About ten years ago, André Gorz died, leaving stimulating ideas about the limits and need to overcome or deconstruct capitalist society. Always attentive to social transformations, Gorz came at times to synthesize everything that was deep and critical in social theory. However, it is possible to observe, in his writings, an oscillation concerned to the social place that the labor occupies. The place of labor seems to change in function of the development of the productive forces. Thus, Gorz's analysis of the social movement of labor in capitalist society remains a prisoner of a technological determination and a concept of labor limited by the productive universe of professional qualifications. In this article, I have objective to problematize the conception of labor exposed by Gorz in three of his main works: Worker Strategy and Neocapitalism (1964), Farewell to the Proletariat (1980) and The Immaterial (2003), demonstrating how social theory and political alternatives built By Gorz change vis-à-vis the social place occupied by labor in these writings.
Key-words:
André Gorz; Labor; Humanism; Determinism; Immaterial labor