikes, thus reducing their purchase price by twenty percent. • "We have earned," the President concluded, ''The right to free work and to free time . That evening, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister went on nationwide television to explain the larger design behind these measures. Since 1972, the President said, the GNP per person in France has reached a level close to that of the United States-the difference varying between five and twelve percent according to the fluctuations in the value of the franc, which has been notoriously undervalu~d. "Indeed, my fellow citizens," the President concluded, "we have nearly caught up with the U.S. But," he added soberly, "this is not something to be proud of." The President reminded his listeners of the period, not so distant, when the standard of living of Americans seemed an impossible , dream to French men and women. Only ten years ago, he recalled, liberal politicians were saying that once the French worker began earning American wages, that would be the end of revolutionary protests and anticapitalist movements. They had been, however, · profoundly mistaken. A large proportion of French workers and employees were now receivirig salaries comparable to those being paid in the U.S. without this having diminished the level of radical activism. "On the contrary. For in France, as in the United States, the people find themselves having to pay more and more to maintain an increasingly dubious kind of well-being. We are experiencing increasing costs for decreasing satisfactions. Economic growth has brought us neither greater equity nor greater social harmony and appreciation of life. I believe we have followed the wrong path and must now seek a new course." Consequently, the government had developed a program for "an alternative pattern of growth, based on an ~lternative economy and alternative institutions." The philosophy underlying this program, the President stated, could be summed up in three bas·ic points: 1. "We shall work less." Until now, the purpose of economic activity was to amass capital in order to increase production and sales, and to create profits which, reinvested, would permit the accumulation of more capital, and so on. But this process must in_evi-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz