A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.

[6] Born in Vienna as Gerhart Hirsch, he was the son of a Jewish wood-salesman and a Catholic mother, who came from a cultivated background and worked as a secretary.

[2] In June 1949, he moved to Paris, where he worked first at the international secretariat of the Mouvement des Citoyens du Monde [fr], then as private secretary of a military attaché of the embassy of India.

Other friends of his included Rossana Rossanda, founder of Il Manifesto newspaper, the photographer William Klein, younger intellectuals such as Marc Kravetz or Tiennot Grumbach,[8] and Ronald Fraser of the New Left Review.

In 1961, he entered the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes and introduced to French thought the Italian Garavini, the neo-Keynesian and communist Bruno Trentin and the anarcho-syndicalist Vittorio Foa.

[13] Gorz's evolution and political and philosophical stances led to some tensions with his colleagues on Les Temps Modernes for which he had assumed the chief editorial responsibilities in 1969.

He was also forced to the periphery of Le Nouvel Observateur since he was replaced by more classically oriented economists, and he supported a campaign against nuclear industry to which EDF, the state electricity firm, replied by withdrawing advertisements from the weekly.

Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology, with his ideas being popularised particularly by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage, which had been founded by Alain Hervé, the founder of the French section of the Friends of the Earth.

[15] A year before the election of the left's candidate, François Mitterrand, to the French presidency in 1981, Gorz published Adieux au prolétariat (Galilée, 1980 – "Farewell to the Proletariat") in which he criticized the cult of the proletarian class in Marxism.

In Les Chemins du paradis (Galilée, 1983) Gorz remained critical of the Marxist orthodoxy of the time, and he used Marx's own analysis in the Grundrisse to argue for the need of the political left to embrace the liberatory potential that the increasing automation of factories and services offered as a central part of the socialist project.

In 1983, he fell out with pacifist movements by refusing to oppose the deployment of Pershing II missiles by the United States in West Germany.

In Métamorphoses du travail (Galilée, 1988 – "Metamorphosis of Labour"), Gorz argued that capitalism used personal investments from the worker that were not paid back.

The fact that the amount of labour required is so low that work can become intermittent and constitute an activity amongst a number of others, should not be an obstacle to its being remunerated by a full monthly income throughout one's life.

It is, however, no longer a true salary, since it is not dependent on the amount of labour supplied (in the month or year) and is not intended to remunerate individuals as workers".