38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
demonstrate what a highly organized and persistent labor movement can win.
The necessary fusion of labor and environmental struggles points to a deeper truth. The essence of the socialist challenge, as Andre Gorz writes, is 'the striving after a society in which the rationality of the maximization of productivity and profit is locked into a total social framework in such a way that it is subordinated to non-quantifiable values and goals, where economically rational labor no longer plays the principal role in the life of society or of the individual.' Hence a left-labor movement today in strategic coalitions can seize the time only if it leads the debate on the social and political implications of new and old technologies and how they affect the natural, that is to say, social environment.
Only socialism can challenge the capitalist rationality of hunger amid opulence and growth via natural destruction. Socialism can also confront the emergent capitalist rationality of casualized labour, half-time labour, semi-employed labour, and translate this into a social opportunity: less-alienating, productive jobs and a shorter working day. Capitalism can define itself only within the parameters of market rationality, whether in the 'industries' of work or leisure. Socialism puts economic rationality at the service of individual and social autonomy.
It is in pursuit of this autonomy that economic planning and an activist state should be seen as our indispensable tools: tools for defending and broadening democracy, for raising mass living standards rather than acquiescing in the imposition of mass austerity, for protecting ourselves against the brutalities of an unfettered free market and for recapturing socialism's great life-affirming vision.